Comment by throwaway918299 10 months 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.
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.
you’re absolutely right! that’s where the art and science of product comes in, knowing what’s possible and whether you can cobble an addressable market by choosing which subset of stakeholders to please.
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.