Finnish Screenful provides overview of business projects

Large business projects have several stakeholders and each of them often have different understandings of the current state of a given project. This causes miscommunication which can lead to fatal consequences for the entire project. Screenful helps prevent this by visualising the true progress of the project in a way, that everyone understands.

Based in Helsinki, Finland Screenful develops business performance dashboards that help companies to track and optimise their operations. Founder of the company, Sami Linnanvuo, decided to do something about it as he experienced the miscommunication again and again in his previous occupations.

“Most often it is the developers who know the true state of the project and how long it will take to complete. But unfortunately they are not always the best at communicating this to the rest of the stakeholders. Also, there is risk of miscommunication as the message is often passed on from person to person. On each step the message gets more distorted,” he explains

Sami Linnanvuo has long experience of software development in various roles such as team leader and CTO and has thus experienced the need for clear communication on several levels.

A niche focus in a large market

Since software developers are most often the ones with the greatest understanding of the project it has been crucial for Sceenful to take point of departure exactly in their data. Software developers often use their own tools to track their progress, but not everyone looks at those tools or understands them.

“There are plenty of dashboard software for sales data, marketing data and so on, but there wasn’t really any for software development where everyone understands what is going on,” SamiLinnanvuo states.

In order to make it as intuitive to implement Screenful as possible it has also been important for them to embrace the project management tools that the companies are already using.

“We want to support the tools and processes that the companies are already using. We don’t want them to start employing new processes, we only want to provide a greater overview for everybody,” he says

Screenful is already compatible with tools like Jira, Trello & Pivotal Tracker ensuring that the dashboard can be set up for a new team in just few minutes.

Surprised to experience interest from the US

Sami Linnanvuo and his team expected to see most of their customers coming from Finland and the surrounding countries in the beginning, but reality turned out differently.

“We were quite surprised to see that the majority of our sign ups come from the US. I thought it would be really hard to enter that market. But we have had some online visibility, e.g. on ProductHunt, and there are always people looking for new technologies, especially in the US.” Sami Linnanvuo says, guessing that people from the US are simply more eager to try out new things.

With this experience the focus is right now even more on exploiting online channels to bring the product to further notice.

A solid point of departure for further development

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The team started developing Screenful 2 years ago and has deliberately chosen to postpone the launch until the product was completely done and polished. During the development pilot companies have tested it ensuring that it meets all necessary requirements.

“We waited quite a long time to launch. I believe it was a good thing, because now that we launched we got quite a lot of signups (150 during the first two weeks). And now we are in a position where the product works and everything looks pretty good. This gives us a good chance to convert trial period customers into paying customers,” Sami Linnanvuo explains

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The next steps for Screenful are to fully automate the setup process for new companies, build more integrations, make weekly email reports and build support for other interfaces as well.