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Insight is an agile dashboard that helps development teams to track and improve the development process. Insight integrates directly with Pivotal Tracker and turns the data into a powerful dashboard for developers and managers. Below is our interview with Emanuel Petre, Co-Founder of Insight:

Q: What is Insight?

A: Insight is an agile dashboard that enables managers and development teams to track and improve the development process.

It integrates directly with Pivotal Tracker — one of the best Scrum project management tools on the market — and turns the data into a powerful dashboard for managers, developers, and clients.

Q: How does it work?

A: Setting up is as easy as entering your pivotal tracker API key and picking a template. Two short steps and you’ve got yourself a brand new dashboard.

In the background, we synchronize with Pivotal Tracker and transform the data into powerful Insights that enable us to deliver advanced, yet simple, widgets and charts.

We support Scrum, Kanban, hybrid proccesses, and even custom processes. We made it so flexible because we know that every team, big or small, employs a different process. We wanted to adapt Insight to cater to their process — not the other way around.

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Q: How did the idea behind Insight come about? Tell us how you founded the company, and what made you decide to jump in and create the business?

A: At first, Jeremy (Jeremy Fabre, Co-founder) and I were trying to show our boss how much our team was improving by using agile principles. We were also interested in tracking test performance, code quality, and other KPIs (key performance indicators). Our boss was interested in knowing how the project is going, whether we were improving, and what the status of certain features was.

We were a very small team at that time and we were trying to prove that our agile practices were helping us to manage change better, ship faster, and improve constantly.

So we started looking around for common solutions and ideas. What we found was that most teams don’t track the things we were looking to track because it was simply too complicated. Other teams were gathering the information on Excel sheets or, in some cases, even building it by hand.

Our lazy developer minds could not wrap themselves around the thought of copying, pasting, and retaining this amount of information on Excel sheets and generating daily reports, or even drawing burndown charts by hand—daily.

That’s when we got to building something on the side and talking to managers and development teams via Skype. The Insight you see today is the result of more than 1,500 interviews with managers, developers, CEOs, and CTOs.

There is definitely a need for those analytics. At this very moment, there are loads of data just sitting there waiting to tell you a story.

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Q: What is the response to Insight so far?

A: In short, steady growth.

We founded the company based on principles preached by books such as 37 Signals, Lean Startup and The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

We intentionally chose to focus on Pivotal Tracker and to capture a narrow vertical so that we could give our customers a simple product, and we’ve done that.

We forge very close relationships with our customers because we know that this is a new market. We also know that, even though the product is simple, many teams fail to realize how much time and money they’d save by improving process. It’s our job to educate them.

Since we began bolstering our documentation and sharing our vision, we’ve noticed significant growth. Our onboarding process has also made a huge difference by helping new customers every step of the way. That’s in addition to the Getting Started Guide and the Common Use Cases we’ve assembled for new users.

Most companies care about time and money first and foremost, but we’re driven by our vision for transparency in software development.

Q: Could you tell us more about your pricing plans?

A: Everyone starts with a 30-day trial, with no obligation. During that period, people usually either end up finding everything on their own or reaching out to us for help customizing their dashboards around their process.

The pricing model is based mostly on the number of boards a team needs:

$19 for 1 board

for 1 board $29 for 3 boards

for 3 boards $59 for 5 boards

Companies with multiple teams on tracker can contact us if they require more than 5 boards.

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Q: How would you convince people to start using Insight?

A: I’d provide three arguments in support of it: