Comfort is everything at MeUndies. Well, comfort, killer designs, charity, and efficient workflows. The first three are obvious if you explore the MeUndies website, where you can learn about the company's sustainably sourced, naturally soft materials for super-comfortable underwear, their dedication to creating fair paying and empowering jobs, and browse new designs rolled out each season.
But under the hood, Vicky Tatar, Director of Project Management at MeUndies, built and maintains a simple but robust system using Asana and Pivotal Tracker to manage projects between different teams.
"Improving our efficiency is constantly on our minds. I was documenting our workflows, trying to figure out how to integrate our tools and reduce the amount of times someone has to communicate something," Vicky says.
Like most companies, different teams at MeUndies have created their own workflows and picked out their favorite tools. The Customer Experience team prefers project management tool Asana, where a lot of MeUndies' projects are managed and executed. The Dev team uses another project manager: Pivotal Tracker. "We were initiating requests and communicating about them in Asana, but then creating the same stories in Pivotal and updating both systems," Vicky explains.
I was impressed with how easy [Zapier] was to set-up. It was just incredibly simple.
Vicky Tatar, Director of Project Management, MeUndies
This wasn't a sustainable workflow, especially not for a lean team working to make the most of their time. "I was thinking there had to be a way to solve for this, so I started looking up integration tools and came across [app automation tool] Zapier," Vicky says.
With Zapier, Vicky was able to build a few Zaps—a bridge between two apps—connecting Asana and Pivotal Tracker, immediately cutting the work the MeUndies Dev and Customer Experience teams were doing in half.
"We have a project in Asana for Customer Experience requests, which includes bug reports and features, and we built a template task for new requests," Vicky explains. "The Customer Experience rep duplicates that template, fills in all the necessary details, and we use the tagging feature to then import it into Pivotal."
To follow up, Vicky has the Zap include a link back to the Asana task so the Dev team can comment on the project status.
We set up Zapier to look for the tag and then that story appears in Pivotal at the top of the [Dev team's] inbox, so they see it immediately.
Vicky Tatar, Director of Project Management, MeUndies
"[Zapier helps] consolidate all of those requests—and it also saves the Dev team time from answering one-off messages about a request. Everybody sees [the status] and they can communicate it back to the Customer Experience team quickly via that link, so the [Customer Experience team] doesn't need to go searching for that request to get an update."
Vicky also built out the reverse, sending Pivotal's Stories to Asana as new tasks so the Dev team can share their projects with the Customer Experience team, too. This transparency means a quick check- in Asana by the Customer Experience team could stop an issue from being unnecessarily escalated.
If you have different teams working in different project management tools, try MeUndies' Zaps that bring tasks from Asana to Pivotal Tracker and from Pivotal Tracker to Asana:
Create Pivotal Tracker stories from new tagged Asana tasks
Create Pivotal Tracker stories from new Asana tasks
Push Pivotal Tracker stories to create new Asana tasks
You could also try using Asana's Boards features to organize distinct projects that all fall under the same umbrella—like MeUndies' Customer Experience team's inquiries to the Dev team.
Vicky hasn't stopped experimenting with new Zaps, either. "I can quickly play around and within probably an hour, get a new Zap set up and document the process. With a lean team, if you have an hour, you need to get it done because you never know when you'll have an hour again."
All images courtesy of MeUndies.
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