The podcast by project manager for project managers. We take a look at company culture, transforming remote work to and improving workplace productivity and efficiency.  How to Work Better Together. Hear about a new software company, Hive, which claims to have the first-ever democratically built project management platform.

Table of Contents

03:05 … Hive History04:07 … Core Hive Philosophy05:38 … Democratically Built Features07:17 … Launching Hive09:22 … Challenges Today for Project Managers11:01 … Addressing Recurring Meetings15:17 … Applying Hive17:21 … Team Size Suited to Hive19:56 … Hive Innovation21:57 … Company Culture24:12 … Transforming a Team to Remote Work29:18 … New Hive Features30:01 … Who Influenced John32:47 … Get in Touch with John33:17 … Closing

JOHN FURNEAUX: A brilliantly run meeting is a work of art and very, very impressive to those around you.  And I would encourage all of us to put 100% into our soft skills and how we manage the projects and the people around us.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers.  I’m Wendy Grounds, and joining me in the studio is Bill Yates.  I just want to let you know that you can still claim your free PDUs by listening to this podcast.  We have instructions on our website where it shows you exactly how you can claim your PDUs at PMI.  We still get listeners who struggle with that, and so we just thought we’d make sure we mentioned it.  So we are very excited that it is now Happy Birthday to Manage This, and we’ve been broadcasting for six years.

BILL YATES:  That’s amazing, isn’t it?  Every month we have two podcasts.  We’ve been doing that for six years now.  Incredible authors, speakers, tools, and then people in the trenches doing projects, leading projects in diverse environments.  And it’s been a pleasure to bring this information to the community and just share it and let people pick up on new perspectives and get more advice on just how to be a more effective project manager.

WENDY GROUNDS:  And we’re very grateful to our guests...

BILL YATES:  Yes.

WENDY GROUNDS:  ...who’ve made it possible.  We really appreciate all that they have brought to our podcast.

BILL YATES:  Mm-hmm.  There’s no compensation.  We don’t pay them.  We just thank them and deeply appreciate the preparation and then their time in recording with us.

WENDY GROUNDS:  And thank you to our listeners.  We value you, and we appreciate your support.

BILL YATES:  That’s right.  Keep those ideas coming because that’s what spurs us on.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Our guest today is John Furneaux.  John is the CEO and cofounder of Hive, which is the world’s first democratically built project management platform, used by many teams at places such as Comcast, Toyota, Starbucks, and many more.  A couple of times in the past we’ve brought you tools that are very useful or platforms that project managers can use.  And we just need to let you know we’re not getting any pay for this.  We’re not getting a free use of Hive.  It’s really...

BILL YATES:  Right.

WENDY GROUNDS:  ...the product comes across our eyes, and we think, gosh, this would be something interesting to tell you about.  And that’s why we’re here.

BILL YATES:  Exactly.  As our listeners reach out to us with tools that are helpful or things that they want us to explore, just keep sending us those ideas because that’s where this one came from.  One of the things that appealed to me with Hive, too, is their mantra is “The first project management platform built for users, by users.”  And it kind of reminds me of our mantra of Manage This, “The podcast for project managers by project managers.”  So we’re going to talk about tactical aspects of this tool and how it can be used.  Then we’re going to back up and talk broadly about company culture, not just how Hive can influence that, but how John’s been influenced by different company cultures, and some advice that he can share with us.

WENDY GROUNDS:  Hi, John.  Welcome to Manage This.  Thank you for joining us.

JOHN FURNEAUX:  Thank you.  Thanks for having me.

Hive History

WENDY GROUNDS:  Can you give us some of the history of your company Hive, when it started, and how you started it?

JOHN FURNEAUX:  Yeah, for sure.  So I myself was a frustrated project manager on some huge programs.  As you can hear I’m originally from the U.K.  Did some stuff with education, really exciting stuff, getting the sort of information network hooked up to all the schools in the U.K.  Felt frustrated, but realized I loved teamwork and helping people accomplish sort of their goals together, and went and joined a company that did just that, prior to Hive, but felt that there was even better solutions available.  And so we started Hive about five years ago now, 2016.  Cofounded it with Eric Typaldos, who is my sort of tech counterpart.  And yet here we are five years later.  It’s been a crazy journey.

BILL YATES:  So Eric, his specialty is more on the tech side. 

JOHN FURNEAUX:  Correct.

BILL YATES:  What is your specialty, or what did you bring to the table as you guys started Hive?

JOHN FURNEAUX:  Good question.  I hope that I bring to the table deep, deep, deep frontline experience of what real projects look like on a real day-to-day basis.

Core Hive Philosophy

BILL YATES:  So I love it that you describe yourself as a frustrated project manager, too.  Because to me it’s like many times in life, if I’m trying to recreate something, even if it’s trying to figure out some home repair issue, it’s usually from a point of frustration; right?  And then I get really motivated and passionate about it.

So as we dive into Hive, it’s going to be interesting to hear some of the passion points that you had, things that you found lacking in the marketplace, or with some of the tools that you had used.  But let’s back up.  Kind of big picture, what’s the core philosophy with Hive?

JOHN FURNEAUX:  Core philosophy behind Hive is two things that are unusual about Hive.  The first one is that Hive is the first-ever democratically built project management platform.  And that’s a very, very simple concept.  Everybody in the Hive community votes together on what they want to accomplish in Hive next from a product perspective.  And that keeps us uniquely focused on the practical day-to-day needs of our users, rather than a kind of ivory tower of product ideas that may or may not be useful to you when you’re coming to work on a Tuesday morning.

And that really is the driving thing that we care about is, is Hive going to be practically useful to you when you come into work versus us foisting a philosophy of project management onto you that may not work in practice in the complex and stressful environment of real life projects.

Democratically Built Features

BILL YATES:  Democratically built, you vote on the product features.  How does that play out?  So how do you engage your user community to listen to the right voices?  Like I’m thinking of a stakeholder meeting or meetings I’ve had with project teams, and sometimes I’ll listen to the loudest voice in the room and then realize later, oh, wait a minute, that’s not the right person.  They’re just extremely passionate about something, but it’s not important to anybody else.  How do you guys go about vetting that?

JOHN FURNEAUX:  Exactly right.  So that’s the beauty of democracy, huh?  One user, one vote.  So they can press that vote button as loudly as they like.  They’ve only got one vote.

BILL YATES:  One time.

JOHN FURNEAUX:  And the other person in the room who perhaps is more timid or whose voice is less frequently heard, they’ve got just as much power as the first person.  And if you think about it from a product management standpoint, it also works beautifully for us to be thoughtful about our larger customers and our smaller customers because we don’t think of our users in terms of being from a large company or a small company, nor do we need to because one user, one vote, by definition, the organizations who have lots and lots of users on Hive do have a larger voice collectively.  But ultimately it’s still one user, one vote; right?

So each individual person on Hive has exactly the same shot of getting their feature built as anybody else.  And to give you a feel for how meaningful this is, two in three Hive users get a feature that they’ve requested built within the first year of them joining Hive.  So it’s really, really meaningful.  You’ve got two-thirds chance of getting something you’ve asked for built.

Launching Hive

BILL YATES:  That’s great.  Okay.  I’m going to confess to you, I am a fan of a podcast called “How I Built This.”  It’s an NPR podcast.

JOHN FURNEAUX:  Yeah.

BILL YATES:  So as I’m looking at a cofounder of a company, 2016, kind of in the back of my head the entrepreneur side of me is thinking, okay, you guys, you have an idea, you have a problem in the marketplace that you think you have a solution for, and you start to build it.  How long did you guys go pre-revenue? So you and Eric take off, you’re trying to build this thing, and you can tell me if you were still working full-time or, you know, doing this while delivering pizza or whatever.  So you’re getting all this feedback from the community and building and building.  And in 2016, when did you guys have something you could launch?

JOHN FURNEAUX:  Bill, it was terrifying, as Eric will testify.  I bought a one-way ticket to New York, a town I had never lived in.  I had very little money in my pocket because I had left my previous job and had no savings.  And Eric and I moved to New York together within a day of each other and arrived to start building.  That was 2016.  And to answer your question about revenue, it was approximately a year before we invited anybody take a paid subscription.

BILL YATES:  Right.  That’s impressive.