The Huddleboard is a new software platform that is aiming to revolutionize how teams communicate, collaborate and get work done. With a sleek interface, innovative features and a focus on flexibility, The Huddleboard positions itself as the next generation of team productivity solutions.
Overview and Key Features
The Huddleboard bills itself as an “all-in-one digital headquarters for your team.” At it’s core, it is a digital whiteboard meets project management platform meets team chat tool. Some of the key features and capabilities of The Huddleboard include:
- Flexible Kanban Boards: The Huddleboard offers flexible Kanban-style boards that teams can use to visualize workflows, map out projects, track progress and assign tasks. Boards can be fully customized with different column layouts, colors, cards and more to match each team’s way of working.
- Integrated Video Chat: The Huddleboard has integrated video chat functionality powered by WebRTC for teams to talk in real-time as they collaborate. The video chat runs alongside the Kanban boards and other tools within the platform itself.
- File Sharing and Version History: Teams can easily drag and drop files onto Huddleboard cards to share assets, mockups, documents and more. All files are stored in the cloud and have version history so you can track changes over time.
- Task Management and Assignments: Flexible cards on the Kanban boards can be used for task management. Tasks can be moved through workflow stages, assigned to team members, tagged with labels, given due dates, checked off as completed and more.
- Team Chat and Notifications: In addition to live video chat, The Huddleboard includes a persistent team chat window for quick conversations, sharing links and sending notifications as you collaborate.
- Third-Party Integrations: The Huddleboard integrates with popular third-party tools like Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, Trello and more. These integrations allow you to share Huddleboard cards and attachments to external platforms.
- Spaces to Segment Content: Teams can create separate spaces within their Huddleboard account to organize projects, departments, clients and more. Custom permissions can be set per space.
- Analytics and Reports: Managers can review built-in analytics around team productivity, card flow, task completion rates and more. The analytics provide insights to improve workflows.
Key Benefits for Teams
With it’s flexible Kanban boards and deep integrations, The Huddleboard aims to centralize teamwork and provide transparency into workstreams. Some of the key potential benefits include:
| Increased Transparency | With all tasks, projects and communications visible on the board, The Huddleboard gives complete transparency across teams. Team members can see real-time progress and activity. |
| Improved Alignment | Visual collaboration allows teams to identify blockers quicker and keeps all members aligned. Less time is wasted due to miscommunications. |
| More Efficient Workflows | Teams can map out workflows using the custom columns on the Kanban board and seeing where improvements need to be made based on analytics. |
| Flexibility for Different Teams | The Huddleboard can support software development teams, marketing teams, product teams, design teams and all kinds of small to mid-size groups. |
| Remote Collaboration | With video chat, persistent chat, screen sharing and other features, The Huddleboard enables smooth remote collaboration for distributed teams. |
| Insights for Managers | With analytics and reporting, managers can spot bottlenecks in processes and see where teams are excelling or struggling in order to provide coaching. |
The Huddleboard Founding Story
The Huddleboard was founded in 2018 by CEO Shane Zhao and CPO Xing Zhao, who previously worked together at an enterprise software company. While working with engineering teams and project managers, they saw firsthand many of the communication and transparency issues that exist in fast-paced work environments. Teams relied on fragmented solutions stitched together instead of a unified hub.
With the goal of creating the best collaborative workspace for agile teams, the founders left their jobs to pursue The Huddleboard full-time. They brought on a strong technical team with experience at prominent Silicon Valley companies like Google, Uber and Airbnb.
Over the last few years, The Huddleboard has refined it’s solution based on feedback from early adopter teams. It has seen quick adoption among software, creative and marketing agencies who appreciate the flexibility to customize it to their needs.
In 2022, The Huddleboard raised $12 million in Series A funding from leading SaaS investors to continue expanding it’s solution’s capabilities to additional types of teams.
Getting Started With The Huddleboard
Ready to get your team on The Huddleboard? Here is a step-by-step guide to get started:
1. Start Your Free Trial
Go to TheHuddleboard.net and click Sign Up. Choose between monthly and annual billing plans. You can start a free 14-day trial before paying anything.
2. Create Your First Board
Once signed up, you can create your first board. Either start from a template or build a custom layout. Name your columns to match key workflow states.
3. Invite Your Team
Go to the Team Members section and invite people to your Huddleboard account via email address. Choose what permissions members need.
4. Install Integrations
Install any of the app integrations that your team relies on like Slack, Trello, Dropbox or Google Drive through the integrations section.
5. Start Collaborating!
Hold a video chat within your Huddleboard, create cards to represent tasks and projects, assign work, set due dates, share files and feedback and more!
Within an hour or two, you can have The Huddleboard rolling with your team’s projects and workstreams visualized on the boards. Adjust workflows and introduce new features over time to get the most value.
Key Features and Tools in Depth
Now that you have a high-level view of what The Huddleboard offers, let’s do a deeper dive into some of the key features and tools that enable seamless team collaboration:
Kanban Boards
Kanban boards are the core workspace of The Huddleboard experience. Teams can create any number of boards to map out departments, projects, workstreams and more.
Each board allows you to create customizable columns and swimlanes. Columns can capture major states of your workflow like “To Do”, “In Progress”, “In Review” and “Complete”. Swimlanes can be used to segment cards by assignee, priority, release milestone or any other labels.
Cards on the Kanban boards represent individual tasks and can be easily dragged and dropped between columns to indicate status changes. Key supporting features include:
- Color-coded Labels – Add labels like “Customer Critical”, “Bug”, “Enhancement” etc.
- Assignments – Assign board cards to team member
- Due Dates – Set due dates for tasks to keep everyone on track
- Checklists – Decompose tasks into checklisted sub-tasks
- Activity Feed – See all real-time activity happening on a card
- Attachments – Add files, designs or any relevant attachments
- Comments – Leave feedback and communicate right on cards
With their Kanban boards being highly flexible, teams can model any kind of workflow that maps to how they naturally complete collaborative work.
Team Video Chat
The Huddleboard has native video chat functionality built right into the platform. Team members can join video chats to align in real-time as work is happening rather than relying on separate conferencing tools.
To start chatting, users click the Video icon which launches a flexible video panel. Calls can welcome the whole team or be more targeted by inviting specific Huddleboard members.
Useful features within Video chat rooms include:
- Screen Sharing – Presenters can share their desktop or document windows
- Whiteboard Mode – Draw together in a collaborative whiteboard space
- Chat – Persistent team chat to share links/feedback
- Recordings – Video chats can be recorded and made available later
Video chat helps distributed teams feel connected as they see each other’s faces and directly discuss work happening on the Kanban boards and cards.
Team Chat
In addition to real-time video chats, The Huddleboard offers a persistent Team Chat window that serves as an always-on discussion space to communicate with colleagues. Chat is useful for:
- Providing card updates and notifications
- Sharing links and files quick references
- Coordinating impromptu video chats
- Asking workflow or task-related questions
- Direct messaging individuals or groups
Team Chat complements the rich commenting capabilities directly available on cards themselves. For lightweight discussions, happening in real-time, chat is the right channel.
And with support for chat notifications, teams can subscribe to specific convos or message types so they stay informed of important activity. Enable notifications for direct messages, references to yourself, card assignments, entire spaces and more.
Third-Party Integrations
While The Huddleboard provides a central collaboration hub in itself, teams invariably use other software tools ranging from file sharing to enterprise IT systems. That’s why integrating external platforms into the workflow is supported.
The Huddleboard offers pre-built integrations with:
- Slack – Share Huddleboard card links within Slack channels for visibility
- Dropbox – Attach Dropbox folders/docs to cards
- Google Drive– Direct access to Google Docs and Sheets
- Jira– Sync Huddleboard tasks to issues and projects
- Trello– Sync cards between Trello boards and Huddleboard
- Clubhouse– Map Clubhouse story workflow into Huddleboard
- GitHub– Connect code commits to tracker cards
- Many more custom integrations…
Setting up integrations is easy and only takes a few clicks through the Integrations dashboard inside The Huddleboard. Take advantage of these critical connections to unify team collaboration.
Huddleboard For Different Team Types
While originally designed for software engineering teams, The Huddleboard has proven itself flexible enough to support any small to medium-sized team.
Here are some of the most common team types currently using Huddleboard as their collaboration platform:
Software and Product Development Teams
For software teams, Huddleboard provides the perfect hybrid of digital Kanban task boards, video chat for agile ceremonies, shared documentation and connections to developer tools. Typical use cases include:
- Tracking sprints/iterations and user stories
- Daily standups and retrospectives in Video chat
- Workflow tracking from dev to code review to testing
- Visualizing release milestones and progress
- Syncing tasks, issues, commits across other DevOps tools
Marketing & Creative Teams
For marketing teams, bringing campaigns to life involves constant cross-functional collaboration. Huddleboard helps tame the chaos through:
- Planning and tracking content calendars/timelines
- Assigning tasks and assets across teams
- Signing off on creative proofs and assets
- Brainstorming and feedback in video chats
- Tagging and filtering by client workstreams
Sales Teams
For sales teams, Huddleboard supports key scenarios like:
- Tracking sales prospecting workflow
- Qualifying leads shared across the team
- Conducting visual display of customer data
- Assisting deal desk hand-offs between reps
- Situational awareness on deals as a team
In general, The Huddleboard works for any small to medium-sized team needing flexible project management coupled with close communication. Setup is quick and modifications are easy as needs change.
Pricing and Plans
The Huddleboard offers Team plans and Enterprise plans suited for handling different organization sizes and collaboration needs.
Teams Plans
The Huddleboard Teams plans start at $7 per member per month when billed annually. Key features of Team plans include:
- 5 Team Members
- Unlimited Boards & Cards
- 250MB File Storage per Member
- 2 Integrations
- Standard Support
As your team grows over 15 members, you would want to upgrade to the $15 per member Teams Premium plan that offers:
- Unlimited Team Members
- Unlimited Integrations
- 500MB Storage per Member
- SSO & API Access
- Priority Support
Enterprise Plans
For even larger companies that need advanced administrative controls, security policies, audit logs and premium support, Huddleboard Enterprise plans are available.
Enterprise packages allow managing organization-wide settings, permissions and billing from a central dashboard along with deeper data access and backups.
Contact The Huddleboard sales team for volume discounts and custom Enterprise pricing.
Free Version
Huddleboard does offer a forever free version supporting up to 5 Team Members with basic collaboration features. The free mode is great for trying out the product and seeing if it matches your team’s workflow style.
Summary and Conclusion
The Huddleboard delivers a complete collaboration solution blending visual task management, video chat, document sharing and third-party integrations together in one TeamHQ platform.
By keeping all team communication and work centralized on flexible boards, projects stay transparent and aligned. The focus is on enabling clarity into workflows and surfacing blockers early to keep work moving fast.
Whether you lead a software team, marketing team, consulting group or other small to medium-sized team, The Huddleboard is worth trying out as your digital collaboration headquarters. Sign up today to experience the future of teamwork.
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