Katana

As a new company we could early adopt and bet on #RemoteTeam setup without cultural baggage derailing us. Our building blocks for developing remote working culture are:

• Hiring people who are self sufficient, self-disciplined and excel at video and written communication to work remotely
• Set up periodic ceremonies ( #DailyStandup, #Grooming, @{Release}|topic:1491| calls and chats etc) to keep the company rhythm / heartbeat going across remote cells
• Regularly train your leaders to take into account remote working aspects of organizing f2f calls, events, meetups, parties etc. when communicating and organizing workflows
• And last, but not least - select the right tools to support effective communication and collaboration:

1. All feeds and conversations come together in @{Slack}|tool:675|
2. @{#Agile}|topic:531| workflows in @{Jira}|tool:154|
3. @{InProductCommunication}|topic:1492| and @{#CustomerSupportChat}|topic:66| in @{Intercom}|tool:257|
4. @{#Notes}|topic:1488|, @{#Documentation}|topic:404| and @{#Requirements}|topic:1495| in @{Confluence}|tool:769|
5. @{#SourceCode}|topic:1489| and @{ContinuousDelivery}|topic:1493| in @{Bitbucket}|tool:28|
6. Persistent video streams between locations, demos, meetings run on @{appear.in}|tool:2300|
7. @{#Logging}|topic:1490| and @{Alerts}|topic:1494| in @{Papertrail}|tool:82|

Back at early 2017 the confusion and controversy around the future of AngularJS was at full swing. Also, the Angular 2 looked quite restrictive (or prescriptive even) when we did the assessment what to choose for Katana. React came out on top because it's community looked healthier, future more solid. And as you all know, one decision leads to many others: Redux, redux-saga , Axios

How we ended up choosing Confluence as our internal web / wiki / documentation platform at Katana.

It happened because we chose Bitbucket over GitHub . We had Katana's first hackaton to assemble and test product engineering platform. It turned out that at that time you could have Bitbucket's private repositories and a team of five people for free - Done!

This decision led us to using Bitbucket pipelines for CI, Jira for Kanban, and finally, Confluence. We also use Microsoft Office 365 and started with using OneNote, but SharePoint is still a nightmare product to use to collaborate, so OneNote had to go.

Now, when thinking of the key value of Confluence to Katana then it is Product Requirements Management. We use Page Properties macros, integrations (with Slack , InVision, Sketch etc.) to manage Product Roadmap, flash out Epic and User Stories.

We ended up with using Confluence because it is the best fit for our current engineering ecosystem.

We undertook the task of building a manufacturing ERP for small branded manufacturers. We needed to build a lot, fast with a small team, and have clear focus on product delivery. We chose JavaScript / Node.js ( React + LoopBack full stack) , Heroku and Heroku Postgres (also Heroku Redis ) . This decision has guided us to picking other key technologies. It has granted us high pace of product delivery and service availability while operating with a small team.