Canny is a feedback management tool that helps teams make informed product decisions by using their customers' feedback.

We spoke with Sarah Hum, one of the founders at Canny, about how she found an email client that ensures she and the team stay productive.

‍

‍

What Challenges Led You to Look for a Solution like Missive?

It's interesting because we've been using Missive since very early when we were a team of two. I believe Missive found us first. At the time we were very curious about everyone who was signing up for Canny. When we saw Missive, it was something where we were like: "Hey, you know, it's better than Gmail! It has a lot more functionality on top of Gmail, so why don't we try this other tool?"

It's not like we needed an email solution. It was so early that we didn't feel the pain yet. We kind of grew into the pains and then the solution grew with us. And over time, it's been clear that it solves a problem for us.

Ever since then, we've been using it even as our team has grown and all that stuff. It's become a more and more important part of handling email across the whole team. I think the magic comes in when your team is a little bit bigger and when you need to get emails to the right person.

‍

What Are the Problems Missive Solves in Your Company?

For us, there were shared aliases and we were wondering who was handling them. Has somebody already looked at this? Do I need to look at this?

At the end of the day, I need to go through my emails, and the easier we can make that, the simpler. The more relevant we can make our email, I think the easier it becomes. And it's a task that we need to check off every day, but it's not something that you enjoy doing. Making sure that we're not duplicating work is super important because we are, such a small team.

Only one person should need to look at an email unless other people need to be looped in. Ideally, I know who's taking a look at it and who will take care of this, and then I can have peace of mind and archive it. It's about saving time and working better as a team.

How Do You Use Missive at Canny?

We all use Missive and one of the most important parts for me is the team inboxes. Make sure marketing emails, go to marketing, support emails, go to support, and so on. People are only seeing what they have to see.

From my position, as someone who's managing the team, I'm not only aware of my inbox, but also aware of other people spending unnecessary time in their inboxes. I want to make sure to protect them from things that they don't need to see or don't need to worry about. As a team has grown, it's been really helpful to be able to say these emails, go to these people, making sure you only see what you need to see.

One of the big things for us is the rules. We all have annoying emails, spammy emails, or really "salesy" emails that honestly we don't need to see in our inboxes ever again. I think it's important just to get rid of those right off the bat.

Beyond that, emails are routed to the right person. For support, we have our support emails that only go to people who are on our support team or our customer-facing teams. Demo requests, and stuff that is more "salesy" go to our sales team. Emails that are marketing focus like: "Hey, you know, we wanna write a blog post with you", or a new partnership opportunity, go to the marketing box. People don't need to know the specific individual at the company for their email to go to the right person.

‍

Apart from Rules, Which Missive Features Do You Use?

One of the big things, as part of my workflow, is, looping in people when it's necessary without having to forward. I think that the forwarding mechanic is so outdated. Who do I need on this? I either do @Andrew, or I can do @marketing team in the really handy conversation chat.

I just can get the eyes that I need on an email and if they have input, they can send it to me right there versus having to draft an email, send it back, and now it's this weird like BCC, CC mess. That makes it easy to just have an internal conversation around emails.

Snoozing is also big for me because I almost treat emails like my to-do list. I look at my email. These are the things I need to do to follow up. When there's a prospect or someone that I'm talking to that is important for me to keep in touch with, that's when I would snooze the email and it comes back to me when I needed to. It then becomes an item on my to-do list.

‍

‍

What Are Your Different Teams in Missive?

We have design, engineering, finance, marketing, product, recruiting, sales, security, success, and support. It's almost like there's one team per person because we're still such a small team. But there is a lot of overlap because, Andrew and I were the co-founders, so we want visibility into a lot of these different areas.

Active Members and Observers are very handy for priority in that case. For example, I'm an observer of marketing. I want to keep a pulse on what's happening, but it's not urgent for me. It's on my marketing team to handle that.

How Did Missive Help You Accomplish That?

The rules and the team inboxes are really important and crucial as we grow. As more people join the different teams I can say this person is on the sales team, this person is on marketing. It means they'll automatically be tuned into those emails.

Internal chats are super helpful when we are talking back and forth about feature ideas or deals that are in the works. It's really easy, especially as a remote team for us to have those conversations asynchronously. We all know that with remote work it's important to be able to do that on our own time.

Then for me snoozing helps me a lot. It seems basic, but it creates my to-do list. Everything that's in your inbox is the thing that needs to be addressed. I can just check them off the list.

‍

Would You like to See Other Features in Missive?

Honestly, it works pretty well. I feel like it does the job that I need it to do. I think the product is great. I would hate going back to Gmail because I feel like I would just lose so many superpowers.

‍

You Mentioned You Would Never Go Back to Gmail, What Are the Aspects That Make You Say That?

Being a remote team, enabling remote work and working with other people around email. Emails are not always one-to-one. In a lot of cases, it's important to loop in other people. I need to have other eyes on something and I need to be able to do that without having these weird forwarding chains where the email is just super long because it's just a bunch of replies or a bunch of forwards. It keeps it clean.

This is how team emails work in my mind. Whereas Gmail feels very much like what email used to be. It was very one-to-one. If you want someone to know about this, forward it to them. And then you have these weird chains where there are some people in a forwarded chain and some person in the original chain and it's just a mess. I appreciate having that clean solution.

‍

‍