Working in a healthtech product team we are so connected to the needs of our patients - always striving to build the best experience for them. But how is your team's internal experience looking? Are there any extra tools you use that make your tasks more efficient or more enjoyable?
The work that we do as product owners, testers, designers, and engineers is often behind the scenes. However, the way we work together is crucial for our healthtech product’s success. Most of us are working remotely or hybrid. And if not, many have taken some learnings from remote tools into our day-to-day practices.
Aside from the top-down infrastructure, whether that be Microsoft or GSuite, there are loads of tools you can add to your day-to-day to enhance your internal culture. We asked our team about their favourite tools that make collaboration and communication a breeze. From Loom to Notion to Miro, here’s why we love them, and why you should too.
Some things are just easier spoken than written. Loom is a video and screen recording app that allows you to record your screen and voice at the same time. When you are finished recording it instantly creates a link that you can share with who you like. No faff with downloading and sending large video files.
We use Loom for:
Great for: saving meeting time, explaining your ideas better and quicker than a painfully long email
Pricing: Free for 5-minute recordings
Check Loom out
Mapping out complex features and flows can be intense, but Xmind makes it delightful. Brainstorming likewise. With as many handy features as Miro, this supercharged mindmapping app is also highly collaborative. The design themes allow you to get it just right for your projects.
Templates include logic charts, tree tables, org charts, timelines and more.
We use Xmind for:
Great for: brainstorming, mapping
Pricing: Unlimited free trial
Give Xmind a go
Our designers are huge fans of Notion! Think of it as a digital personal notepad that you can customise to be anything you need. From to-do lists to kanban boards, Notion says it is designed to work the way you do. If you find yourself needing to jot down those research points, engineering spikes or UI tweaks Notion is for you. Their webapp, desktop app and mobile app seamlessly allow you to update your Notion any time.
We use Notion for:
Great for: everything you would ever want to write down or organise, noting down those morning shower thought ideas!
Pricing: Free for personal use | Paid for pro or team features
Take a look at Notion
No one enjoys emailing or messaging back & forth to find the perfect meeting time, or having to analyse calendars to find availability. Calendly removes this pain completely. It is essential for anyone working in healthtech. It is your personal booking system that syncs with your calendar availability and rules to allow people to book time slots in your calendar through an easy to send link. It can even pre-populate a Zoom, Teams or other video call link for you.
We use Calendly for:
Great for: saving time, booking internal meetings, user testing, intros and demo calls
Pricing: Free for one ‘live’ meeting type at a time | Paid for more features or team accounts
Set Calendly up today
Our team loves a meeting run with Lean Coffee Table. Based on the Lean Coffee framework, it allows all attendees to submit discussion points. Your team then votes on which points they’d like to discuss. Timers are set for each topic, which can be voted to end or extend by everyone in the meeting. A truly democratic meeting method ensure time is spent discussing the right topics. It also has an agenda setting which is also great.
We use Lean Coffee for:
Great for: facilitators, making any meeting productive, auto generating meeting notes
Pricing: Free for 30 days, then £8 a month afterwards
Give Lean Coffee Table a try
The software testing tool of dreams. A recent and much-loved addition to our tech stack thanks to our Product Tester. With Qase we can build, manage and reuse a repository of test cases for all our products. Qase is super user friendly and accessible (as expected).
Testing is crucial for the stability and accessibility of any product; and is very important to our team – we recommend implementing this into your testing infrastructure.
We use Qase for:
Great for: replacing excel sheets for testing
Pricing: Free for individual testers | Paid tiers for company use
Start testing with Qase
As a product team, you're probably already familiar with design systems; and how building and maintaining them is no small feat. Storybook is a ‘frontend workshop for building UI components and pages in isolation’. It allows you to develop UI including all states and edge cases separately from your app. Focusing purely on front-end to build a strong framework for your back-end. A must-have for our engineers and designers.
We use Storybook for:
Great for: building UI at pace, maintaining consistency between engineering and design
Pricing: Free and open source
Start testing with Storybook
If you haven’t tried Miro already, you’re guaranteed to find a good use for it. A top choice for our product owners and engineers, Miro enhances your teams' collaboration powers. A self-proclaimed whiteboard tool, you can use Miro and its endless post-it notes and templates for brainstorming to wireframing, and everything in between. There is a low-learning curve with Miro, so anyone in your meeting won’t find it hard to pick up at all. Cross-team, cross-discipline collaboration is better with Miro.
We use Miro for:
Great for: remote or in-person meetings, brainstorming, journey mapping, planning
Pricing: Free for 3 boards | Paid for additional features and team licences
Try Miro
The benefits of Figma go way beyond just UI design. Every discipline in our teams love Figma. Their motto is ‘Nothing great is made alone’ and Figma truly allows teams to work collaboratively with multiple people working together in a file at the same time. Creating prototypes for our designs is effortless and it is easy to share for testing or review.
Figma is lightning fast, lag-free, version-saving-free for any kind of design.
Of course, we use Figma for:
We also use Figma for:
Great for: prototypes for user testing and demos, cross-discipline feedback, presentation designs, literally almost anything design related.
Pricing: Free for individuals | Paid tiers for more features and team use
Get Figma
We love products, so it's hard not to create a mega list. Here are some other products that could help your working day.
Slack huddles, voice and video notes – If your healthtech company uses Slack, jumping on ‘a quick huddle’ or sending a Slack voice note really helps us clarify those quick questions. These help with video call fatigue and keep you in the zone.
Zeplin – Supercharge and save time in dev handoffs of product designs. A great one to save time if and integrate with many design and dev tools.
Todoist – One of the best to-do-list apps that is essentially a personal planner and task manager. Todoist lets you schedule, plan and automate tasks in an intuitive way. Switching between List view, Calendar or Kanban view depending on how you work.
Confluence – Part of the Atlassian family, we love Confluence for pretty much creating very customised docs in organised ‘Spaces’ that play very well with Jira.
Trello – A sibling of Jira, Trello is a simpler Kanban board product that is ideal for managing non-sprint work outside of Jira.
Typeform – Create user friendly forms, surveys and quizzes. Ideal for user research and card sorting remotely.
Contact us to discover more about Phlo Connect and how we can work together to create integrated digital pathways for your clinicians and patients. Contact us today
