Dwarves
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Naru: A browser focus web extension for US market

In brief

Highlight

The Context

Naru’s goal is to supercharge user workflows on web browsers.

An enhanced version of to-do list - but acts as a widget within user’s browser.

Keeping the open state for the task board across tabs is the highest priority. Naru must boost the productivity.

Engagement Model

Making a web extension behaves like an application (says Trello) is nontrivial. A web extension work by attach and execute) its own <script> tag to the current web page. After that, it boot up with a UI for user interaction.

Collaboration

Matt resides in the U.S. It’s 11 hours away from us. He had to stay up at 9pm and we woke up at 8am for our daily catchup. We quickly realize such a schedule won’t work in the long run.

After 2 sprints, we proposed “Async Communication”. Daily calls became daily check-in writeup. Meeting turns to 15’ quick calls: Sprint planning, Mid-sprint adjustment and Sprint retrospective.

Daily check-in forces us to define the daily focus. It removes unnecessary ideas. It sticks us on the right track.

As we partner, more product ideas & features come up from payment plans, team collaboration and analytics. The ideas are unorganized.

It leads us to 2 todo “list”: “Icebox” and “Client feedback”. This drives a sense in separating feedback and idea contribution.

The team meet up twice a week to go through the lists, modify each item to structured software requirements, and propose for clarification.

Once those requirements became new features. We either put to future sprints or the backlog

Release-schedule

Tech stacks

Tooling

Outcome

After 3 months, the very first stable version of Naru.app hit the web store - indicating our very first success in web extension development.

Moving forward, we head for advanced features: team collaboration, team space and activity dashboard.

It’s going to be a busy and an exciting year. Currently, the beta-user is getting invited through Typeform.