David (@dahernan) and I (@matryer) have spent the past six months building a new minimalist project management tool that combines simple work tracking with async-first team communication.

We call it Pace.

Why Pace?

Rather than focusing on “sprinting” or being forever “rapid”, we acknowledge that there is an ever changing pace associated with delivering at a high quality. Sometimes you get to ride the rapids and rally around together to deliver things quickly, but there are many hidden trade offs to speed alone.

“Sometimes the right pace for a team is to go more slowly.”

Code and features are like paint; you have to let them dry before you can see their true colour. A few years ago, we introduced a mandatory cool-down period whenever we had ideas. This removed the immediate pressure to get stuff done, and allowed our initial excitement to settle before making any decisions.

Overall, this made us a lot better at what we do.

Pace values

The tools we use influence team behaviour in a big way, and so they should encourage the highest quality, sustainable engineering.

• Honesty - don’t encourage people to lie (ahem, estimations)
• Respect - trust people and respect their time
• Minimalism - don’t try to solve every problem in the tool

We designed Pace with these few core values in mind, and as a result the app turned out to be quite different to the alternatives.

Not another project management tool?!

Most of the options out there have become packed with features as they try to solve every problem and chase every possible customer. This makes the software bloated and hard to use.

Pace selects from a handful of the most important problems faced by modern tech teams and aims to address them in a simple and minimalist way.

• Asynchronous individual and team communication
• Workflow-light task management
• Showcase progress over estimations

Interruption free by default

Instant messaging apps can be quite damaging to a developer’s focus. We found that Slack encourages people to interrupt you at any time of the day, and puts pressure on people to reply immediately.

Pace admits that this hurts productivity, and so takes an async-first approach instead.

With asynchronous communication, questions, debates and conversations can happen across time zones, inclusive of remote and co-located teams, and allows everybody interested to contribute.

Only simple workflows

In our experience, complicated workflows make the tools even harder to use. If you just need to mark a task as Done, you shouldn’t get caught up in red tape and unnecessary admin.

A lot of “features” in these tools seem to come from a lack of trust in the team. Trust your team to do their best and you can cut down on the workflow enforcement.

Respecting your time

Rather than designing the app to keep you hooked, our goal is for you to spend as little time as possible with project management duties, freeing you and the team to focus on what matters to you and your team.

Pace won’t be constantly knocking for your attention, or forcing you through complicated workflows just to update the rest of the team. We offer a light-touch alternative.

Show, don’t tell

When you’ve finished a task in Pace, you’ll be asked if you would like to share a video, image, or screen recording of your recent work. This is a great way to get feedback and let the rest of the org know what you’re working on.

Screen recordings are easy in Pace

For the first time screen recording is a first class concern, easy to do with just a few clicks right in the comment box.

Can I use Pace today?

Yes. Pace is live now and ready for you to try. You can start your 14 day free trial whenever you are ready.

We want to learn more about how your team works, so we can make sure Pace solves the problems you care about most, so please get in touch and start a conversation with us.

• Head over to https://pace.dev/app to get started.

Pricing

• We are charging $7 per user per month
• Teams will get 10GB of storage included, with each extra GB costing $0.20 per month so you only pay for what you use

Everybody gets a 14 day free trial.

If you aren’t convinced after a couple of weeks, we won’t be employing any tiresome hard-sell tactics to try and claw you in. We can still be friends :)

How can you help?

If you believe in our mission, then please talk about us. We don’t like ads, so we are relying on our friends and supporters to spread the word and help us reach like minded teams.

You can use the SHARE button on the right to tweet this story.

Thank you for your interest. Please join the conversation. We look forward to meeting you, if we haven’t already.

Learn more about what we're doing at Pace.

A lot of our blog posts come out of the technical work behind a project we're working on called Pace.

We were frustrated by communication and project management tools that interrupt your flow and overly complicated workflows turn simple tasks, hard. So we decided to build Pace.

Pace is a new minimalist project management tool for tech teams. We promote asynchronous communication by default, while allowing for those times when you really need to chat.

We shift the way work is assigned by allowing only self-assignment, creating a more empowered team and protecting the attention and focus of devs.

We're currently live and would love you to try it and share your opinions on what project management tools should and shouldn't do.

What next? Start your 14 day free trial to see if Pace is right for your team