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Comment by iba99 | Hacker News Reader

Hey folks. My co-founder and I started noodling on productivity tools a few years ago. After interviewing 250+ engineers and founders, we discovered that most project management software a) takes a lot of time to configure b) is not built for cross-functional teams and c) takes away focus from the release cycle. The status quo is that engineers spend precious time wading through tickets, and EMs + PMs continue to lack visibility at the release level. This only gets worse with distributed teams across different time zones, and as teams outside of engineering rely on product to meet customer milestones and release dates.

Currently- the tool helps run and manage tasks, requirements and sprints. With team level insights and a smart indicator for sprint planning.

This is our open beta. RN Github integration is live for PRs and commits tied to sprints- we're still working on Bitbucket and Gitlab.

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I've never worked in a place that had 'release cycles'.

Maybe it's just me, but maybe not.

So I'm glad that Jira doesn't force its 'release cycle' shenanigans on me. Like with git, not being opinionated is the road to success.

Yes, sounds like something a bored project manager would "invent" to feel in control.

I work at a place with mobile apps. You can't continuously release a new app update every day so a release cycle is useful for structuring when we're going to ship, when qa starts to test, and having deliverable dates in anticipation of app store/play store approvers (couple days)

>most project management software a) takes a lot of time to configure

Every project management software will have some reasonable defaults that can get you started in no time.

The problem is that every company (and certainly any company with more than a handful of employees), at some point, will want to adjust the tool to their use case and that's where the complexity comes in. If you can't adjust things like statuses and workflows, then you'll have issues with adoption.

All the best, this is an incredibly crowded and competitive scene.

This. This is what we think about, constantly. How do we maintain the low to zero config teams ask for flexibility. We are a few apple engineers on the founding team (I'm not), and they really want to follow the approach set by Mac OS. Overall, Tara won't be for everyone, but it's a fine line between balancing the intuitive simple design and use case adjustments/workflows. Could be considered a matrix with several trade-offs.

Do you offer tools/services to folks who want to transition off of JIRA? How painful will this be? How long would it take? How many resources will folks require?

These are some questions potential buyers will have, specially if they are transitioning from a tool like JIRA and related suite of tools. It might be a good idea to capture this on the homepage.

It's free and you're hiring people at the same time -- makes me wonder about your business model (or other goals?)

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