Mike Johns

June 9, 2023

The "Give A Shit" Stack

You use software all day, every day, at work. Your choice of software tools — the stack your business runs on — affects the daily lives of everyone you work with. These tools are the user interface of your business, as presented to your team (your most important users). Do you pick the cheapest, easiest possible option when designing UI for your product? Of course not. So why would you force a bad business UI on your team?

These are the tools I'd choose for building that user interface. Products that give a shit. I don't know how you force a team to use Microsoft products or Windows machines and sleep peacefully at night. These are the opposite of that.

Computing platform: macOS

Team communication: Slack

Writing and documentation: Notion

Spreadsheets and analysis: Equals (check out some of my other thoughts about Equals)

Project management: Notion, especially with the new Projects features

Runner up: Basecamp. It doesn't fit my mental ergonomics despite many trials of the software but I really wanted to list that instead. If it's a fit for you, it could replace several others in the list.

Video calls: FaceTime (really) — especially for a small team. Underrated: FaceTime Audio so you can walk and talk.

Calendar + scheduling: No great answer. Open to suggestions — and pretty sure 37signals is working on this.

Email: Hey for Domains, and for the love of God, don't use email internally

Password + secret management: 1Password (and you absolutely need a team answer for this category)

About Mike Johns

Product manager and developer obsessed with ambitious SaaS. Discerning Ideator.