We just launched Cassini, a toolkit for product makers 🚀

Visit our new product at cassiniapp.com

We have been running a product design studio (Canvs Club) for close to a decade now. In our experience as product makers, we’ve repetitively solved abstract problems and done banal tasks having varying degrees of impact on the project outcome.

Tasks like these lie on a broad spectrum of difficulty. These are problems in communication (e.g. reviews), resourcefulness (e.g. inspirations and references), understanding (e.g. finding problems in designs), execution (e.g. gaps between design and dev) etc. Some of these problems keep us stuck in loops while some unravel way too late in the scheme of things to be acted on. Beyond just the individual skills of team members, the project outcome is actually deeply dependent on how teams solve these problems.

These problems aren’t the bugs in the process, in fact, dealing with them is a part of the process. The maturity, sharpness, efficiency and consistency with which teams handle these problems, define their project timelines and the quality of their results. How teams handle these visceral nags is possibly a defining difference between good and average teams, between released products and achievable plans.

Great teams run on great Compute

Most good teams either develop processes and tools to solve these problems or find workarounds in existing tools. A fun way of looking at this in terms of power/work is that teams trying to introduce computational solutions for problems arising in people operations. Tools are typically introduced to speed up routine stuff or expand the perspective on problems otherwise difficult to wrangle with our minds directly. Basically, tools increase the computational capacity of teams.

Better tools give more compute. Better teams have better tools.

That’s exactly why we are building Cassini. To give you tools that work for you, get jobs done for you, move things ahead for you, while you build your product.

Cassini’s purpose is to build a set of tools that performs jobs in the product-building process which have a disproportionately high impact on the product’s quality, delivery timeline and the maker’s experience while building it.

To achieve this, we’re starting with 3 key aspects of the product development process, starting with a primary focus on design and engineering disciplines.

Better design discussions

To drive creative decisions faster as a team.

Having seen our share of creative discussions, we realize that all creative collaborations within teams could use more clarity, actionability, structure and direction. To this end, we are building a review system that allows you to group related reviews, provide references as attachments, mark actionable items clearly etc. Reviews take up a massive bulk of time in creative processes and speeding up reviews is a definite high-impact spot.

Enabling research and knowledge for teams

Because building good stuff requires knowing what’s good.

In all product teams, having more referential knowledge of design patterns, visual styles, creative directions etc. creates more potential for progress in quality. The more we know the better our design explorations are after all. Teams typically stagnate when they stop learning from the industry around them. To allow teams to grow their combined knowledge, we are providing a way to do research, share it, and discuss it.

Tactical developer collaboration

So what you build is what you imagined.

One of the most important aspects of crafting products is the understanding that design doesn’t simply end with directions to engineering. It ends with an actual usable product that works as the team intended it to. Customers don’t experience Figma prototypes, they experience interfaces built by engineers and designers. This is why to create good experiences, it’s imperative for engineers and designers to have a form of strong collaboration, if we may call it that.

Right from the smoothness in motion to the crispness in colours and the lightness in visual perception, everything should be tangibly captured in the discussions that Design has with Engineering. We are trying to build something that captures the context that designers want to provide along with their designs so the loss in translation is minimal, irrespective of the level of experience among design and engineering teams.

To this end, we are providing tools like overlay, grids and again, a very powerful reviewing environment that proves to be especially useful in situations like these when teams spend a lot of time dissecting a single interface being developed.