Comment by ethbr1

Comment by ethbr1 11 hours ago

Atlassian's primary sin is listening to PMs for features.

As a subset of users, they seem to want the flexibility of Excel, except it also has the specific workflow they want out of the box (which is different for every PM).

Every product that's chased that rabbit down the hole has ended up with something customizable enough that (a) users need training to actually use it & (b) nobody is ever trained on it.

I'm sure Jira is great... if I and everyone else at the company went to a two-week training course on configuring and using it. But none of those people, nor I, am ever going to do that.

Tl;dr - project management/tracker tools should have a complexity feature cap, defined by what a reasonable person can intuit in the course of normal use over a month.

throwaway918299 11 hours ago

I would rather just use an actual spreadsheet for issue tracking than Jira.

We lost our CTO recently, and he was also the "jira admin" (ie. the only person who knows how the hell to do anything with jira) and it's just been a clusterf*ck ever since.

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ethbr1 10 hours ago

Excel-as-a-benchmark is a powerful thought argument.
If something can't be significantly better than Excel, then product specs probably need refining.
It's not that Excel is amazing or perfect in any one thing, but it is a pretty amazing blend of simplicity, flexibility, out of the box features, programmability, and presentation.

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- karmajunkie 5 hours ago
  
  this dovetails into my test for whether i’m looking at a good startup idea or not… if existing solutions are all complicated spreadsheets, there’s both a potential market of users, and the problem is complex enough to warrant some code to manage it.
  ETA: obviously not all good startup ideas fit into that thesis, just the ones i tend to enjoy working on.
  
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  ethbr1 5 hours ago
  
  It's a good test, but also a trap. Because the relevant follow-on question is "Is it possible to design a single solution that will please most of these people?"
  Sometimes, the nature of the problem makes flexibility irreducible.
  
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