5 Project Management Tools That Changed Our Startup: The Founder Tips

I have often encountered the fact that my fellow founders, despite having enormous potential, burn out or become ineffective. This is influenced by many factors: the professionalism of the manager and his team, the speed of entering the market, and even simple luck. But there is one thing where it all starts—project management.

Of course, classics like Jira and Trello have proven themselves well, they have been using it for many years, and they solve problems, but...enough :)

As an alternative, I will describe five tools I used and implemented in the team.

1. HubSpot

This is not just a tool but a comprehensive platform for all marketing, sales, and even support. Among the advantages, in addition to the obvious optimization and automation, I would note centralization, elimination of routine, and excellent analytics with detailed reports. Using HubSpot CRM

you can track the entire lead path and quickly respond to errors.

My personal rating: 3.5 / 5

2. Asana

What I liked about Asana was the simplification of complex, multi-layered projects. This is not a primitive Trello board, but everything is quite obvious, and the team’s progress on each part of the functionality is clearly visible in any convenient form for you: kanban desk, schedule, or list. Integrates well with a number of popular tools such as Slack, Google Drive, Dropbox, Microsoft Teams and others. Somewhat reminiscent of DevOps Azure but more intuitive and offers a convenient mobile application.

My personal rating: 4.5 / 5

3. Monday.com

To be honest, I was not impressed with this tool, but I will mention it because it is quite popular. The good thing is that you can customize the workflow to suit your custom request. You set the templates yourself, and everything works according to these rules. In my opinion, this tool is very simple and impersonal. It can be a good start, but if your team has expertise, you are unlikely to appreciate it.

My personal rating: 2 / 5

4. Airtable

It's not just a tool , it's the entire Marvel universe. Here you can set up a marketing campaign launch calendar from one place and assign sprint tasks to developers. The platform also has special templates for different departments, which reduces the time needed to set them up. Of the minuses, I would name the prices; the cost of the user fee per month can reach 20 bucks. You will have to spend time understanding all the functionality. Still, you will be able to manage everything painlessly and efficiently, and collecting analytics in such a global system is more convenient and faster.

My personal rating: 5 / 5

5. ClickUp

ClickUp is also distinguished by its versatility and the ability to customize it to suit your needs. With the correct filter settings, you can clearly understand which tasks are at what stage and which employees are slacking. I would say that this tool is perfect for those who, after chaos, are trying to set up processes. ClickUp will be able to introduce the team to the CRM game rules and task management rules but not shock them immediately.

My personal rating: 4 / 5

I would like to emphasize that this is my vision and experience. I often try new tools and ask the team’s opinion. There is no universal tool that will solve all your business's problems, but you can try to improve it point by point, so I am open to discussion and suggestions.