How our team communicates, builds, and runs the business — and why we eventually built our own operating system to bring it all together.
Running a software studio isn’t just about writing good code. It’s about keeping a distributed team aligned, clients informed, projects on schedule, and the business itself — payroll, invoicing, HR — running without friction. Here’s a look at the tools that power that work, both the industry staples every software company relies on, and the system we eventually built ourselves.
1. Communication & Collaboration
No software team survives without a solid communication layer.
- Slack — our day-to-day home base for team chat, quick decisions, and async updates
- Zoom / Google Meet — client calls, sprint reviews, and daily standups
- Google Workspace — shared docs, spreadsheets, and calendars across the team
2. Source Control & Development
- GitHub — version control, pull requests, code review, and CI/CD pipelines
- VS Code — our primary editor across the team, standardized with shared extensions and linting configs
- Docker — consistent, portable dev environments across every machine
3. Project & Task Management
- Jira — sprint planning, backlog grooming, and issue tracking for client projects
- Trello / Notion — lighter-weight boards for internal initiatives and smaller teams
4. AI Tools
AI has become a genuine part of our daily workflow rather than a novelty:
- GitHub Copilot — inline code suggestions and boilerplate generation
- ChatGPT / Claude — documentation drafts, debugging second opinions, client communication drafts, and research
5. Design
- Figma — UI/UX design, prototyping, and design-developer handoff, all in one shared file
Operations Tools for a Growing Startup
Writing code is only half the business. Running the company requires its own stack:
| Function | Common Tools |
|---|---|
| Accounting & Invoicing | QuickBooks, Xero |
| HR & Payroll | BambooHR, Gusto |
| CRM & Sales | HubSpot, Pipedrive |
| Time Tracking | Toggl, Clockify |
| Documentation | Notion, Confluence |
The problem most growing studios run into: each of these is a separate subscription, a separate login, and a separate silo of data. A client’s information lives in the CRM, their project lives in Jira, their invoice lives in QuickBooks, and the conversation about all three lives in Slack. Nobody has one screen that shows the whole relationship.
Enter RCPower OS — Built by Raldin Casidar Studio
That fragmentation is the exact problem we set out to solve internally — and it grew into a product of its own.
RCPower OS is our in-house company operating system, built with React, MongoDB, and Express, and deployed on Vercel. It’s the platform that now runs our own studio end to end, bringing together:
- Project & Client Management — boards, sprints, and tickets sitting next to the client’s CRM record and history
- Team Communication — built-in chat and updates tied directly to the project or client they belong to
- AI-Assisted Workflows — an integrated assistant that drafts documentation, summarizes standups, and flags blocked tasks
- HR & Time Tracking — leave, payroll, and billable hours on the same dashboard as engineering metrics
- Invoicing & Financials — client billing connected directly to project delivery, no exporting to a separate app
Instead of stitching together six or more separate tools, our team — and increasingly our clients — works inside one connected system.
RCPower OS is our answer to the tool sprawl every growing software company eventually runs into. It’s the platform we wished existed when we were juggling a dozen logins — so we built it, and it now runs the studio we built it for.
Interested in RCPower OS for your own team? Reach out to Raldin Casidar Studio to learn more.