You can forage for those on the Oregon coast! I was just given some by a friend and they're tasty; had never had them before. But they do smell a bit like gym socks.
I talk to dev team leaders (EMs and PMs) multiple times a week about project management and it's quite rare that we find anyone using GitHub apart from very small teams (2-3 devs). Our research suggests product managers especially tend to prefer things like Notion/Trello and really don't like the complexity of GitHub.
Disclaimer: I'm a founder at Constructor (constructor.dev)
Jira also has momentum. I've advised at least a dozen places on, or moving to Jira (I was in for a different project but watched it). The reasons I heard were: new CTO had it at the old place, waits it here; and everyone uses it. Many of those startups also didn't have a Jira expert and soon got tangled in workflow automation that mostly got in the way for small, growth phase companies.
Accounting for the use of Jira is easy: known quantity and name recognition. A better question is "With so many unhappy customers, how do we still account for the continued use of Jira as an org matures?" It's the same answer but with the additional caveat that learning a new tool that's so fundamental is disruptive. I consult and advise multiple orgs and have done so for years. I don't often encounter heavy supporters of atlassian products, despite the number of users. Jira is one of those things that flies in the face of most UX logic in that it doesn't appear to lose market share, no matter how much slower, unreliable, inflexible and generally unliked it is. It seems that once a founder has grabbed the first thing off the shelf, you're stuck.
Full disclosure: I have no competitive interests in this space, I just hate garbage tools. (Apologies to my actual friends who work at atlassian. Your software is terrible.)
So full disclosure, I recently (literally this week) started a role at Atlassian, but not on Jira. Standard disclosure - this is 100% my personal opinion and not that of Atlassian in any way.
I think the thing that sets Jira apart is process management. It's the feature that no other competing tool really has to anywhere near the same level of power. If you're at a big org, especially one that has regulatory obligations, the level of control Jira gives you over workflows is pretty unmatched and it allows you to enforce certain practises and processes into the ways your teams work that mean that when you get audited, you can point to your Jira workflow and be like "See, we have system enforced process controls".
I also think that the Jira UX is... weirdly nice (personal opinion), in a brutal utilitarian way. If you compare it to some of the startups that are trying to disrupt Jira (I'm looking at you, Clickup), the UI is SIGNIFICANTLY less noisy.
Big ClickUp user and I feel you comment about it. It has become a massive UX mess. They really need to clean it up per "use case" or have toggles for users to disable UX features.
Too much is too much, and it's getting close to being too much on ClickUp.
But one of the killer features (IMO) is the fact that you can customise the flow of issues to match a flowchart. "TODO - IN PROGRESS - DONE" only goes so far when the org gets bigger.
This way it's a lot harder to move issues to the wrong state and the workflow is clear for everyone.
Jira offers them much more in the way of process management, reporting, and integrations with the likes of ZenDesk for its complexity. They seem to think of GitHub as just for the coders and aren't comfortable there.
Thats a disappointing trend. I personally like github for project management explicitly because it offers more features and options (and they are continuing to improve it)
We're deliberating this ourselves. Our investors strongly advocate removing the "beta" because our product is solid and complete (in fact pretty polished at this point) and we're doing ourselves no favors. I think they're right. To me the question is simply: what's more accurate? We were honestly in beta 8 months ago; at some point we just had customers happily using a product we're progressively making better.
Hi, we’re Seth and Andrew (Aalk4308), co-founders of Constructor (https://constructor.dev), based in NYC. We’re building a tracking tool as lightweight as Trello for all the small dev teams out there with basic needs, and we’d love your feedback. You can try it out by clicking “Try the demo” on our website. You’ll get your own private, mutable workspace prepopulated with dummy data (no email or signup required).
We started building Constructor about a year ago after talking to lots of CTOs/VPEs and product leaders about their frustrations with this space and frequently hearing “Trello’s a great tool to start with, but we know in six months we’ll want something more tailored to software dev”. Some of them had in fact used Trello all the way to exit with teams of 30+, but they’re the minority.
Trello’s great in a bunch of ways: it’s quick to set up, there’s not much to figure out, and the whole team can use it, not just the developers. It also strongly biases teams away from process complexity. But since it isn’t purpose-built for software developers, it lacks a first-class GitHub integration, backlog management is painful, and discussions are onerous. This all adds up to wasted time. But for many teams this is still preferable to heavier-weight alternatives.
So we built Constructor for small dev teams with basic needs who just need to get up and running with a tool that stays out of their way – but also understands how software is built. We aim to retain what’s great about Trello while redesigning it from the ground up for software dev teams.
We’ve been in private beta since January with teams ranging from two to more than 10 people. There’s clearly a lot left for us to improve here, but we wanted to share what we’ve built and get feedback from a broader audience.
We realize there are lots of tools in this space besides Jira and Trello, including several new ones in the last year or two, and we don’t expect ours to be right for every team. But we think it will help small teams keep their process light as it evolves, and save them time and frustration.
Thanks!
P.S. There’s a dark mode not yet exposed in the settings; if you want to see it just change the body tag class from c9r-light-mode to c9r-dark-mode and optionally add the class c9r-dark-high-contrast.
This aligns with my experience talking to lots of small startups of this size. It amazes me that 2-man shops use Jira, but they do, because they know it from their previous jobs and don't want to bother finding/learning a new thing. We also run across Trello and Asana a lot.
