15Five

This app is no friendly at all

I can’t imagine working without 15Five now that I’ve tried it. It would be like trying to go back to just email now that I’ve used Slack. Nothing makes it easier to understand how my team is doing, what they need, and make sure they stay focused on the biggest priorities. I also really like being able to recognize people and keep notes organized through the app. I can’t imagine going back to taking notes for 1:1 meetings on a Google sheet or trying to get to know my new teammates without their Best Self templates.

Overall it’s a decent app to track priorities and interact with supervisors and direct reports. Some functionality doesn’t make sense from a work flow perspective - e.g, the 1:1 and checkin screens should better integrate. The 1:1 should lay on top of the checkin and not a be a separate space to track priorities.

I love the ability to do so much through the mobile app. I can literally be anywhere in the world and still have an open discussion with my manager to make sure we’re completely aligned. The UI experience has no lag or gaps, and when I’m not by my computer, it’s a great way to look back on what my priorities are or the notes between me and my manager.

Checking in in-person and 15Five is a hat on a hat. Complete waste of time.

Wonderful to be able to use Harvest on my phone. When typing long responses to Checkin questions, it’ll sometimes duplicate words, have scrolling issues, or bounce around making it hard to complete a sentence. Being able to do it on my phone outweighs those problems (for me).

The idea is cool. Specific features that would be helpful: (1) pulling forward priorities in late submissions. you are meant to submit progress reports on Fridays. If you are late and submit it on Saturday your priorities get pushed to the next week/future report (as if you did none of them just because your report was late). So you have to retype them all into the report for the current/late week just past, and there is no copy feature. (2) and your face has weird delays so you can’t just type in you have to wait for it to absorb inputs then type the next thing. That sounds like delay between the server and the device or maybe it’s a performance issue not sure (3) High Five thanks are not copied to recipient managers -that seems like an odd mess because there’s no way to forward it if you were the lucky recipient to show your manager that clients are pleased. The system should automatically copy managers for best affect

For brevity I won’t review the service in detail, but the *platform* of 15Five is great and has been a boon to my company’s performance. That said, the app on my iPhone 13 Pro Max running iOS 15.6 is virtually unusable. Frequent freezing, lost data, wacky text boxes and hidden UI elements make using the app a total non-starter. Until these issues are fixed it’ll be desktop-only for me.

The app is okay, but beware that folks in your company will want weekly feedback and data on you. You always trade one devil for another, and after using this app for a year I’d honestly prefer to go back to a written monthly report.

Works amazing for my teams need