In this episode of Free People Move, Sten got a hold of Thomas Schranz, co-founder of blossom.io - a lightweight, yet incredibly insightful project management tool.
Thomas tells us more about Blossom, how it works and the reasons why it’s perfect to help you track progress of software product development, especially in teams who don't sit all in the same room. We discuss the early days of the startup and how he learned why it’s important to test your own product to build standards and get a good feel of when it’s ready to go.
More and more software teams consist mainly of members that have very different schedules and operate on completely different terms compared to traditional companies. This can make it hard to apply traditional methods like Scrum and daily standup meetings to synchronize people, and that’s exactly what Blossom can help with – it can not fully replace having meetings, but it helps to get a summary of what other people are doing and working on and helps answer important questions about progress - sometimes better than people can.
As a founder of a distributed team and roaming entrepreneur, Thomas knows all about why reaching out of your own location is crucial to finding talented people - Blossom turned out to be a remote team “by accident” when Thomas started realizing that awesome people are everywhere and how much it pays off to try and make it work regardless of location. For Blossom that means having colleagues in Australia and Novosibirsk, Russia among other places.
Thomas also shares his view of the value of traveling around, meeting people and keeping in touch. He tells us about how he shares his time between his main locations - Vienna and San Francisco, while traveling around in multiple other locations, how he chooses when and where to go and talks about the importance of flexibility, which is something the whole team values in Blossom.
And of course, as a tradition, in the end of the episode we discuss some things that Thomas thinks are pain points that haven’t been dealt with yet - you’ll get a business plan out of these podcasts one day, we promise!
As always - if you're a fan of iTunes, you can find our podcast here. If the newest episode isn't up yet, give it a bit - sometimes it takes some time to sync!
