Remote work is almost certainly here to stay. The pandemic accelerated what was already a trend, and now a huge number of companies have remote workers as part of their staff. Here at Craft we have our HQ in beautiful Budapest, but our team is also growing with new remotely located staff joining from Stockholm to Spain, Sofia to Scotland.
In this article, we reveal the tools we use here at Craft to enable us to communicate and collaborate smoothly.
1. Craft Docs
Of course we use Craft - a lot! Our note-taking, documenting-making and all-round collaboration tool enables us to build beautiful, easy-to-read documents across a wide range of workflows: from meeting notes to employee handbooks, company wikis to technical post mortems, job posts to our 30 60 90 day plans - Craft empowers our team to work together, from afar.
2. Slack
This communication tool is a must-have for remote teams. Yes, there are other messaging tools out there - Microsoft Teams for example has messaging functionality - but in our opinion, Slack is still the king messaging app. It’s fast, easy to use, and just works seamlessly. It allows our team to easily communicate with each other, create channels for specific topics, and even integrate other apps and services.
3. Zoom
There are several popular video call services, but Zoom is one of the best. At Craft we use it daily for our meetings. Although services like Google Hangouts offer similar functionality, Zoom just seems to be designed better and works very well for our team.
4. WeTransfer
We regularly need to shift around large files - for example video content (check out the Craft YouTube channel) - and WeTransfer is our go-to for that. The file-sharing service allows us to quickly and easily send files around the team. WeTransfer also includes features like real-time file tracking, which lets remote workers know exactly when their files have been received and who has accessed them. WeTransfer also has a very cool editorial section - WePresent - with excellent stories featuring fascinating characters.
5. Trello
There are various task management tools around - Jira, Asana, Monday.com - but we are still big fans of the simplicity, and interface of Trello. It allows our teams to easily create and track tasks, activities, and projects.
6. Figma
When it comes to design, we love Figma. We use it daily and its collaborative functionality makes it really quick and easy to refine and hone our work. It is incredibly user-friendly, with intuitive tools and it enables our team to centralize our design efforts and collaboratively create and refine designs with a few clicks. It is accessible on any device and can be easily shared.
7. Linear
If you’re a software company, you’ll need to track bugs and have somewhere to list improvements and new features. For that, we love Linear. It also comes with project management capabilities, enabling us to create boards, lists, and cards to represent tasks and milestones. It's easy to use and intuitive, with a clean and organized interface that makes it simple to get up and running.
8. Github
Github is an essential part of our software team's workflow. It allows our developers to collaborate, store and share code, track tasks, communicate with team members, and more. Through Github our developers can securely access, review, and update code from anywhere in the world - which is pretty handy for a remote team.