Collaboration Tools

📃 Given the initial complexity of JIRA, you will have a specialized JIRA training during your onboarding at Gradient.

JIRA is our project and product management tool. Although it is commonly used by software companies, we’ve found it to be pretty helpful at helping us keep track of, specify, and review work product in a highly systematized way. That said, because it is purpose built for software development, some features are irrelevant to our needs and may appear a tad clunky at first use. Follow these steps to setup JIRA using the Gradient JIRA board layout.

📃 Given the integral role good code hygiene play at Gradient, members of the Product Team will have a specialized Github training during your onboarding at Gradient.

Github is our coding version control platform. We’ve invested heavily in establishing a collaborative coding protocol. We use one master repository called g6tr that is the single source of coding truth.

We’ve taken considerable effort to develop an effective collaborative coding culture. The pages in the Coding folder enumerate Gradient’s approach to coding, including specific coding principles and coding habits that help us avoid mistakes and conduct analyses that other team members can easily contribute to.

We use Google Drive to organize documents that other team members and external partners may need to access. See here for guidance on how to use and organize folders. All project-related materials must be stored on a Shared Drive.

If you are ever not sure where something should be saved, reach out to a team member or Operations.

In nearly all cases when creating a new document in Google Drive, use one of the Gradient-branded templates depending on the objectives of the document. We have standard templates for:

• Memos
• Proposals
• Surveys
• Spreadsheets
• Trendlines
• Articles
• Segmentation Synthesis
• And more

We host all of our datasets on AWS and call data from R to avoid having to store data on local machines. Refer to this document for information on how to use AWS.

A repository that hosts minimal images of our virtual machines that can be used on AWS or during the tests on GitHub.

We use HubSpot to host our website.

We’ve taken most of our survey programming in-house using Forsta. Doing so eliminates the dependency of having to rely on third-party programming vendors and provides the opportunity to program surveys exactly as we need them for analysis.

Depending on your role, you may have your own Forsta account under the Gradient license. Newly created surveys should automatically be shared with the Gradient workspace for others to access. Note that depending on a User’s project permissions, some features may be disabled.

Crunch.io is a purpose built software to interrogate and visualize survey data. It is most useful to review survey data and can support limited analytical needs (e.g. tests of significance). The platform can also create intuitive dashboards for key performance metrics. Another major benefit of Crunch is that it can export tab books. Some of our clients use Crunch to analyze survey data themselves.

There are some tasks for which you just don’t have the right specialization, or it’s so tedious that your time could be better spent elsewhere. For this reason, all Gradient employees are authorized to spend up to $500 per month on hiring a “gig worker” to help where needed. This could be hiring someone to help you program a Qualtrics survey or to do desktop research on a topic that you are not familiar with, but need to get smart on to design a survey. Upwork has many high-quality experts, but it’s by no means the only source of extra help.

Prior to hiring a contractor, please connect with your manager to align on the scope of the ask, the driving benefits of outsourcing the work, and estimated budget.