Guides
Current for Startups
Current helps facilitate an open and collaborative team culture by giving you a platform to share work in progress early and often. For growing startups, alignment and speed are crucial. So naturally, having a platform to see the work happening becomes an important tool. Here’s our Guide on how to best use Current at your startup.
Jonathan Simcoe
“Current enables our entire team to align, share work, and support each other using the tools we use every day. Weekly Drops help build momentum and Streams enable anyone to see what is happening elsewhere as our team and product scales.”
“Current enables our entire team to align, share work, and support each other using the tools we use every day. Weekly Drops help build momentum and Streams enable anyone to see what is happening elsewhere as our team and product scales.”
Agree as a team how you want organize your posts in Current
“Streams” are the primary way for you and your team to organize posts within Current. You can think of Streams like tags, but with a few added extras. Properties include - descriptions, the ability to bookmark links, membership and privacy options.
For Startups, we recommend mapping Streams to different projects or initiatives happening across your company. For example, this quarter you might have several large initiatives you want to ship: a native iOS app, a dashboard redesign, and improved product notification emails.
Your streams could be: # iOS app, # Dashboard Redesign, and # Product Emails
An alternative approach that suits larger teams is to map the Streams to internal team names. Using the same example above, your Streams might be something like: # Mobile, # Core, and # Growth
Remember that posts can live in multiple Streams, so you could even do a combination of both approaches. The important thing is to agree on an approach with your team and stick to it!
If things start to feel disorganized, Current has features that allow you to merge, rename, or archive streams to help tidy things up quickly. Watch video →
Establish your team rituals around sharing
We’ve added two key features to help establish good habits around sharing and reviewing work:
Weekly Slack Reminders
As an admin or owner in a workspace, you can set up Slack reminders to ping one or more channels on whatever day you think makes most sense for your team. We recommend sharing an encouraging message to remind people why it’s important to share what they’ve accomplished for the week. One thing to remember is that this should be before the “Weekly Drop” gets shared out with the team (see next section).
The Weekly Drop
The “Weekly Drop” is Current’s AI-powered newsletter. This summarizes your team’s week and automatically shares it with all members of your workspace. We like to think of it as your replacement for creating lengthy internal newsletters.
You can select which day your Weekly Drop gets shared. We recommend it comes after the Weekly Slack Reminders are sent. We've found Friday afternoon, or Monday morning is the best time to ensure everyone’s work gets included.
An additional feature of Weekly Drops is the ability to share a public link. This lets you share the Drop with Execs or VPs within the company that want to be kept in the loop but without an account. If privacy is a concern we recommend inviting them to the workspace and disabling most notifications.
Make sure the right people see your Posts
Broadcast your posts to Slack
Whether you’re using the web app, or the Figma Plugin, to create posts on Current, you can select one or more Slack channels in which to broadcast your posts in. This is a quick easy way to loop in multiple stakeholders. For example, you might want to include the design team, but also the Product Managers and Engineers that make up the squad working on this initiative.
Make streams private to hide secret projects
For a number of reasons, privacy projects is a reality for many companies. If your team has a project which you only want specific people to see, you can create a private Stream. Only people invited to the Stream will be able to see it or post work to it within Current. Everyone else who doesn’t have access won’t be able to find the Stream or see any work that was posted to it. It will also be excluded for from the weekly drop for those users. When the project is no longer private, you can make the Stream public with a single click.
Use Drops to recap your work over a period of time
Quarterly or bi-yearly reviews are a a common way teams reflect on how things are going and what can be improved. Current allows you to filter posts in your workspace by a specific time period, Streams, or teammates. This is great for creating summaries of work during review cycles or at the end of a project. You can even use AI to generate a summary of all the work, which should save you some time writing your self review 😅.
Invite all roles in your company to Current
Current is primarily used by Design teams. But, with recent integrations like Github and Notion, we’re seeing Engineers and Product / Project Managers posting to Current. A bigger benefit for companies using Current is getting roles signed up that may not be accustomed to sharing. Sales, and Support are two great examples. It takes your customer interactions from: “that’s a great idea, I’ll take it back to the team”, to “We’re actually exploring that idea right now!, I’ll see if I can share some prototypes with you for early feedback”.
We hope you found this guide useful. If have any other questions about how Current works or how to best use it in your company feel free to hit us up at hello@current.so, or book some time to chat with us in person.
Agree as a team how you want organize your posts in Current
“Streams” are the primary way for you and your team to organize posts within Current. You can think of Streams like tags, but with a few added extras. Properties include - descriptions, the ability to bookmark links, membership and privacy options.
For Startups, we recommend mapping Streams to different projects or initiatives happening across your company. For example, this quarter you might have several large initiatives you want to ship: a native iOS app, a dashboard redesign, and improved product notification emails.
Your streams could be: # iOS app, # Dashboard Redesign, and # Product Emails
An alternative approach that suits larger teams is to map the Streams to internal team names. Using the same example above, your Streams might be something like: # Mobile, # Core, and # Growth
Remember that posts can live in multiple Streams, so you could even do a combination of both approaches. The important thing is to agree on an approach with your team and stick to it!
If things start to feel disorganized, Current has features that allow you to merge, rename, or archive streams to help tidy things up quickly. Watch video →
Establish your team rituals around sharing
We’ve added two key features to help establish good habits around sharing and reviewing work:
Weekly Slack Reminders
As an admin or owner in a workspace, you can set up Slack reminders to ping one or more channels on whatever day you think makes most sense for your team. We recommend sharing an encouraging message to remind people why it’s important to share what they’ve accomplished for the week. One thing to remember is that this should be before the “Weekly Drop” gets shared out with the team (see next section).
The Weekly Drop
The “Weekly Drop” is Current’s AI-powered newsletter. This summarizes your team’s week and automatically shares it with all members of your workspace. We like to think of it as your replacement for creating lengthy internal newsletters.
You can select which day your Weekly Drop gets shared. We recommend it comes after the Weekly Slack Reminders are sent. We've found Friday afternoon, or Monday morning is the best time to ensure everyone’s work gets included.
An additional feature of Weekly Drops is the ability to share a public link. This lets you share the Drop with Execs or VPs within the company that want to be kept in the loop but without an account. If privacy is a concern we recommend inviting them to the workspace and disabling most notifications.
Make sure the right people see your Posts
Broadcast your posts to Slack
Whether you’re using the web app, or the Figma Plugin, to create posts on Current, you can select one or more Slack channels in which to broadcast your posts in. This is a quick easy way to loop in multiple stakeholders. For example, you might want to include the design team, but also the Product Managers and Engineers that make up the squad working on this initiative.
Make streams private to hide secret projects
For a number of reasons, privacy projects is a reality for many companies. If your team has a project which you only want specific people to see, you can create a private Stream. Only people invited to the Stream will be able to see it or post work to it within Current. Everyone else who doesn’t have access won’t be able to find the Stream or see any work that was posted to it. It will also be excluded for from the weekly drop for those users. When the project is no longer private, you can make the Stream public with a single click.
Use Drops to recap your work over a period of time
Quarterly or bi-yearly reviews are a a common way teams reflect on how things are going and what can be improved. Current allows you to filter posts in your workspace by a specific time period, Streams, or teammates. This is great for creating summaries of work during review cycles or at the end of a project. You can even use AI to generate a summary of all the work, which should save you some time writing your self review 😅.
Invite all roles in your company to Current
Current is primarily used by Design teams. But, with recent integrations like Github and Notion, we’re seeing Engineers and Product / Project Managers posting to Current. A bigger benefit for companies using Current is getting roles signed up that may not be accustomed to sharing. Sales, and Support are two great examples. It takes your customer interactions from: “that’s a great idea, I’ll take it back to the team”, to “We’re actually exploring that idea right now!, I’ll see if I can share some prototypes with you for early feedback”.
We hope you found this guide useful. If have any other questions about how Current works or how to best use it in your company feel free to hit us up at hello@current.so, or book some time to chat with us in person.