Dream Chasers: Start Your Dreams on Mars

Exploring Mars is no longer just a wild dream to human beings anymore. Team Tumbleweed is a group of currently 16 students that is building a wind-driven Mars rover. The team is located at TU Delft in the Netherlands, TU Wien in Austria, and at Stanford University in the US.

The idea is to develop a scouting solution that is able to rapidly explore large areas of Mars’ surface to identify research targets and find landing spots. Tumbleweed is a good mix of engineers, software developers, PR strategists, and business students. The team is currently growing from the core team of 4 people to hopefully around 50 in November 2019.

After several months of using Quire, the team loves to share with us how Quire has supported the whole team in managing their projects and collaborate with the team members from all over the globe.

An Excel File is No Longer Viable for a Dynamic Team Anymore

As the large remote team is coming together in a short time, Tumbleweed immediately faced a challenge with tracking their task list using Excel. The old-fashioned tool like Excel cannot be enough for a dynamic team and soon appeared to be not viable anymore. The team needs a new solution with rather basic functionality and good usability to manage their growing task lists.

Productivity software is such a crowded market and finding an one-size-fits-all solution is simply a mission impossible. Team Tumbleweed has googled for the best task management software and tried several popular solutions such as Trello or Meisertask before they settled for Quire.

“We used another popular solution for some time but no one really liked it since it forces you to put things on boards and people also were too lazy to look into it often.” -- Tumbleweed Team

Quire Provides the Exact Features that Our Team Needs - No More, No Less

After a short time of initial trial with Quire, Tumbleweed decides to settle with Quire. “[Quire] is the only free tool that had this “premium” feel to it and wasn’t overloaded with features we didn’t need,'' said Tumbleweed Team.

As one of the core values that Quire team shares when we started to develop Quire, trying to please everyone by stuffing as many features as possible into a project management software won’t do any good for a team. Instead of driving users crazy with the features maze, Quire focuses on creating the set of features that can go well with the existing workflow and deliver a whole package solution that can actually help users to get things done.

Team Tumbleweed also shared with Quire how they love the modern and minimal interface of this tool - just like a clean, well-organized sheet of paper lays out all the information you need. The main panel shows very clearly who to do what and when to meet the deadlines. It is critical for team collaboration to view and track what the other teammates are working on at the moment.

Since Mars exploration is obviously a big project that requires all hands on deck, communication can be very challenging and might backfire on the productivity if not handled carefully. Team Tumbleweed took advantage of Quire nested task list to break down the whole project to digestible tasks, organize in a well-structured hierarchical list, and keep everyone informed with the seamless Slack and Quire integration.

“Thank you so much for your work! We have already recommended it to other student groups.
Please stick to your philosophy of providing only the most essential features but making those as easy to use as possible. You’re amazing!” -- Tumbleweed Team

Quire also allows Team Tumbleweed to keep documents corresponding to a task centralized using Google Drive integration. You just need to log in to Quire, find everything in one central place and waste no time since you never have to search for the deliverables.

Choosing a good project management software that has enough features for the team to get things done yet still maintain a simple and clean minimalist is not an easy mission. Quire team is very happy to join the exciting journey of Team Tumbleweed. And, we aspire to hear more great stories about Quire’s role in pursuing your next goals!