Introducing The Little Owl

We all have ideas that we would like to build and see them flourish. But thats the things about ideas, they aren't always good. The little owl helps you keep track of your good ideas.

Introducing The Little Owl
This image was generated using Adobe Firefly.

A few months back, I wrote about decentralizing your backlogs:

Decentralize your Backlog
Ideas are cheap. They come up all the time and end up in the backlog. Remember, really important ideas almost always come back.

This applies not just to backlog items, but also tasks, features, whatever it is that you use to track your ideas.


I talked about having a system to decentralize your backlog. Where instead of having a massive backlog to refer; maintain a small list of items and vote them as and when you get more feedback.

You can do the same with your ideas be it work or personal. The root problem starts with someone having an idea. We almost always have too many ideas. Grooming & executing them becomes hard because,

  • Most ideas suck! 
  • We can't tell which ideas are good.
  • We are always over-confident about our own ideas.

The last couple of months I looked into my workflows and realized that over time they have gotten more complicated. The essence of keeping smaller lists and focusing on the most voted ones have always remained at the core of it, but manually maintaining them with CLI scripts is not the right way. Also, a solution that works should be shared.

After working on this for several weeks, I have finally something that I can share. For the moment, it's a simple app that allows you to create entires for your ideas (as expected). When you discuss your ideas, you can collect/document the feedback and vote for or against each idea.

The app comes with some basic functionality. A list of predefined filter, and tags to help categorize your ideas. The app follows Apple's HIG at the moment and will change over the next few days/week.

The beta for the app is available and I would be more than thankful if you can give this app a try and send in your feedback. I have been using this app to manage upcoming functionality.

Join the The Little Owl beta
Available on iOS

The app is available on the iPhone and the iPad. I'm working on the macOS version and should be available soon. Your ideas will be in sync across all your Apple devices.

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Jamie Larson
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