How we use Campsite to build Campsite

When we give a demo of Campsite, people are often surprised to hear how we use it internally. While Campsite was originally created for design teams, we’ve rallied around the tool as a place to iterate on all kinds of work — design, product, and engineering — while making it easy to follow progress across the entire company.

Design, product, and engineering feedback

At Campsite, we ship new features every week. We’re always looking for reactions to designs or prototypes, and frequently need help testing features before they go live.

We use feedback requests to make it obvious when someone is blocked or needs a second set of eyes. Combined with our work to reduce feedback bias, we can trust that the team’s input is thoughtful and independent. Other features, like polls, have made it easy to decide between design directions.

Focused conversations

We share mocks and prototypes throughout the day so that everyone can see work-in-progress and get a sense of what decisions are being made.

People on our team leave comments on an image, or at a specific timestamp on a video, so that critique is precise and contextual.

As we iterate, we resolve comments to keep the conversation focused on actionable next steps.

This way of working makes it easy to follow design progress. Because we’ve removed the need for instant replies and chaotic threads, we’re shipping faster and with higher quality.

Visibility across projects

The core Campsite experience is a home feed of posts from every project. People can filter that feed to see updates from the projects they follow, but by default, it gives us a global lens into what’s happening across every project.

We’ve also connected our Campsite to Slack to broadcast updates to project-specific Slack channels, where our synchronous collaboration happens.

For other teams, we believe this is the best way to keep engineers or PMs in the loop about design updates.

Internal changelog

For most teams, it’s challenging to keep up with daily changes and know what features are going live for customers. We’re not an exception, so we share posts into a dedicated announcements project whenever we ship a new feature, change our components, or upgrade hidden parts of our infrastructure.

This sort of “internal changelog” has become a timeline of our product’s evolution and gives our team a shared moment to celebrate wins.

Organizing customer feedback and research

Customer feedback drives everything we do at Campsite. It’s important that everyone on the team has visibility into where customers are getting stuck, confused, or wish the app worked differently.

We post customer feedback in a dedicated feedback project so that everyone can read and respond on their own time. Quite often the conversations we have about customer feedback get turned into Linear issues and prioritized on our roadmap.

Similarly, we always share notes from our user research calls back to Campsite for everyone to see. Each time we give a demo, or onboard a new team, we learn new things about how people want to use Campsite, and it’s important for everyone to understand what our customers feel when trying Campsite for the first time.

Long-term idea storage

Like most teams, we have a constantly-growing backlog of ideas. Capturing those ideas in a task manager feels too rigid, and putting them into a wiki creates too much of a burden on organization.

Instead, we post into an ideas project on Campsite. These get broadcast to the rest of the team on Slack so we can all comment and riff on the ideas asynchronously. It’s really easy to find those ideas later with a quick search or a skim back through the ideas feed.

We’re able to revisit old ideas as our roadmap changes, and it’s wonderful to have that archive of notes to get over the initial “uncertainty hurdle” that usually exists when starting something from scratch.

Archives and portfolios

When we ship a new feature, we archive the project on Campsite. This keeps our working space clean while keeping all the past conversations and ideas searchable and easy to resurface. Scrolling back through our list of archived projects is just another way to visualize our roadmap and historical velocity.

Every person in a Campsite organization has their own profile. This makes it easy to know what someone has worked on over time, get a sense of what’s top-of-mind, and see what projects they’re contributing to. It’s a bit like having an ever-growing, automatically-generated portfolio of things we’ve made.

How other teams use Campsite

Internal blogging

Campsite is a great place for internal blogging — sharing retros, company announcements, new hire shoutouts, or celebrating team milestones. These types of posts don’t necessarily need to be about pixels and code; because Campsite is such a simple communication platform, it’s useful for any type of async knowledge sharing.

Performance reviews & calibration

Many teams love that Campsite automatically creates an internal portfolio for everyone on the team. Profiles show contributions over time, and are a useful conversation starter during performance reviews and calibration.

Sharing design progress with leadership

Finally, for many large teams, Campsite has become the default way to share design progress upwards with leadership or executives. We built a feature to help with this called Digests, which helps managers and team leads curate highlights into a standalone artifact. Digests can be shared with anyone, including people who aren’t on Campsite. Team leads often use digests to make weekly, monthly, or quarterly status updates with a couple of clicks, replacing a tedious and manual process of collecting assets from everyone.

Try Campsite for free

We’re excited to see Campsite change how teams work together to build great software. And better still, we get to be our own customer to make sure everything we build is useful and high quality.

You can try Campsite for free today. We’ve designed a free tier that’s ideal for smaller teams, but if you need more power we have a Pro plan that unlocks larger uploads, unlimited projects, and unlimited team members.