There’s a genre of blog post that lists the “ultimate tech stack” for modern teams. Usually it’s twenty-five tools, half of which require enterprise pricing, and it reads more like a sponsorship roster than practical advice. This isn’t that post.

This is what our small team actually uses, every single day, and why. No affiliate links. No aspirational picks we signed up for but never opened. Just the stuff that’s genuinely earned its place.

Communication: Slack (With Discipline)

Yes, Slack. It’s not perfect — we’ve written about its limitations before — but for day-to-day team communication, nothing we’ve tried works better. The key is discipline. We keep channels purposeful, mute what’s not relevant, and have a firm rule: if it’s longer than three paragraphs, it goes in a document, not a message.

We tried Microsoft Teams for six months. It was fine. But the threading was clunky, the search was slower, and nobody on the team actually preferred it. Sometimes the best tool is just the one your team will use consistently.

Project Management: Linear

We switched from Jira to Linear about a year ago, and the difference in speed alone was worth the change. Linear is fast. Genuinely fast. Pages load instantly, keyboard shortcuts work the way you’d expect, and the interface gets out of your way.

Jira is powerful, and for large enterprises with complex workflows, it probably still makes sense. But for a team under twenty, it’s overkill. We don’t need custom fields, seventeen status columns, and a workflow engine that requires its own administrator. We need a place to track work, assign it, and mark it done. Linear does that beautifully.

Documents: Notion

Our internal knowledge base, meeting notes, process documentation, and project briefs all live in Notion. It’s not flawless — search could be better, and it occasionally feels sluggish with large databases — but the flexibility is remarkable. You can build almost anything in Notion, from a simple wiki to a lightweight CRM.

The alternative we considered was Confluence. We lasted two weeks. The editing experience felt like fighting the tool rather than using it.

Design Collaboration: Figma

Even if you’re not a design-heavy team, Figma is worth having. We use it for mockups, quick diagrams, presentation slides, and anything visual that needs team input. The collaborative editing is excellent — multiple people can work in the same file simultaneously without conflicts.

For teams that don’t need the full Adobe Creative Suite (and let’s be honest, most business teams don’t), Figma covers a lot of ground at a fraction of the cost.

Code and Development: GitHub + VS Code

These are industry standards for good reason. GitHub handles version control, code review, and CI/CD pipelines. VS Code is the editor almost everyone on the team gravitates toward. The extension ecosystem means you can customise it for virtually any language or framework.

We briefly experimented with GitLab. It’s a solid product, but the majority of open-source tooling integrates more naturally with GitHub, and the network effect matters when you’re hiring developers who already know the platform.

Finance: Xero

For Australian businesses, Xero is hard to beat. Bank feeds, BAS preparation, invoicing, and reporting all work well. The integration ecosystem is mature — payroll, expenses, inventory, project tracking all plug in cleanly. Our accountant uses it too, which eliminates the quarterly data exchange awkwardness.

Xero isn’t cheap anymore, especially with add-ons, but the time it saves our admin team is significant. We priced out MYOB and QuickBooks; neither was compelling enough to switch.

What We Stopped Using

Just as interesting as what we use is what we dropped:

• Trello — great for simple boards, but we outgrew it quickly. Linear replaced it.
• Google Docs — still used occasionally for external collaboration, but Notion handles internal docs better.
• Zoom — replaced by Google Meet. Fewer features, but it’s built into our calendar and works without thinking about it.
• Asana — solid tool, but the pricing got aggressive and we didn’t need what it offered over Linear.
• Monday.com — too much visual noise for our taste. Everything felt like it needed a colour-coded dashboard.

The Principle Behind the Picks

The common thread across our tool choices is simplicity. We’d rather have a tool that does fewer things well than one that does everything adequately. Feature bloat is real. Every unnecessary feature is cognitive load — another menu to navigate, another setting to configure, another notification to manage.

We also bias toward tools with good keyboard shortcuts and fast performance. It sounds minor, but when you’re in a tool eight hours a day, the difference between a 200ms page load and a 2-second one compounds into real productivity.

Find What Works for Your Team

Our stack won’t be right for everyone. A team of fifty has different needs than a team of ten. A marketing agency needs different tools than a construction company. The point isn’t to copy someone else’s list. It’s to be honest about what you actually use versus what you’re paying for, and to regularly question whether there’s something better.

Try things. Drop what doesn’t work. Keep what does. That’s the whole strategy.