The question is why do you need a whiteboard?
What problem is the whiteboard solving?
Drawing freely with a mouse is something that can be done but also you have tools like draw.io if you need to draw something.
What problem is the whiteboard solving?
Drawing freely with a mouse is something that can be done but also you have tools like draw.io if you need to draw something.
I'm honestly more surprised that this isn't a universally known concept on HN. Scribbling on scraps of paper is something most people in western countries have done since pre-school.
Both people thought their whiteboarding was indispensible. Neither person's actually were, even the guy who was quite effective at drawing his ideas.
The larger the organization, the less one person can hold the entirety of the solution in their head.
I think it depends on the communication skills of the team.
Anyone who plays some form of "Win, Lose or Draw" or "Pictionary" will quickly realize that most people aren't as good at visual communication as they think they are.
Myself, I've been in too many whiteboarding sessions where the whiteboarder either spent too much time trying to "live bake" their idea on the whiteboard or simply produced an incoherent mess.
If you just want to capture a list of ideas, google docs will let people collaboratively edit a document or you could just have one person share their screen and capture verbal ideas.
If you want to diagram things, pen and paper + a camera can be just as effective if not more effective than a whiteboard. Often it's better to have the whole team do a sketching exercise and share their results which isn't really effective on a single whiteboard.
More importantly, whiteboards are never going to be effective for remote organizations for the same reason hallway conversations / voice chat aren't effective. It builds knowledge silos as only the people who were there understand the context of the whiteboard even if you photograph it.
Even now that I’m not remote all we use the whiteboard for is bulleted lists which easily can be done with notion or google docs
Yes, you could probably accomplish the same thing by writing up a proposal spec document (which you'll need to do eventually) but the downside of doing that during the drafting stage is that it lengthens the feedback loop and not everyone will read such a document thoroughly and leave a thorough review. In-person whiteboarding is usually much faster and everyone in the room is almost always on the same page.
My point was more why does it need to be a physical thing. Like a whiteboard.
we, for example, use hackmd.io and draw.io/figma for quickly drawing. It is also easier with this to archive this and change or copy later.