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Using an agile approach to make taxes suck a little bit less.

Thanks to everyone who attended the Product Council on Tuesday, September 29th @ Pivotal Labs. Our next Product Council event will take place on Tuesday, December 15th @ Pivotal Labs in NYC. We've taken the year to build a great movement, it's now time to celebrate our collective success.  Join us for our annual holiday party featuring a product talk by Justin Gallagher, Head of Product @ Trello. Food will be served and frothy beverages (thanks to Other Half Brewing) available at your beckon call. You can learn more about the event and grab your ticket here.

Shout out to Vimeo’s Director of Audience Product, Christophe Gillet (LinkedIn­) for diving into Vimeo’s new discovery engine. Vimeo was founded in 2004 by a group of filmmakers who wanted to share their creative work and personal moments from their lives. Today, Vimeo continues to be the home for high-quality videos and the people who love them. You can view Christophe’s entire Vimeo presentation here.

We also want to thank Katch Co-Founders, Tarikh Korula (LinkedIn­­) and John Merlino (LinkedIn) for putting themselves on the product hot seat this month. Katch helps users record and catalog their Periscopes / Meerkats with one tweet.

Lastly, thanks to our Product Council panel this month. Each council member provided a short note summarizing their product feedback for Katch:

Sara Poorsattar, Director of Video Products at The New York Times (LinkedIn­) “Katch.me is an interesting concept with huge growth opportunity within video, mobile, and social. If they can find their way out of being middleware, and identify their user base to build a platform around, I think they will be very successful.”

Christophe Gillet, Director of Audience Product at Vimeo (LinkedIn­) “I was impressed with the Katch team, and their ability to move fast and pivot. They face an uphill battle by being built on top of another platform, and they need to do as much as possible to be in control of their own destiny by not be beholden to another startup's roadmap.” Max Stossel, Creator & Storyteller at Words That Move (LinkedIn­) “Katch is an interesting place between having a promising initial community, and being completely dependent on third party services. I don't believe that users will use Katch over Meerkat/Periscope etc to capture video, so important to figure out how you can offer unique value in a way that's more ownable (in addition to being the hub for live-video streams).”

Want to join the Product Council? Click here for more info!

Thanks to everyone who attended the Product Council on Monday, August 31st @ Pivotal Labs. Our next Product Council event will take place on Tuesday, September 29th @ Pivotal Labs in NYC. This month we are featuring two products focused on video publishing: Vimeo and Katch.me. You can learn more about both products and grab a ticket to the event by clicking here.

Click here to view all the photos from this event.

Thanks to Justworks Head of Product, Camilla Velasquez (LinkedIn­) for showcasing their product team's approach to developing permissions within the Justworks platform. Justworks platform automates HR, payments, benefits, and government paperwork for SMBs. As many of you know, a product which provides service to a variety of user types often requires permissions to help manage user access and control. To quote Camilla,“Permissions are hard. And stressful. They can get over-complicated quickly.” Want to see how the Justworks team tackled this problem? View Camilla's presentation on Permissions here >

We also want to thank Maven Clinic Co-Founder, Susie Grange (LinkedIn­­) for putting herself on the product hot seat this month. Maven Clinic is first digital clinic for women with the aim to make women's health a priority. Their app enables users to easily book video appointments with a network of women's health practitioners.

Lastly, thanks to our Product Council panel this month. Each council member provided a short note summarizing their product feedback for Maven Clinic:

Jen Ator, Fitness Director at Women's Health Magazine (LinkedIn­) “Maven Clinic is an intriguing concept with a huge potential customer base. I see an exciting opportunity for them to carve a niche in the market by narrowing their focus slightly to be more about proactive healthcare for women, especially in fields like nutrition, physical therapy, and mental health.”

Jung Sin, Product Design and UX Consultant (LinkedIn­) “Maven Clinic should separate the product in two ways: preventative health and immediate health. Preventative health service should focus on "enhancing” the dr.-to-patient knowledge sharing relationship while the immediate health service should “expedite" the ability for the doctors to diagnose any medical concerns.” Camilla Velasquez, Head of Product at Justworks (LinkedIn­) “Conceptually I like the idea and will get value out of the service myself. I'd suggest clearly aligning or linking with a customer's existing doctors (by allowing users to send or receive information in either direction should they opt in). This could create a robust multichannel experience and foster trust (not to mention potential distribution)”

We’ve just added Pivotal Tracker to our alpha version of Hojoki. You can now shoot some hoops with the app that is also our first choice for development tasks. You’ll get notified in Hojoki whenever you or a collaborator alter anything in Pivotal Tracker. Pivotal Tracker fits nicely into our existing tool-set, as it supports apps like Twitter, Github (coming soon to Hojoki), Lighthouse (coming soon to Hojoki) and Zendesk (coming soon to Hojoki).

Hojoki looks for new activities in your Pivotal Tracker account. It imports activities when a task is created, edited (e.g. change wording, add tags), started, finished and deleted. Hojoki also imports associated people and provides you with powerful faceted filtering for who created a task, who requested it and who is responsible for doing it. This way you could easily find out which of the tasks you are responsible for have been requested by Tom.

So, that’s one more app added to the already large selection. We aim to maintain this pace and continue to roll out all your favourite apps. Remember, we base future additions to Hojoki on your suggestions. Visit our feature request forum and tell us what you’d love to see in Hojoki.

Here’s a guide on how to get started with Pivotal Tracker in Hojoki. 

By Adam Bannister

Previous blogs of a similar nature:

Hojoki Plays Nicely With Beanstalk