Be a virtual sticky note ninja, with Melee!

It’s pretty easy to let routine take over. No shame in that, everyone gives in. This weekend we popped out of the same old, same old and decided to build something new – sure, there was a motive (Rails Rumble 2008), but we just took it as an excuse. In 48 hours (well, we slept two full nights, so make that about 24) we sketched, built and privately launched a new product called Melee.

If you do agile work (design or develoment), you probably do the stuff Melee helps you with, but with sticky notes and office walls. Melee is an agile brainstorming app. What does that mean, you ask? Let me give you a couple of use cases.

1) You’re a design and development shop who just got a RFP for a new social network. You might brainstorm a few ideas, throw them at the wall, cluster them, prioritize them, and build a proposal. Melee is your new wall.

2) You’re a development shop that uses SCRUM (ed: if you don’t use it yet, give it a try, you’ll love it). You maintain a product backlog which is a list of things to do, ordered by priority, and before each sprint, you look at the backlog, decide what to do next, and proceed to be awesome for the whole sprint. Melee helps you maintain the backlog.

It’s meant to be used either locally or over the web, so it should be a great tool to dump, cluster and prioritize ideas on those product planning conference calls you all do (we know we do them, at least). It’s all Ajax-based so you see live what others are doing, and they see what you are doing too. The goal is live collaboration.

Anyway, it’s easier to see it rather than reading about it, but since we’re not completely ready to show this baby to you yet, how about a Flickr set with screenshots and photos of the development process? Fine, you say? Well here, then.

Launch details

Melee will hopefully launch as a beta later this week – we’re doing all sorts of work with Totspot and Goplan 2.0 but we *will* get this out to you. Here’s what we can tell you already: there will likely be a free version and a paid version to help with our costs of running the app. In the beginning, it’ll be free for all, anyway. We do hope it’s useful for you and your team. It’s useful for ours – heck, otherwise, we wouldn’t build it. More details really soon, promise. Did I mention that Flickr set already?