As TEN7’s Director of Operations, I’ve been working with our team to revamp and document a lot of our internal processes, like our contractor guide and how we handle support requests.
As we continue to grow and refine our business processes, we thought it would be valuable to have a document at-the-ready that illustrates the various technologies we use as a company. In other words, TEN7’s Tech Stack.
We could share this document with all new hires, so they’re clear on which tools we use, and we’d have it as a reference guide if ever in doubt. Also, it’s honestly irresponsible of us to try to keep upwards of 60 different tools in our brains, with no “backup”. Backup, in this case, is just as necessary as it is for us to backup the websites we care for.
Where We Started
We’ve gone through a lot of trial and error when it comes to tools. We attempted to move from Jira to Asana for project management and ended up back in Jira! We recently switched from using Buffer and a spreadsheet to power our editorial process to Loomly for scheduling social media posts. And we officially left Jira Service Desk for Front for support requests.
In creating our stack, we took our first queue from GitLab’s Systems Diagram. We used this as a jumping off point with the goal of simplifying it, so that anyone could make at least some sense of it at-a-glance. We felt the diagram format was a bit too complex to digest.
We started our documentation by creating TEN7’s business categories: marketing and sales and operations, to name a few. We then compiled a spreadsheet that our whole team could contribute to, which included columns for the names of our tools & software, their purpose (e.g. password management, version control, design & development), and their business category.
We asked our team for contributions because there are certainly tools that our developers use, for instance, that our marketing team isn’t aware of—and vice versa. It took the whole team to compile a comprehensive list.
From there, we whittled the list down to only the most prominent and relevant tools. Some tools aren’t used enough or by enough team members or simply don’t seem to fit. For example, we chose to leave social media apps like LinkedIn out of the mix, but included Loomly, the tool we use to schedule social media posts. In this example, Loomly is the essential tool we need to keep up with social media posts.
Where We Landed
This is by no means an exhaustive list of possible tools, nor is it a list of every tool we’ll ever use. But it is our current, most trusted list. We keep a list of all of our tools on our public Notion page.
What does your company’s tech stack look like? What tools are you using that are missing on our list? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected]. we’re eager to learn what you are doing.
We’re pretty happy with where we’ve landed with our tech stack, and for us, this was an essential exercise to go through. We no longer need to question which software to use and when, now that we’ve got this handy reference guide at our fingertips.