A Day in the Life Without HYVE

By Aaron Lapierre, Project Manager at DoubleDutch

Most of us have had the experience of not realizing how much we need, love or treasure something until it’s gone. You might under appreciate its value or take advantage of it. But then one day its gone, and you’re left feeling empty, helpless and lost.

For me it was my iPhone. More specifically it was HYVE.

It was an ordinary Monday evening; I left the office and went over to the gym to sweat out some of the day. An hour later and I’m staring at my locker, lock left undone inside, iPhone and cash missing. Luckily the robber was kind enough to leave me my cards and in a moment of panic I ran straight to the Apple store and bought a new one. Problem solved. Or so I had thought.

HYVE was gone. We use HYVE internally as a way to track productivity. At a glance, I’m able to see what clients Biz Dev have talked to recently or which project our Engineers are working on. By checking-in to different Projects and Clients, we’re able to collect structured data on where we spend our time

Working in such a fast-paced environment, I felt left in the dust by my coworkers. Even though I sit within an arm’s reach of most of them, I had no idea what was going on in the office. It was crippling.

Working on time sensitive projects was proving to be incredibly difficult. I couldn’t see that Nick had finished developing a client feature request for me. It sat there for hours until I remembered to ask. Why didn’t he tell me you might ask? He did, in HYVE. We’ve synced our development tools to HYVE so that when they finish a project it checks-in for them. No walking up to my desk, no email, no meeting, it’s pushed to our feed and viewable to all.

By the early afternoon I came to another realization. Not only did I not know what was going on, but my coworkers didn’t know what I was working on. I had met with one of our clients earlier in the day to discuss some questions emailed to Pankaj and myself. Not being in HYVE, I didn’t post that I met with this client and answered their questions. An hour later, I see an email from Pankaj answering all the same questions. There was no harm done, but we were duplicating effort and wasting time. Communication goes two ways and I wasn’t holding up my end of the deal.

Twenty-four hours was all it took for me to beg our iPhone developer to give me access back. I couldn’t have been happier. I spent the first 10 minutes going through all of the day’s activity to get caught up. That’s when it really clicked. HYVE isn’t just a product I use; it’s a tool that I rely on to help my team and I perform at our best.

Whether you’re a bootstrapped start-up or a large enterprise corporation, I encourage you to start using HYVE. And then stop, just for a day. You’ll quickly see the impact it made and you’ll never want to let it go.

Locker-room thief, the one thing I have to say is thank you for allowing me to experience that loss. I now look at HYVE in a whole new light. Oh, and please return my iPhone.