The Tools We Use: Part I

Here at Hover, we’re no strangers to technology and we’re not the type to shy away from the latest gadgets and apps. New iOS updates and Ting mobile device deliveries are just a couple things that set our office abuzz.

When it comes to getting stuff done, we’re pretty enthusiastic about adopting different tools to help us make Hover the best it can be. Of course, we each have our favourite apps for work and personal use, but there are some tools we use as a team for task management and collaboration.

Here are a few of the tools we love and use every single day:

Sprout Social

It’s important to us that we’re able to stay in touch with our customers across the major social media channels. Not only do we use Twitter, Google+ and Facebook to keep you up-to-date on what we’re working on, but also as different avenues for you to connect with us. With the help of Sprout Social, your messages, posts and tweets reach us on both the management and customer service levels. It’s a great way to get in touch with us for all your support needs and feature requests.

Sprout allows us to manage and connect our social networks from a single dashboard. It has a slick UI that’s designed for ease-of-use, and even generates analytics and engagement reports. Since it keeps our feeds updated in a single-column view, we’re able to respond in real-time without constantly refreshing the screen.

Asana

Some of the best new technologies are the ones that allow us to break free from technology. While email has revolutionized the way businesses communicate internally, it can be difficult to collect and organize information from different sources in an onslaught of messages.

Asana is a task management app that doesn’t rely on email to coordinate team members. It’s become essential to our workflow across all of our teams, including product management, development, marketing and reporting. We use it to log our projects, and prioritize both what we’re working on and what we plan to do next. Anyone at Hover (and Tucows) can attest to the satisfaction of archiving completed tasks.

All the details involved in each task are consolidated in one place for everyone to access. We’re able to stay on the same page by setting due dates and assigning tasks to individuals or groups. We even use Asana to work with people outside the company, like designers, by adding them as guests to the tasks they’re helping with. Suffice to say, Asana helps us stay organized so that we can take on more complex, exciting projects.

Google Apps

No surprise here. We’re happy to offer you Google Apps on your domain and we’re proud users ourselves.  Not a day goes by that we don’t use Calendar to set reminders for ourselves or book meetings with one another.

The cloud-based tools allows us to collaborate on Docs, Sheets, and Slides from anywhere, whether we’re in the office or at home. GoogleApps helps us work together documents at the same time. With Hangouts, we can even have face-to-face conversations when we’re working from home (or, from across the office, not that we officially encourage it).