Disclosure: I'm an investor and was an early adopter of Branch.
14 karma · joined August 2, 2012
Disclosure: I'm an investor and was an early adopter of Branch.
I have looked at several sites like this and using GitHub to query and then present is smart. Some suggestions:
1) Find a way to notify the user when their resume has been built. This could be a great distribution tactic.
2) Allow the user to reveal non-detailed summaries of their private repos. This is where the real power of a tool like this would come in. Allowing a generalized summary of the private repo's could lead to an "IMDB for programmers"
If we want to promote the people who have shown grace and forgiveness for horrible crimes committed against them, there are many people to celebrate over Larry Flynt. Likewise, the number of anti death-sentence crusaders are plentiful and far more admirable than Larry Flynt.
Only when a 2nd person sends feedback to that same manager, does the rest of the feedback (from employee 2, 3, 4etc) get locked until the manager switches to a paying account.
By the sounds of it, you're aware of our enterprise product (i.e. has to be activated by a manager or leadership team) product called happiily which is also our company name. Part of our motivation in building this new product was to provide smaller companies and teams a product to collect feedback quickly.
As well, we wanted to build a product that could provide value without first being activated by a manager. That's really the crux of the experiment here at Tell Your Boss Anything.
And yes, there are lots of startups seeking to improve the way people work. And that's a good thing.
If a relationship has become truly broken, it's unlikely our system is going to fix it. In that case, you might be right that the person should seek employment elsewhere.
But there are many scenarios by which the relationship can be improved by anonymous feedback. Keep in mind that a lot of the feedback managers tell us they get are based on feedback about systems, tools used, company policies and the like.
We've built (and are building) a follow-up mechanism to try and ensure good feedback doesn't go ignored and that the downvoting you speak of is actually transparent in the system.
If you try our service, you'll see that the feedback is in fact both ways. Managers can reply, ask follow-up questions, mark the issue as resolved and so on. Likewise, the employee can reply and do the same.
Not everyone wants to leave or feels they can leave (in this economy). They want a mechanism to try and fix something without fear of retribution. That's what we're trying to provide.
You're absolutely right that the degree of anonymity is increased with more people on a team.
One outcome we'd like to see from this tool is for conversations that begin anonymously to end in person. In other words, that we're helping initially build the trust to bring employee and manager together in person.
We have a feedback mechanism for both sides of the conversation to indicate whether - as a result of the conversation - the issue has been resolved, worsened or improved. We'd like to see a lot of "resolved."
We welcome your feedback.