Tangle
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About Tangle:
Tangle is a remote collaboration tool designed to make teams feel like teams again. Even pre-WFH Revolution, the team at absurd:joy felt there was a big hole in the world of remote work tools. Sure, we had Zoom and GoogleMeet, but these were little islands of connection and when the call was over you were back in your bedroom, all alone. Productivity was fine, but people were not. Tangle began as a tool for absurd:joy to use internally as a way to connect while working on their consulting jobs. But it quickly became clear that Tangle was the thing they should be building. Unlike competitors like Gather or Kumospace, Tangle opted for a highly customizable, canvas-based interface that allowed teams to co-exist with their context. Rather than try and replace the 15 tools you use to do work everyday, we gave them a place to exist alongside the humans who use them. Project Timeline I joined Tangle in August of 2021 Project Responsibilities At Tangle I held 2 roles: First as Executive Producer and second as Head of Product. I'll talk about both of these below! To get an in-depth overview of my role, pop over to my Product Reel Executive Producer When I joined in August of '21, I was employee #7. Over the next year, we'd grow to more than 20. At the outset, my mandate was simple: Create Production. Prior to my involvement, Tangle had existed as a prototype with no clear plan to ship. Teams were small enough to survive on Post-Its and Slack, but it was already clear that the growing org. wouldn't survive that lack of structure. My first order of business was to find our cross-functional team a tool they could all use to task track and that would provide me with usable reporting to forecast our launch. The second was finding a set of rituals that would help us communicate + collaborate without feeling rote or unnecessary. Both of these steps would be under iteration for the entire time I worked at Tangle. One of the great joys of Production work is watching your team's needs evolve and change and finding new ways to support them! You can read a lot more about this work over in my Production Reel. This work became the beating heart of our team- I wrote the schedule, ran the sprints, mediated the retros, and communicated state of product to C-Suite & Board stakeholders. I also took over a lot of "Somebody's gotta do this" work. I ran demos for new teams who were onboarding, handled hiring and new employee onboarding, created company dashboards, write e-mail newsletters, ran the social accounts and the ten thousand other things that happen when you're building a product. I half-exited this role towards the end of '21 when we hired a Lead Producer to handle the day-to-day work of running Production and I became Head of Product. Head of Product As Tangle evolved there became a clear need for someone to be liasing with users, watching the changing market and directing the team. While Product can feel like a very separate discipline from Production, the two are actually quite close- They require a lot of diplomacy, a knack for heads-down data analysis and decisive leadership. In a lot of ways, Product is the 5000 foot view version of Production In this role, I developed a Product Roadmap and ran quarterly meetings to pull in C-Suite, Senior Leadership and customers into one vital loop that kept our development in tune with user, market and business needs. Additionally, we'd refine that roadmap on a Sprint basis, re-evaluating and re-scheduling features as outcomes required. The roadmap was fed by user surveys, emerging market trends, requests from business + board, analytics conclusions and our own sense of what Tangle needed to succeded. Every feature Backlog item was scored on 2 axis- Surpriser vs Satisfier - to ensure that we had a good balance of what made Tangle fun vs what made is useful. Where to download it: Unfortunately, Tangle was a SaaS product that's no longer hosted anywhere. But you can see screen captures and videos below! |
TEAMTeam Credits (Subvrsive):
Alex Schwartz - CEO / Janitor Cy Wise - COO / Live Racoon Lynds Gallant - Head of Design Andy Moore - Head of Engineering Kendra Wilson - People Ops Christine Brual - Head of QA Jenn Harrison - QA Testing Noreen Rana - Lead UX Valerie Kolomiets - Lead Production Anne-Elise Chung - Client & Network Engineer Tejas Shroff - Client Engineer Keenan Woodall - Engineer & Technical Artist Scott Doxey - Backend Engineer Afeez Nosiru - Backend Engineer John Harris - Network Engineer Stephen Gray - Agora Guru & Engineering Britt Kolar - UI Artist Nik Odic - Illustration, Technical Artist, Accordionist Rick Armstrong - Head of Marketing Lacey Winter - Customer Success Sheen Tacos - Producer |
