The product challenge of creating Tools for Thought

There's an interesting discussion going on in Craft's Slack Community. Thread.

The gist: In his podcast with Metamuse, CEO and Founder Balint talks about Craft being primarily a tool for thought.

A real tool for thought must remove all friction for users to dump thoughts easily anywhere … knowing that they will be able to find them.

People are asking: looking at the features Craft is building (tables, collaboration, etc.), is this focus still true?

Here's the challenge. For me, a huge friction of being able to dump thoughts easily knowing I'll be able to find them is not having all my stuff in Craft.

Sometimes, they are in

• Github (our main work tool)
• Google Docs (collaborative editing w other people)
• Slack (I write and think through conversation. More on this in my monthly personal update)
• Google Sheets (comparing different items across standard categories)

and more.

This is because I work with other people. Inherently, 'thinking' is a multiplayer game for me. I believe less in genius and more in scenius.

But then, in order to help me easily find anything, Craft has to help me ‘have everything in one place’. This means, the tool needs to allow me to create tables, manage my projects, collaborate with other people… in Craft.

Now they are going into dangerous territory of trying to be everything for everyone 😀

That's the challenge.

Updated with reply from the Craft team (almost verbatim, emphasis mine):

Most of us have very different ways of thinking (and definition of thinking). For some, backlinks are the most important. For some, todos. For others, tables. And some prefer spatial thinking.

It’s not a straight line. We want to make sure we have the right basic components - at a high quality. And this takes time & effort to build.

Around becoming everything - we don’t believe we have to do so. But we do have to ensure you can have all your data in one place.

We’re aiming to solve that with Craft Connect - see an example of import functionality

i.e. relating to your workflow involving Github - you’ll still use Github, but if you can easily get Github info into Craft, you can easily use it for other “processes.”

And again this shows the importance of having the right building blocks we can use to represent data from other tools within Craft.

(And note that having all your data in one place doesn’t mean having to STORE all your data in Craft - just having the ability to ACCESS from Craft)

I asked if /github feature is available??? 😅

We are working (as you can see) very intensively on Craft Connect.

Our goal is not to just have specific integrations, but a platform you can use to easily add your own ones.

So it’s still a bit out, but there will be one for sure.

I love it. And this is why I'm bullish on Craft.