How we got here

Looking back at how Atono came to be, what drove us, and where we are today.

When you experience how great it is to work on a team that gets things done – well and on time – you want to do it again. That often isn't the case for most people, but it really should be. At Atono, we want to make that the norm.

We started discussing our concepts ten years before founding Atono. We were frustrated with the status quo, so we built new ways of working in software development. We had teams built around the job to be done, not reporting lines. Leaders were promoted based on their ability to lead, not their functional background. We built feature flagging so developers could flip their own flags. We delivered on time every time. The culture was pretty blameless. Our people were happy, our service was resilient, and our customers received real value.

Then we got acquired – and things changed.  

As we were reminiscing about the good old days, we began to wonder: what if we built a company that learned from all the mistakes of the previous one? What if we focused on a big problem that affects every software development team? What if we re-envisioned the software development cycle and built an application to facilitate that? How would AI come into the picture?

All those thoughts lead to Atono. 

So where are we now? Let’s rewind a few months.

October 2023

We kick off Atono (then known as SameTeam). We recruited our founding members to start on December 1st and then promptly asked them to take the first month off as vacation. We wanted everyone to be well rested, have time to research areas of interest, and have a fresh start in the new year.  

January 2024

We met in Victoria, BC, to build our roadmap, design our initial culture, and start to define our first take at MVP. Each developer presented some research findings and recommendations. We made quick decisions and started the CRUD work which included banks, incorporation, initial financing, payroll, etc. We all knew Jira, so we picked ClickUp to run development. 

February 2024

We defined MVP, took a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess) at the size of the work, and picked December 2024 as a logical deadline. We don’t know the size of the epics, stories, tasks, or the velocity of our work – so yes, December sounds like a winner.

Our definition of MVP is “Atono can run our software development processes using our own product.”

It will have some rough edges, but any team should be able to plan and build software using this first version. We also changed the name from SameTeam to Atono. Atono means unstressed, exactly how our customers should feel. We expanded our team to 10, co-founder Tobias worked from Mexico and we narrowed down our VC prospect list from 250 to 75. It was a busy month.

March 2024

The product is starting to come together. Users, Teams, Roles & Permissions are beginning to take shape. Some nice touches like drag-and-drop are getting built. We are running about one week behind our pace for MVP, but our velocity is increasing. Our ceremonies (standup, planning, design reviews, retro’s) are working like a well-oiled machine. We need a website so that work has kicked off. We switched from ClickUp to Linear. We have lots to say about both apps.

Oh, and we saw Dune 2 all together – loved every second.

April 2024

I’ve been lost at sea for two years now and a volleyball is my best friend. Alright, it’s not that bad, but working remotely is hard. We met in both Victoria and Vancouver for our meetups. Our development velocity continues to improve. We’ve started building parallel product tracks (two epics at the same time) because we were crowding stories and creating bottlenecks. We’re working on our new Slack capabilities this month, it’s cool. Tobias went to Japan, visited a Capybara, and now we potentially have a mascot. 

May 2024

Well, we knew pivots would be needed. As we built, we realized our brand required refactoring. If at first, you don’t succeed, iter8! We love the new system. We also produced lots of content for our handbook, soon to be public. We selected Readme and Contentful for docs and our CMS respectfully. We are knee-deep in feature flags (flipping on and off from within the story) and the new Slack capabilities. Velocity is holding steady, hoping to improve a bit in the summer. 

June 2024

June brought good weather, finally! We also produced the first website which we're developing in public. So, don't mind the imperfections here and there. We also built a storytelling demo version of Atono to show the goodness in practice. We continued wrapping up Slack, working on feature flags, and added work on the “bugs” module. Is a bug different from a story? We think so and that bugs can be managed more efficiently. The proof is in the pudding. 

Summer, Fall, and Winter 2024

In the next six months, we are building the rest of the product and our business infrastructure. We are experimenting with a buyer-led journey – it is exactly how it sounds – the buyer buys the way they want. That may include à la carte pricing, everyday low prices, self-service, and a money-back satisfaction guarantee, to name a few ideas we’re working on. We also need to build a fully operational website, develop a presence in development communities, attend development events, run user interviews, and much more.

We have lots to do, but we’re enjoying the journey.