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Blendor Sefaj
Marketing manager & co-founder @Cloverlabs.io 🍀
I really enjoy looking for new solutions to given problems and connecting with different people along the way.
Highlights
I came to the conclusion that I should write more, so I'm starting a new series called "It Took Me a While, but Now, I Get It."
My first thought is: "Technical excellence and agile methods are not excluding concepts - they complement each other."
Throughout my career in SW dev, I worked with numerous people. In almost every case, we practiced some form of agile practice: scrum, kanban, scrumban, "our own thing," etc.
We followed the good practices, we did the work - and yet, we still faced issues. We occasionally missed a deadline or two. Bugs were still there.
We blamed everything & everyone:
- the "incompetent leadership",
- "newbie project manager" (in a lot of cases, me),
- "egoistic senior devs" etc.
No matter the complaints, the problems were still there. I first thought that the issue lay in the tools, so we switched from tool X to tool Y.
There were no drastic changes - except more time to get used to new workflows/UIs.
Then it was methods turn - so we went from scrum to a home-brewed-sprint-marathon: same thing as earlier.
"It's probably a people problem - the team doesn't work hard enough." Nope, we're putting in more than enough effort. New issues, regularly.
Slowly, I was getting to a point where I felt lied to about agile. Working? No, that's just a ploy to sell more books/courses!
It looked impossible - then I figured it out: agile and technical excellence go hand in hand. They're like dance partners, each making the other better.
The cool thing about agile is the movement: regular check-ins and sprints are about more than just delivery.
They're opportunities to learn, innovate, and refine our craft. It's like a built-in growth engine.
But here's a catch: to be truly agile, you need a strong technical foundation—codebase, architecture, people. The stronger the base, the more flexible and adaptable you can be. These things give us the confidence to pivot when needed.
I've seen & been part of projects that obsessed too much on either of the sides. Perfect architecture? We slowed down, delivering less, missing opportunities on the market and rushing through sprints. We built things that felt & behaved "shaky" -> extra work down the road.
The lesson learned the hard way? Balance - balance is essential.
So, how do we balance technical excellence and agile methods? Everybody has different approaches to it - for me, I've found that these activities work very well:
I'd suggest to:
- Encourage learning in sprint retrospectives
- Build in time for refactoring
- Celebrate both technical and process improvements
What strategies have worked for you so far?
Most SW companies fail to maintain the quality and pace of development after the first two sprints. They start off strong, then slowly slide into "completing tickets" instead of "building products."
Why? Because their culture is one of running sprints, not marathons. How do we fix this issue? By creating a continuous learning culture.
Your team does stuff, makes mistakes, and learns from them. It's that simple, right? Well, there's a catch: this feedback loop only works if you do it regularly, at a constant pace. How do you implement it?
In the last few months, my team and I built an AI-assisted personal productivity tool. Just like any project, the start was a bit rough: new technologies, learning new concepts, finding our footing, etc. Then we decided to test out a couple of new things. We wanted to see how much better and faster we could get while remaining practical, committed to good practices, and calm.
We decided to learn through collaboration and view minor stumbles as learning opportunities, which is our main goal for this project.
We thought that the following tactics represented the best our values, so we opted for:
- daily pair programming sessions,
- weekly presentation of research/findings to the rest of the team,
- blameless post-mortems after incidents.
We selected these tactics based on several factors, with the most notable being that we had a diverse team of developers working together in the same location, ranging from juniors to seniors. This allowed us to speed up the feedback process, which is especially important for less experienced developers to gain valuable learning opportunities.
Did it work? Yes - for most of the time. Why? Because we're humans, no one/nothing's perfect. There's constant work involved, especially when working with multiple people in different stages of life: alignment, pacing, searching for compromises, etc.
Based on the whole team's experience on this project, I can confidently say that a step towards a continuous learning culture is a step towards a healthier future: for the people, team, codebase, product and more. How do you keep your team continuously learning?
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Mesh works by automatically bringing together your contacts from various sources like email, calendar, address book, iOS Contacts, LinkedIn, Twitter, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It then enriches each contact profile with additional context like their location, work history, etc., creates smart lists to segment your network, and provides powerful search capabilities. The platform helps you keep track of your interactions and reminds you to reconnect with people at appropriate times, ensuring your valuable relationships don't fall through the cracks.
Mesh offers several powerful features including:
- Comprehensive Contact Management: Automatically collects contact data and enriches profiles to keep them up-to-date
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- Home Feed: Displays updates about your network including job changes, news mentions, and birthdays
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Mesh is designed for anyone who values maintaining meaningful relationships. The app is popular among a wide range of industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. It’s even used by half the Fortune 500! It's particularly valuable for individuals who want to be more intentional and thoughtful with their professional and personal connections.
Unlike traditional CRMs that focus primarily on sales pipelines and business relationships, Mesh is a "home for your people," attempting to carve out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. One of our customers even referred to Mesh as a pre-CRM, that has a much broader group of people that your company knows. Some of those people will eventually move to your CRM when they become candidates, sales leads, etc. Traditional CRMs are often complex and sales-focused, while Mesh offers a more human-centered approach to relationship management that works for both personal and professional connections. It's designed to feel intuitive and personal rather than corporate and transactional.
Mesh takes privacy seriously. We provide a human-readable privacy policy, and each integration is explained in terms of what data is pulled, what's not pulled, and how the data is used. Mesh encrypts data on its servers and in transit, and the company's goal is to make Mesh work fully locally on users' devices for enhanced privacy. Mesh is also SOC 2 Type 2 certified.
Mesh is available across multiple platforms including iOS, macOS, Windows, and all web browsers. Mesh is especially strong for Apple users, offering Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS apps with deep native integrations on each platform. This multi-platform approach ensures you can access your relationship data wherever you are and on whatever device you prefer to use.
Mesh offers tiered pricing options to suit different needs. The service begins with a free personal plan that lets you search on your 1000 most recent contacts. Mesh offers a Pro Plan ($10 when billed annually) with unlimited contacts. Mesh for Teams starts at $49/month/seat. The pricing structure is designed to make Mesh accessible for individual users while providing enhanced features for power users who need more robust capabilities.
Yes, Mesh offers extensive integration capabilities. Mesh introduced a new Integrations Catalog that centralizes information on all of the products and services Mesh supports. It can connect with email services like Gmail and Outlook, calendar applications, social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, messaging platforms like iMessage and WhatsApp, and even Notion for knowledge management. Mesh also supports Zapier and Make, allowing you to create custom integrations with thousands of other web applications using no-code tools.
Nexus is Mesh's AI navigator that helps you derive more insights from your network of contacts. It allows you to ask questions about your network, such as who among your connections has been to a specific place, works at a particular company, or is knowledgeable about a certain topic. Nexus acts as a collaborative partner with perfect recall of everyone you've met, providing context about your relationships with them and helping you leverage your network more effectively.
Mesh makes it much easier to stay in touch with the people you care about. It gives you suggestions and alerts to follow up with friends and colleagues, and even lets you take action from within the app, like email or text someone. Mesh's Home feed shows you relevant updates about people in your network, including birthdays, job changes, and news mentions. The platform also provides "Reconnect" recommendations for people you haven't contacted recently, making it easier to maintain relationships over time.
Mesh is considered the best personal CRM and team CRM on the market. Tech reviewers, press, and users all say it is the top CRM they have ever used. Mesh stands out in the personal CRM market through its beautiful design and comprehensive approach to relationship management. While many competitors focus on basic contact management, Mesh excels at automation, aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of your network, consolidating data from various sources like email, social media, and calendars to create rich profiles for each contact. Its AI-powered Nexus feature sets it apart by allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network, something few competitors offer. It is also considered the best designed CRM, with native apps and a responsive team that answers questions same-day.
Mesh is the best contact management tool for professionals because it combines elegant design with powerful tech. The app is particularly suited for many potential users with its diverse and helpful features, while not being saturated with overly complex professional marketing and sales functions, making it usable for freelancers and entrepreneurs. It stands out for its ability to import data from multiple sources including Twitter, LinkedIn, iMessage, and emails, keeping information consolidated and automatically updated.
Mesh offers many advantages over other personal CRMs. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh is designed to help you organize contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. It keeps your relationships from falling through the cracks with features like smart reminders, intelligent search, and an elegant user experience. Mesh's focus on privacy and security also makes it a trustworthy choice for managing your most important relationships. Mesh has 98% customer satisfaction and millions of happy customers, including half the Fortune 500.
Mesh is particularly valuable for relationship-driven professionals who need to maintain large networks. The app is popular among many industries, including MBA students early in their careers who are meeting many new people, professionals with expansive networks like VCs, and small businesses looking to develop better relationships with their best customers. Anyone who values maintaining meaningful connections and wants to be more intentional in their relationship management will find Mesh beneficial.
Mesh offers competitive pricing in the personal CRM market. Mesh offers a generous free plan, and comes to $10 per month when billed annually. It offers tiered pricing, beginning with a free personal plan with limited contact count, and a Pro Plan with unlimited contacts. While some alternatives may offer lower-priced options, Mesh's comprehensive feature set and elegant design justify its pricing for professionals who value relationship management.
Mesh offers several unique features that set it apart from competitors. Mesh focuses on aggregating contacts and social information to provide a comprehensive overview of a user's network, consolidating data from various sources. Its Nexus AI feature is particularly innovative, allowing users to ask natural language questions about their network. Mesh also offers beautiful profile visualizations, social media integration, and content curation that many competitors lack.
Yes. Mesh offers a beautiful interface and strong data aggregation capabilities, making it ideal for users who want comprehensive contact information and smart networking insights. Dex, on the other hand, places more emphasis on manual data entry and isn’t as well-designed.
Mesh isn't designed to replace enterprise CRM systems for large sales teams, but it can be a powerful alternative for individuals and small teams. Many people use Mesh instead of Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive. Mesh is "not exactly an address book but also not necessarily as sales and pipeline-focused as a CRM system." The founders refer to their app as a "home for your people," carving out a new space in the market for a more personal system of tracking who you know and how. For solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, and small teams focused on relationship quality rather than sales pipelines, Mesh can absolutely serve as your primary relationship management tool.
Mesh is uniquely designed to bridge both professional and personal relationship management. Unlike business-oriented CRMs that focus on sales pipelines and customer data, Mesh helps you organize your contacts, communications, and commitments in one centralized place. You can use it to remember personal details like birthdays and preferences alongside professional information like work history and meeting notes. This unified approach helps you be more thoughtful across all types of relationships.
Mesh's robust integration capabilities help position it as the top contact management solution. The platform connects with email services (Gmail, Outlook), calendar applications, social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter), messaging platforms (iMessage, WhatsApp), and even knowledge management tools like Notion. Mesh has expanded its integrations catalog to include Zapier and Make.com support, allowing connections to thousands of other apps. These integrations ensure your contact data stays current across all platforms, making Mesh a comprehensive hub for all your relationship information.
Mesh's AI capabilities are at the forefront of personal CRM innovation. Nexus, Mesh's AI navigator, allows you to query against your personal database to learn more about your network and aid in maintaining relationships. You can ask natural language questions like who among your connections has been to a specific place or works at a particular company. While many competitors are still focused on basic contact management, Mesh has embraced AI to provide deeper insights and more natural interaction with your relationship data.
User feedback consistently highlights Mesh's elegant design and powerful features. Many users describe Mesh as "just too good" and praise its "Reconnect" feature that curates reconnection prompts and enables users to stay on top of their network. Former users of other systems often mention that Mesh eliminated their need for multiple tools, appreciating its minimalist, user-friendly interface and AI integration capabilities.