When you experience how great it is to work on a team that gets things done – well and on time – you want to do it again. That often isn't the case for most people, but it really should be. At Atono, we want to make that the norm for our customers too.

We started discussing our concepts ten years before founding Atono. We were frustrated with the status quo, so we had to build new ways of managing software development to be successful. We had teams built around the job-to-be-done, not reporting lines. Leaders were promoted based on their ability to lead, not their functional background. We built feature flagging so developers could flip their own flags. We delivered on time every time. The culture was pretty blameless. Our people were happy, our service was resilient, and our customers received real value. Then we got acquired - and things changed.

As we were reminiscing about the good old days, we began to wonder: what if we built a company that learned from all the mistakes of the previous one? What if we focused on a big problem that affects every software development team? What if we re-envisioned the software development cycle and built an application to facilitate that? How would AI come into the picture?

All those thoughts lead to Atono. 

So where are we now? Let’s rewind a few months.

Hello, world! We met in Victoria, BC, to build our roadmap, design our initial culture, and begin defining our first take on an MVP. Each developer presented research findings and recommendations. We made quick decisions and started the CRUD work, which also included handling all the administrivia of a new Canadian and U.S. corporation. Since we were all familiar with Jira, we chose ClickUp to manage development. Whoops.

We picked February 2025 for MVP, a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess)! We don’t know the size of the epics, stories, tasks, or the velocity of our work - so yep sounded like a winner.  We decided on “Atono” because it means unstressed, exactly how our customers should feel. 

We have Users, Teams, Roles, and Permissions built, along with some nice touches like drag-and-drop. Our ceremonies (standups, planning, design reviews, retros) are working like a well-oiled machine. We need a website, so that work has kicked off. We switched from ClickUp to Linear (phew). We have lots to say about both apps. Oh, and we watched Dune 2 together.

I've been lost at sea for two years now, and a volleyball is my best friend. Alright, it's not that bad – but working remotely is hard. We met in both Victoria and Vancouver for our meetups. Our development velocity continues to improve. We've started building parallel product tracks (two epics at the same time) because we were crowding the code. Tobias went to Japan, visited a capybara, and now we have a mascot – the world's second least-stressed animal.

Well, we knew pivots would be necessary. As we built, we realized our brand needed refactoring. If at first you don’t succeed – iter8! We love the new design system called Tensor. We’ve produced lots of content for our handbook. We chose ReadMe and Contentful (whoops) for our docs and CMS. We're knee-deep in feature flag development and new Slack capabilities.

Good weather, finally! We produced the first website which we're developing in public. Intentional imperfection. We continued wrapping up Slack, working on feature flags, and added work on the “bugs” module. Is a bug different from a story? We think so and that bugs can be managed more efficiently. The proof is in the pudding, you’ll be the judge.

Summertime at Atono. We met up in July to assess where we were, take a breath with a half-day hike, and recommit to the second half of the year. Heather was cranking out mocks for workflows, backlogs, and roadmaps, which were built during the quarter. We gave our first public presentation at VanJS (a local meetup in Vancouver) and another at AWS Community, testing our product-market fit – good feedback. We hit a few snags, but we're still ahead on cash burn, so that’s a good thing. We're setting up marketing infrastructure for next year.

Atono is using Atono to build Atono! Nine months from the first line of code to production use. Still not ready for the world, but it works well. We wrapped up bug reporting, triage, feature flags, workflows, and team boards. We attended our first “big event” at QConSF to demo the product and gather critical feedback. We also celebrated our first year of working together – the longer story is here.

Meet Capy – our mascot! The world's second most unstressed animal, Capy the capybara is now an official part of our brand. We kicked things off with a meetup in the mountains of Vancouver Island, where we reflected on our progress, planned the road ahead, discussed our culture, and mapped out what’s left to do.

We wrapped up beta testing, launched our MVP, and now, we’re working through a treasure trove of usability feedback. 

200+ interviews, MVP, a few POCs and a series of workshops - we altered our approach. We set out to replace Jira. We found angst over the culture Jira facilitates, not just the tool. The response was “help me build great software fast” not “help me kill Jira”.  Important information for us as we review how to collapse the SDLC into an AI-accelerated workflow. That informed the rapid production of saved filters, search, AskCapy (AI), Public API, Linear import and Github integration.

Atono is ready to compete! Q3 we are rapidly responding to feedback. A POC on usage metrics at the story level suggested this feature should be built so “Mark 1” is underway. Our teams are also rapidly developing AI features to make your life better - more time building, less time documenting. We will add a Jira import feature to round out the work.

We will continue to drive meaningful AI-assisted features into the application; however we also are reserving capacity for PLG activities - we value your thoughts and want to respond quickly to your ideas - so let us have it! 

If you've read this far, cheers to you! We're optimistic about Atono’s future. There are plenty of alternative solutions in the market, but none have taken our approach. Some will agree with us, while others will prefer different tools – and we're okay with that. We believe in a few key differentiating ideas:

1. Less, is more
2. Designed with software teams, for software teams
3. Stories are the campfire teams meet around
4. Team development is iterative, not a linear assembly line of issues
5. We guarantee happiness, or we refund your money
6. We value long term relationships over short term gains

We have lots to do, but we’re enjoying the journey.