As you may have seen, rubber chickens are well known for studying radiation in space, singing Star Wars theme songs and now, helping teams have productive meetings.
Friday, October 26th. We had our retrospective meeting as we usually do at the end of every week to check how the teams did and set the goals for the next week. The meeting started nicely with everyone synced and paying attention to every point. But after 20 mins, we saw ourselves discussing pointless stuff.
-I got it! — said Mauricio.
-What?
-I have this crazy idea that will help us stay focused on our meetings: a digital rubber chicken.
Put in Atlassian words, rubber chickens are good for shutting people up — in a nice way.
Mauricio baptized our rubber chicken bringing it to life, and just like that, we created an #arthur slack channel and started discussing the design line, functionalities, use cases, etc. shaping our latest venture. We also created a classic Trello board with To-Do’s, Doing and Done columns:
Our first draft was close to a Da Vinci artwork and we weren’t sure if we should post it here, or donate the physical version to the Louvre. But after going back and forth, here it is:
Lovely, right?
By day 5, we had a (they say) better-looking version of Arthur that was then illustrated and texturized:
And an initial sketch for the interface (with typos):
On day 8 we had a functional prototype that our team started using for our meetings so we could give initial feedback for improvements. Finding the right audios for our chicken was one of the hardest and most serious tasks we’ve come across so far. Cheers to the team for the commitment.
Our first functional prototype was inspired on Myinstants and here is what it looked like:
We could see a list of the team members on the room and had a chicken(?) to squeeze. We also had our V1.0 interface ready:
On day 12 we had defined Reddit, Hacker News and Product Hunt communities as the channels we were going to use to spread the word about Arthur. We wrote down the basics to approach each channel and also created a Twitter account for our rubber friend.
We were also thrilled to find out a memorable rubber chicken named Camilla that had made it to space on a NASA mission to measure radiation.
Kuddos to the Bishop Union High School’s Earth to Sky student group.
We finished a first version of our product and we only needed to tweak final details like optimizing it for mobile, meta tags and SEO related matters, metrics-tracking, etc.
After 9 business days, we were proud to launch our newest pet project, Arthur. And while it certainly could have been developed as a #24hrstartup had we ‘hackathoned’ it, we were still very happy with the speed of the team considering this was developed as a side project while still being able to complete our weekly tasks.
To use Arthur, you can go to https://chicken.dailybot.co/ and you will be assigned to a random room.
You can create your own room e.g. https://chicken.dailybot.co/test and then share it with your team members so you all get notified when someone squeezes the chicken.
