Cushion is the modern async communication platform for distributed teams. Cushion helps teams get organised, stay in flow, and focus on deep work.
Chat apps like Slack force you to work at the same time, which can be difficult for distributed teams. Cushion is async by default, which means communication happens on your time.
Background
One of the biggest time drains in any company is status meetings. Project collaboration requires keeping everyone in sync, but back-to-back status meetings waste time.
Status meetings are also incredibly expensive. Ten people sitting for an hour isn’t a one-hour meeting. It’s a ten-hour meeting. Lost time, salary, and opportunity cost make a real dent in company revenue.
At Cushion, we wanted to do something different. My co-founder Dave and I reflected on the most successful and enjoyable projects we’d worked on.
- Who worked on them and how did we communicate with each other?
- How did we keep everyone up-to-date?
- What happened when something went wrong and we had to make a call?
We both had the same experience. The best projects made communication part of the work, not bureaucratic overhead. Sharing progress and asking for input became pivotal moments.
With Checkins, we wanted to capture that feeling. The question became: how can we help everyone do this without someone there to organise it?
Creating a checkin
For each interval, users get an in-app reminder. The reminders are deliberately soft as some teams are more strict with their updates than others. If you tend to forget (like myself) you can setup email and push notifications too.
When writing, you can use Markdown syntax to structure your post however you like. Some people write a simple paragraph, others use bulleted sections. The freedom to write in your own words is crucial to how Checkins works.
These are logged permanently. Teams can search and comment on each checkin post. If something goes wrong, it’s easy to trace.
Rob Hough
Tip: You can use Markdown when writing a checkin
Work happens across multiple platforms: writing posts, updating CRM systems, or pushing code. We automatically import high-priority activities from Cushion into checkins, including written posts, resolved discussions, and provided feedback.
When writing their post, users can toggle if they want activity added. Clicking the ⚡ button fetches data from any connected sources. This links your update with artefacts that show your progress. However, some days you don’t have something to show. Knowledge work includes thinking days and slow days. Making this optional takes the pressure off having to show something.
Follow along
After we shipped Checkins, one founder gave us early feedback. His team had multiple checkins, one per project, which he checked regularly to see if anyone needed help. This was difficult because he wouldn’t know when someone would post and didn’t want to chase people. ‘It’d be nice if I could subscribe to a checkin so I can get updates.’
We shipped this update, giving users a way to subscribe or not to each checkin individually. We never thought of this idea. My co-founder Dave and I wouldn’t need this feature. Yet when other people use our product, they always find things we don’t. We’re so lucky that they took the time to give us the feedback.
Feedback
Checkins has become one of our most loved features. Every team can setup as many checkins as they like, choosing either weekly or daily intervals. They can be used for status updates, team standups or personal journals. Teams on cushion have found they free them from endless meetings without sacrificing staying on track or keeping each other accountable.
After we shipped v1 of checkins, our early users loved them. They found surprising uses we hadn’t imagined. For example, one customer used them to keep track of freelancers he had working for him. At the end of each week, each freelancer would fill in their checkin and attach their GitHub activity. He would use this as part of their ‘timesheets’. This also made life for the freelancers so much easier as they had only one update to write a week, instead of multiple which is usually the case.