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Show HN: Ask recurring questions and get aggregated answers in your email

keyory.com

71 pointsjujodi40 comments

I've worked in a cross functional organization as a product manager for about 8 years now and I finally feel as though I can articulate a need that has existed for quite some time. There are a few problems.

  * Someone isn't asking a question to team members that should be asked on a regular basis
  * Someone is manually asking a question to team members on a regular basis
  * Someone is asking a question during a meeting that should be asked before or after the meeting

Here are some examples of these types of questions

  * As a team leader - Is there anything you'd like me to specifically address to the team during our weekly status meeting?
  * As a sales manager - What feedback did you hear from customers this week about our product?
  * As a product owner - What do you think should be our top 5 priorities for the next 3 sprints?
  * As a scrum master - Is there anything that is blocking your current objectives?

There's an interesting side effect of not asking these questions regularly and asynchronously. Instead of getting the best answers from the group, you get the perspective of the loudest, fastest talking person in the meeting and it becomes the focus of discussion.

We built Keyory to solve this problem. You can ask recurring questions to a group of people and have the aggregated responses delivered right to your inbox. You can configure your questions to be sent out daily on specific days, weekly, biweekly, or even monthly on the first day of a month. Then you forget about it and read the answers all in one place, in your email.

> Instead of getting the best answers from the group, you get the perspective of the loudest, fastest talking person in the meeting and it becomes the focus of discussion.

I think this particularly is a sign of poor meeting discipline, and have found that the people facilitating them can learn the skills needed to stop this from happening.

Here's an example of a case where I don't think good meeting discipline can help. If I'm in a meeting and I ask everyone on the engineering team what they think the number 1 highest value tech debt item is at the moment, then only the first person to answer is giving me an uninfluenced opinion, because every other person has now heard someone else's perspective and possibly altered their own before their turn. Instead, I prefer to ask every engineer to come to the meeting with their answer written down (or aggregated in my inbox with Keyory already) so that I can see what everyone's unfiltered opinion is and then direct the meeting from there.

I agree asynchronous communication can be important also, but disagree with at least the way it was articulated.

"First comment" can have an anchoring effect, sure - but there is no reason that it has to dominate or really constrain the rest of the conversation.

Your example sounds like the primary focus of a meeting. I agree people should come prepped for discussion then in order for it to be effective.

I knew there was some Daniel Kahneman in what I was trying to explain I just drew a blank on the word haha. That's really good feedback though, I'll have to work on a better way to articulate the particular struggle I'd like to focus on and not skew it with such strong wording about something completely different

In this situation I would ask everybody to write it down, collect all the notes, stick them on the wall and discuss them one by one.

Or if you're remote, screen share the Keyory email. It's been a long time since I've had a functional team meeting (vs. status or cross functional) anywhere but zoom

Amazing concept. As an engineering manager, the main cause of my drinking is juniors NOT asking questions either for an immediate blocking issue or for a very clear learning opportunity.

I imagine for many questions are not asked in order to reduce or delay doing actual work. It'll be interesting to see what excuses remain after implementing a solution like this.

Thanks! And they can't say you never asked if they needed help either. Keyory won't solve your people problem though, unfortunately

Can you offer the ability to plan out weekly questions and pre-populate each weeks question with a different question?

What's an example of how the question might change each week? If the use case is "ask a different question each week" then it probably isn't for Keyory

Like, cycle through 4 questions that are repeated every month? I guess you can set it up as 4 separate series, but then managing them becomes a pain.

Whoever signed up support@keyory.com, I confirmed your email, enjoy lol

Reminds of an internal Amazon system that would pop-up a question every morning when you open your computer asking some bullshit HR or “culture” question. Man, I hated that thing.

I hope nobody uses it like that! One thing we've done is made it so the recipients of questions have to explicitly subscribe to them, otherwise they'll never actually receive the question in their email. They can do that by just clicking a "subscribe to question" link that goes out when the question is created or users are added

I wish I can upvote this more than once. Very useful service and congrats on launching this.

Your challenge is, I am afraid, is in finding a manager who forces the teams to use it _constantly_ as opposed to just a few iterations and the usage fades away. Not because your product is not good, but humans often do not stick to routines. My intention is not to come across negative, but to implore you to design-solve a implicit loop inside the product.

Thanks for the feedback, that's definitely something we need to consider

Basecamp (the project management software) has this as a built-in feature. My company is small enough that I always disable it. As we add more people and lean more into remote work I'll probably give it a try.

Yep, I think that makes sense for Basecamp users. We're differentiated by the fact that you don't need to be a paid user in a closed ecosystem to be able to check in. Everyone is already an email user and only the asker is a paid user if they're asking enough questions to enough people. We have smaller teams in product development using Basecamp but aren't paying for other teams (operations, sales) to access our projects since they're just design/development focused

This is really useful! Nice work on keeping the service simple and thanks for the really clear data usage detail. I really like this feature in Basecamp, but not every situation warrants a project management tool.

Edit: any plans to allow sending the email to everyone? It can just be forwarded in the meantime, of course.

Thanks! That's funny, I just wrote down "Ability to email all the recipients the answers" in my notes so I guess +1 for that idea.

We released this feature.

Nice! Looking at it now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark_(search_engine)

Based on some of the great feedback we added a "How it Works" page to describe the problem we're solving in detail and how to test out its value without even trying Keyory. I will say the more I write about this and by the questions I see some people asking their teams on Keyory, people definitely get it. https://keyory.com/home/how

Or, you could just use slack. It has a recurring message thing as well, which you can set on a channel.

Or, just set up recurring reminders on your calendar with the question saved to the calendar entries... for the great price of $0, unlimited questions and recipients

Sounds like an interesting low-tech solution. Can you explain a little more how this works? Is this with Outlook, Google Calendar or something else?

Sure, my pleasure. We use Outlook at work so it's just a matter of clicking on 'Recurrence' on the Ribbon under the Meeting tab and picking your selection.

Don't invite anyone to the meeting, just put whatever info you want to be reminded recurrently in the body of the message or in the Subject and/or Location fields

https://i.stack.imgur.com/h3WJg.png

Thanks!

Not everyone uses slack. In most mid/large size companies people are still using email. Keyory helps bridge that gap between functional teams using slack and leadership teams using email. Everyone gets to stay in the loop.

>in most mid/large size companies people are still using email.

Is slack usually associated with start ups and small companies?

For me, yes that’s my experience. Older/bigger companies built communication habits on email and maybe an IM solution. I even see IM fairly underutilized except for “wanna grab lunch?” type conversation or in big offices “got a minute to talk?” for impromptus

Clever. Could be useful for people who do a lot of email.

Thanks!

I just read that as "aggravated".

So, I get aggravated answers in my email. Yay?

Great now I have to choose a new word. And make sure it doesn't say aggravated anywhere hah

Collated.

I read the same thing. Specifically due to the "Ask stupid questions get stupid answers" saying, I think.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes :D

Wish I had thought more about my title now.. ugh

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