How to scale project planning

gm, legends. It’s Sunday funday.

In this edition: why the project planning that got you here won’t get you there, tools for scrubbing your Uncle Larry from the selfie, getting AI to save your marriage, and the most popular products that launched this week. We’ve got a lot to cover, so grab a cuppa and sip slowly.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

When our 3-person team expanded to 10, we realized we had to change our process…or risk missing deadlines. 

Akash Anand, Co-founder & CEO of Clueso

Too many times as a company, we’ve found ourselves making bold promises—both to customers and to ourselves internally—and then scrambling to meet them.

In this post, I wanted to share some of the strategies that have worked for us to reliably predict deadlines and execute projects to meet them. I’d also really love to hear what’s worked for the rest of you.

I’ve known my co-founder, Prajwal, for over five years now. Over this time, we’ve been on a non-stop journey of hacking together different products and chasing different customer bases.

Somewhere along the way, we developed a kind of telepathic communication. We could exchange a single sentence with each other, and that was often enough to get an entire feature built.

That one sentence would be enough for me to mock something up quickly in Figma—or skip design entirely and directly build the entire frontend on React—while Prajwal would have the backend logic and entire infrastructure ready by the time I was done. There would be no tickets, meetings, or handoffs. Just building and shipping.

But over the last eight months, as we’ve found some early signs of PMF with Clueso, we've expanded our engineering and design teams. And with that growth, we’ve had to radically rethink how we work.

It happened again. You took the perfect snapshot, only to discover your Uncle Larry photobombed you. While eating a hot dog. And a tank top that says, “It’s 5 o’clock somewhere.” No matter. 

Our top launch from July 2020 was a background-removal tool that could help you remove Uncle Larry in under 5 seconds and replace him with something else (preferably not Aunt Marge). Over two years before the LLM revolution, this tool was already using AI. And in May of this year, it released an AI Erase feature, so you can scrub your photo of Uncle L. and keep the background.

Can you name the product?

Our Gabe Perez is a forgetful dude. And he finds calendar reminders and alarms just more distractions in a distracted life. What’s an ADHD brain to do? Strap on Fieldy, an AI wearable that uses voice capture to figure out your tasks, then syncs with Google Calendar and Apple Watch to tell you what to do.

Perez documents his experience and explains that this AI work tool is even proving a blessing at home: “I've been saved from one or two arguments about forgetting to do something (like pick up eggs and pepper on my way back from working). So for that Fieldy gets two thumbs up from me.”