TL;DR: Kitemaker is a tool that allows you to keep specifications, user feedback, roadmaps, and tasks in one place, providing a better workflow than any collection of product management, documentation, and issue-tracking tools. Is it fast? Yes. Is it simple and easy to use? Absolutely. In addition, it works very well to facilitate collaboration between engineering, design, and product management.

Hey!

We're Kevin and Sigurd, the co-founders of Kitemaker. We built Kitemaker because we felt that the tools we used for project management, collecting feedback, and writing specifications were disconnected. This resulted in engineers, designers, and product managers working in separate silos, making it harder to focus on what truly matters: building things that users want.

The problem

Most YC companies have taken the wisdom of Michael Seibels' "Product Development Cycles" to heart. To reach product-market fit, we need to talk to customers, figure out what they want, build, launch, and then iterate. There are plenty of good tools to collect user feedback, write specification documents, and track tasks/issues.

However, it's all disjointed. It’s easy to drop the ball on user feedback, which isn’t connected to the tool where we’re writing specs, which again isn’t connected to our issue tracker. It's easy to become disorganized or spend too much time project managing when we should be spending as much time as possible talking to users and iterating on the product and the messaging.

Our solution - Kitemaker

Kitemaker allows you to keep specifications, tasks, roadmaps, and user feedback in one place. We have carefully designed it to provide a better workflow than any collection of product management, documentation, and issue-tracking tools.

How it works

The basic unit in Kitemaker is the work item. It has a document where you can write your specifications and break them into tasks, as well as an activity feed for discussions and to see what is happening across the development tools. We encourage you not to split work items into many small pieces but rather use to-dos to keep track of the tasks. This way, you will be able to focus on what you plan to deliver to your users, rather than individual tasks. Additionally, you will have all the to-dos in the same place as your discussions and specifications, meaning there will be one place to see everything relevant to a new feature or a bug fix.

When you receive user feedback, we have a section where you can organize all of it. You can either write the feedback directly in Kitemaker, or you can use our Intercom or Zapier integrations (with more integrations to come). You can select any part of the feedback, capture it as an insight, and link it directly to work items. Since the insights and feedback will be directly linked to the work items, you and your team will know exactly what was said and by whom on the work item screen.

There are many more features and integrations for you to explore, so if you are curious, feel free to check out our website.

What our users love about Kitemaker

• It's fast, easy to use, and simple to get started with.
• Work items let you have specs, tasks, and discussions in the same place, making it easy for engineering, design, and product management to collaborate in the same tool.
• Having user feedback directly connected to the stuff you are working on is incredibly powerful, and the Intercom integration directly syncs conversations into Kitemaker.
• Our to-dos have everything engineers expect for issues, like git automation, referencing, and metadata, so the hierarchy fits perfectly for teams that focus on shipping awesome stuff to users.

Asks

We love all kinds of feedback, so if you are curious about Kitemaker, head over to https://www.kitemaker.co and give us some feedback when you have tried it.

You can also join our community here, where you can discuss Kitemaker or all things product development.

We’re also super interested in chatting with people about their product development process. Both to learn how you approach it or just give you some insights into what we have seen talking to many 100s of teams.