Comment by ethbr1 10 months ago
Unfortunate. Of all the PM tools I've used, I hated Pivotal the least.
It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done.
It limited customization down to a sane level.
And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).
That's not really true: witness Jira boards which are really kanban boards replicated everywhere. Jira, by now, is mostly a database of issues with a terrible management interface that's only accessed through the "boards" features.
At least in the "agile" (actual or lookalike) software development.
As soon as the AI features start showing up in Linear, it's time to jump ship. You know for sure VCs are pushing for that in the weekly meeting.
Linear founder here.
We look at AI as capability similar to any other technology. Instead of jumping on the AI bandwagon or thinking AI is a feature, we look if there is opportunity to reduce friction or help the user well in the workflow they are doing. Today like the AI can inform if there is duplicate issues being reported or improve the titles you submit from Slack conversion.
If it takes the pressure off, then go ahead and add those features.
But carve it in immutable, legal stone that there will always be a classic (reddit style: old) version of the product that's feature-complete but maintained.
... my suspicion is there's actually legalese somewhere that mandates the continuity of old.reddit.com. Otherwise, I'm at a loss to explain its continued existence in light of aggressive app pushing.
That's true. They are maybe the only major player who went with that approach. I wonder if their users are that vocal?
We've been on Linear for a couple years now and like it a lot.
I help build Shortcut (https://www.shortcut.com/) and I think it fits the bill of light—but not spartan—on customization and day-to-day management.
To set up a new Shortcut workspace:
1. Sign up 2. Invite teammates, group them into teams if desired 3. Activate the GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket integration, so as engineers work via VCS their work in Shortcut progresses automatically 4. Set your workspace's timezone 5. Turn on/off Iterations (sprints) based on your process. Unfinished stories can be set to automatically roll from one iteration to the next. 6. Turn on/off point estimation based on your process
Then start writing Stories (tickets/issues) to track work.
Going further: Stories can be grouped into Epics. Epics can be grouped into Objectives (with associated Key Results if that's your thing). You can put Epics on a Roadmap to "share out" what your team is planning to work on. All optional, based on how you work and the size of your org.
I’ve been using Github Projects. It’s not as advanced and complex as Jira though, but its simplicity and closeness to code and documentation is a blessing for my hyperactive geek brain
The problem with Github projects is that they don't seem to have a super focused direction. They're trying things and then shutting them down after two years: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/39106
I do like conceptually the idea of issue tracking living tightly coupled with the codebase, but unfortunately Github can't seem to get it quite right yet.
Thanks for the context.
Ah, I didn’t know/notice any of that, probably because my use case is the absolute minimum:
A project, a few columns, tickets and an assignee field is all I’m using.
I understand most use cases are more complex than mine though.
Yeah I think making PM software is ultimately a trap. You either keep use cases super skinny and make one camp happy, or you decide that you slowly need more customers and end up like Jira. I feel like every PM software is on the spectrum of ending up like Jira, it’s just how far along that journey they are that dictates whether they are interesting to software engineers or not.
Pivotal Labs was acquired by EMC back in the day. They bundled it with some cloud foundry work and created Pivotal. When Dell acquired EMC they also acquired a big share of Pivotal. Dell then decided to squeeze more blood from the VMWare stone and forced them to acquire Pivotal before selling the whole thing off to Broadcom.
We found https://www.shortcut.com less opinionated than Linear and a closer 1 for 1 to Pivotal. They're all getting a little bloated, wish one would dial it back vs keep adding (which feels like the inevitable future for Linear).
Not the person to whom you're responding, but:
Collaborative/online spreadsheets can work. Carefully designed, with appropriate field constraints and filters and sort templates... especially for smaller lists or smaller groups, they can be OK.
A few areas where they break down though:
- No attachments to stories (test cases, screenshots, etc)
- No comments/history view or threaded discussions
- Poor usability of notifications on @mention
- Inflexible UI/data formatting (cells instead of layout)
Sometimes I keep the spreadsheet for internal stakeholder issue reporting. It's a business-familiar tool for gathering input, which then gets synced to the more purpose-built tool for action.
Linear is the one I've settled on, it stays out of my way.
For now. Looking at the competition it's only a matter of time before it becomes bloated to justify valuations.
https://linear.app/