Ask HN: What are you using to manage in your team the projects/features? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you using to manage in your team the projects/features?

50 pointsgls2ro48 comments

Hi HN,

What do you use to manage projects or features for your projects?

I am trying to discover some tools that maybe are a combination of Basecamp and Github/Gitlab issues.

I want to be able to have discussions there but to include also non-technical people, while also being able to plan for technical work.

I tried Asana, but it did not work in our team. It seemed very crowded UI.

We also tried various other projects, including Basecamp. It is the closest one to what I am looking for but the todolist management is a bit hard to use.

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I'm going to shill for my current employer, you should checkout Kitemaker[0]. The unique shtick is that our 'issues' are large collaborative documents (we call them work items) and are meant to track deliverables rather than development tasks. The idea is that a work item is created as soon as someone has an idea and all the exploratory work happens in the work item.

So it could start with someone writing down how a feature should work, then some designers creating some mock ups based on the discussion. Finally programmers can look at the description and the Figma designs and start implementing, with all the context still available. And since the document is created from the start, the entire team can start commenting throughout the whole process rather than at the very end when the jira ticket is created. It helps avoid stuff like this[1].

I obviously like it, but I am biased :).

[0] https://kitemaker.co

[1] https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-1052-what-didnt-end-up-...

The website kitemaker.co is super laggy in Firefox (101.0.1, Win11) and it slows down other open tabs as well. Not sure if it's just for me

Argh! Sorry about that! Our CEO likes to mess around with the landing page as we're still experimenting with our messaging. We're struggling to consciously describe how we are different.

We keep him away from actual product code ;), but we let him go mad with the landing page. I'll try to take a look on Monday to see what's up.

GitHub Projects Beta is incredible, the way you can slice and dice issues across an entire org and enforce custom metadata... It's great, it's one of the few products that does what it says on the tin and stays out of your way. They're adding custom workflows to it which will pretty much kill the need for any kind of issue tracking outside of GitHub, IMO.

Honestly, about the only thing GitHub is missing right now is time tracking, not sure why they haven't implemented it yet.

If you want an example, here's a projects board that I use across multiple repositories (one is public, the rest get hidden) to build Homechart: https://github.com/orgs/candiddev/projects/6/views/1

Same - projects that span repos + GitHub wiki are great for the PM side, and being inside github is great for the developer side.

An important part is that Graphistry's devops is largely run via GitHub actions triggered by PR labels as well (ex: pr label -> you have a new copy of production running), so lifecycle visibility comes as part of working vs extra documentation effort.

The tools I've used since 2001:

- Fogbugz

- Unfuddle

- Pivotal Tracker

- Bugzilla

- Redmine

- JIRA

- Linear

- Basecamp

- Spreadsheet

- GitHub Issues

- Codetree (I ran this)

- Zenhub

- Shortcut

Probably missing a few. I've settled on Shortcut for now (formerly Clubhouse). It's a good balance between the "bag of bolts" JIRA approach and the "one way to do things" take that Pivotal Tracker has. Shortcut gives you sane defaults but with enough customization to suit reasonable workflows.

One trend that I don't really get is dev teams using general purpose tools like Trello or Asana to run their software projects. Sure, it's possible to do. But I find it much more sensible to use a purpose-built tool that understands the kinds of first-class objects (Issues, PRs, Comments, Workflows, Workflow Stages, Tasks). Makes life a lot easier.

Certainly there are some team aspects to take into account, but I've worked on several projects as the sole developer with multiple (3-5+) non-technical stakeholders, and Trello has been the best for that setup. Commenting is intuitive, even folks who've never used Trello before understand the columns/swimlanes reasonably well, and it's usually pretty easy to get them to attach documents, provide feedback, etc. all within an individual card.

Agreed, the one exception to my take on purpose-built tools is if you're the only dev and working with non-technical folks.

Having workflow enforced in the dev tool is important when it comes to a team of devs imho... especially if you're managing the team.

Does Shortcut have any support for formal requirements management (e.g. ISO9001 support)?

The R4J plugin for JIRA saves a ton of headache around that... but Shortcut looks nice so thought worth checking.

Kudos for building Codetree! I used it about 2017-2018. It helped meto manage a roadmap of GitHub issues.

Awesome, nice to see a former customer here! =)

I’ve used clubhouse (now shortcut), and really liked it. My current place uses Jira. Not a fan.

From your requirements “have discussions there but to include also non-technical people, while also being able to plan for technical work” almost every single task management system would work. Can you give more specifics?

+1 for Shortcut/Clubhouse. Simple. Uncluttered. Made our planning really easy to visualise.

I will take a look at Shortcut and see how it fits.

For context: in almost all project (including side projects) where I am involved we are using ShapeUp.

We start with a general description of what we want to solve and what value will bring to the user. This is mostly shaped as a conversation between multiple people designers, developers, business managers.

Then we (technical) take that and create a kind of technical pitch in a format close to an RFC where we discuss and solve any architectural challenges or we define the API (it depends). Here I need to have something that has a better support for code highlighting as we sometimes use code samples. Basecamp has a very simple code highlighting support and it also does not support per line comments. Thus a discussion around the RFC can have only parent comments and we sometimes hit 20-30 comments (we mostly work async remote).

Then once RFC is agreed we need to do a high level planning of the changes needed to be done per each system.

And from there each team will create one or many PRs where the work is done. Thus from this point on the progress can only be seen in Github (or Gitlab).

So in a way from the moment the first line of code is written you can see the state of the project only in Git. Someone has to manually update Basecamp or we also tried this: create a Todo in Basecamp for each Github issue and linked them together.

Maybe what I want it does not exists!

There's a lot of Atlassian hate out there and it does cost money as you grow as well. They can solve many of these things within their toolchain though. Disclaimer: I do not work for Atlassian.

Confluence allows you to create such an RFC document where everyone has edit access and there's history. You can embed technical drawings easily (e.g. draw.io diagrams directly edited - or externally) in Confluence and showing inline as well. Of course especially if you grew up with the great old editor, the new one sucks, as it's all WYSIWYG now and it has a few bugs and idiosyncrasies - nothing is perfect. Syntax highlighting in Atlassian products supports many languages and I find is totally 'good enough'. You can comment on any string (highlight whatever you want and add an inline comment on it). There's no threading in such comments but you can have a conversation i.e. one long thread on such comments. The comment section on the bottom of each page even has threading.

Of course everyone here hates Confluence and Atlassian.

Jira will help you if you do want to do task tracking after that. That's an if. You don't have to if you are happy w/ just having PRs in Github. But if you want to show progress automatically linked in a tool that is more accessible to business people it can be as simple as opening a mostly empty task in Jira and hooking up Github/Bitbucket to it. It will automatically link your PRs, commits and branches to the ticket, if you just include the ticket number in the branch name/commits/PR. You can even transition tickets through commit message comments if you really really hate Jira and don't mind having those in your commit messages. Of course you will have people that think it's way too much bureaucrazy to include a ticket number in commit messages and such but I find it's a very tiny 'price' to pay for visibility across an org that does not purely consist of technical people.

Of course everyone here hates Jira and Atlassian.

If you want to keep using Github, use that. I found Bitbucket's UI and UX much better with the caveat that this only applies to Bitbucket's Server product not the Cloud version.

So if you can see past the hate for corporate bureaucracy that can be implemented using Atlassian tools and use these tools for good within your organization, you have a pretty neat toolchain at your fingertips.

I wouldn't say that I hate Atlassian but I didn't get on with either Confluence or Jira. I think now that web applications have become so advanced, we are starting to suffer from subtle UX issues that are not necessarily easy to pin-down.

Some issues are oobvious like too many clicks; not putting common operations in the same part of the screen; general latency, especially when you need to use too many clicks.

But the ones I am talking about are more like how does this UI representation match the way I see these things in my head. Trello works because tasks to most people are post-it notes or index cards, as soon as you end up adding a lot of fluff to contain the extra options, it feels jarring even if it is conceptually the same thing. Lots of tools offer the "quick add" function and this can help but unless I feel that I can quickly achieve what I need with a tool, I won't use it even if I can't say exactly why.

Totally agree with things like cards and such. Fun part is that Jira has had this as an add on for much longer than some people realize. Probably because they were in companies that did not let them use that or did not let them use it in an effective way. It started as a plugin called GreenHopper and Atlassian bought them, which is now just "Jira Software".

What I'm talking about is a simple Kanban board, where the cards are the Jira issues. If you use a simple workflow (such as the default "Open, In Progress, Done", which you can transition in any way you want) you are set very quickly. Simply create a Kanban board and you're basically at Trello.

Now I get it, because of Jira's legacy and what it can do, it can be overwhelming how to configure it. I am biased there because I've been using it for such a long time, including as someone w/ admin privileges) that I know what to do to achieve what our team wants/needs almost instantly and if I have admin privileges I can either do it myself really quickly or I can tell someone w/ privileges what to do so that we get what we want - if the hierarchy is flat enough :), so I have no huge friction to achieve these things with the tool.

I have the opposite problem usually with other tools. Things I take for granted I can do with the Atlassian toolchain are impossible or have been requested from other tools for years and not been implemented. An easy example is Github. They had no "File Explorer" view in PRs. All just a big page you scroll through. It's impossible to do a proper PR that way if you ask me. We've had this since Crucible days in the Atlassian toolchain. And yes, finally Github does have it too now and I can easily navigate back and forth between files while cross referencing things. Github Actions vs. Bamboo. Just so rudimentary in comparison. It has some really nice features out of the box that Atlassian only added later on but is lacking in many other areas. Awesome to have the ability to specify actions directly in your repo (in `.github/`) but I can't easily see old failed builds through my PR (this is important, yes builds fail and I need to cross reference them and I don't want to go to a filter UI somewhere outside my PR). This seems to basic. While I can define workflows through code, I can't properly introduce one on a branch. I have to cheat to get it onto `master` first.

I'm a fractional CTO consultant and have turned into a major shill for Linear — I always recommend it to teams of the right profile (3-4+ developer teams open to change and eager to improve efficiency). It's such a refined product, that a lot of process and communication issues tend to dissolve after switching (from say Jira) to Linear.

Tools don't solve everything with any team, but bad tools can encumber a team and hamstrung potential.

We use Microsoft Azure Dev Ops Boards. It's okay for the engineers but pretty crap outside of that at a project/business level. So much so that we revert back to Trello almost as a layer above dev ops but that duplicates the information we store about sprints/cards etc. Not ideal

Would love to hear from anybody who has found a way to make Microsoft dev ops sing at a project management level!

Our Product Team use Devops, particular the "Features" part which makes it easier to organise at a high level but also you can easily link to other PBIs created to implement those features.

My experience is really related to people's willingness to try things out. Most objections I have had to using these tools relate to technophobes or simply people who don't like it and won't use it!

We also use Azure DevOps. Where I work, developers, testers, designers, product owners, product managers and so on all use it without too many issues. It helps that you can create a hierarchy, with epics and features being more high-level, and user stories and tasks being more low-level. This allows people in different roles to work at a level of abstraction that works for them.

That said, we also maintain high-level roadmaps in ProductPlan, which we've found to be more suitable for non-tech stakeholders, since it lets you quite easily see where projects sit on a timeline and the dependencies involved.

We do a similar thing. Engineering tracking is done through AZDO, but roadmap management is done in another tool with some sort of integration between the two.

Would love to hear more about this - how do you integrate the two?

This is a horrible tool, and it's highly likely that everyone actually hates it but just doesn't want to say anything.

Glad to hear it's not just some members of team who struggle with it!

What do you prefer?

I think for me Trello is the only tool that makes it hard for managers to turn into a hellscape.

I've been using GitHub Issues (and their new Projects feature) more and more. It's far from perfect, but I really value the colocation of code + task management it allows. I like being able to reference issues/PRs by # in markdown comments - it feels more natural to leave "breadcrumbs" this way so that others can follow the chain of events when trying to piece something together.

One thing we've done internally, for all tasks that aren't tied to a repo (because GitHub issues must belong to a repo), we created an "internal" repo that's a catchall for tasks not necessarily tied to a codebase.

The Projects view then let's us plan work across multiple codebases and this "non-codebase" repo

We've had a really great experience with https://constructor.dev/

I don't have any affiliation with the founders; I just really like the product.

Their UI is clean, and I love their commitment to making complexity 'opt-in'. Their integrations are helpful, and it comes across as a task-tracking applications that does a good job of getting out of the way and keeping the focus on the work and the communication.

Constructor co-founder here – thanks for the shout-out, Peretus! Seeing customer feedback like this is a great way to start my day.

For anyone who doesn't know us, we have an unhealthy obsession with simplicity and set out to build something as conceptually simple as Trello but with much better usability, and specifically for software teams.

We recently switched from Gitlab issues + Trello to Linear. The reason was mostly that issues were spread out over multiple repositories and if an issue scope spanned multiple repositories it was always unclear where to put it. With Linear we have one source of truth, review our board of issues at the beginning of the week and don't have to worry about Gitlab issues staying open while the Trello card was archived.

On top of that it is super fast and a joy to use.

My new product, Kandoop (at https://www.Kandoop.com and on the app stores). It uses a cards-in-boards model, and is intended to be full life-cycle from an individual with an idea, to team task/project management, and curated publishing (custom "news feeds" that are intended to be a clean view for executive stakeholders, partners or customers). One of the key features is that "lists" of cards (boards contain lists, lists contain cards) can be attached to more than one board, so everyone can create the optimized view for their role. Example of when that's helpful include manager <-> direct-reports task views, where the manager wants everyone's list in a single view, but can't share the whole board with everyone due to private info. So the lists are shared with the relevant team member, who can put that list in their own personal to-do board, while the manager can create a board with all of their direct reports' lists.

We are using a mixture of Linear[0] and the software we are building ourselves - Saga[1].

Linear is pretty slick piece of software that feels fast, well designed and more opinionated compared to Jira or other alternatives. It has great support for keyboard shortcuts.

Saga is a documents / notes app and each feature or ticket is a separate page. The tool has automatic hyperlinking, so every time you mention a specific task or a ticket, a link to it will be created on the fly. It also combines tickets/tasks with other notes and documents in one place.

[0] https://linear.app

[1] https://saga.so

We use our own product - Okappy - to manage our projects and features. It is actually designed for field service management. We didn't use it to manage our own work to start off with as we thought we had to use a "proper" feature tracking software. However I would really recommend using your own software whenever you can as it can really help your understanding of how your own customers see your product.

We always welcome feedback so if you do want access, let me know at richard.harris@okappy.com https://www.okappy.com

We use ProductBoard and Shortcut right now.

I've found two keys to success:

* Separate tools for high-level product/business planning (ProductBoard) and the project-to-project and day-to-day tasks (Shortcut).

* Keep things as simple as possible.

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For us, I (an EM) coordinate product priorities with our PM in ProductBoard. We manage things at the week to month level here. The PM's goal is to ensure there's always enough work available. Mine is to figure who and how much. We work together on the "when".

When we move to the delivery phase, we have engineers track it in a task management tool (Shortcut). Large stories get broken down into smaller tasks.

Youtrack, from jetbrains https://www.jetbrains.com/youtrack/

I'd say the biggest thing I'm missing in it is a chrono. We track our time worked per tasks and I've been told Jira provides a chrono to do that for you.

I'm using clocking in org-mode anyway, so it's easy to report. But it would be nice if it was provided by the tool itself.

How fast is it? As someone that's only used their Youtrack to look up information about their IDEs (like by landing there from Google) I've found it glacially slow.

It is slow. Sometimes it even completely fails to reflect updates in the UI after you confirm and the infinite scroll used for dashboards often fails to load swimlanes without telling you.

I don't remember having to complain because of its slowness.

Some operations can take times, such as computing a burndown report, but I don't have comparison with another tool to say if it's slow or not.

It may not be as bad now, back in the day I remember it taking >5s to load an issue, compared to <1s for bugzilla.

We’re pretty happy with Clickup as the non-tech people also know how to use it. Also a lot of the automations and integrations are pretty well done.

All I have ever used is a priority list. It works great. And you can turn any tool (JIRA etc.) into a priority list. So I don’t care what tool I am forced to use :) However if the tool supports Kanban then I will use that.

Try https://notik.app. It merges a project overview and a very simple and easy to use project management model. Also if you email me at contact@notik.app I can personally help you get started.

Apologies for self-promotion, but I’m building the exact product you describe:

- project focused

- GitHub style discussion threads

- slightly more powerful tasks than Basecamp

- simple/minimal design

Currently in closed beta (macroapp.io) however you can drop me an email james@macroapp.io and I can give you access.

My manager uses excel, yes he is the reincarnation of the Office Space guy.

The world runs on Excel to be honest... it kinda sucks how "the actual solution that almost every one 'out there' uses" is so under-represented here..

Have used just about everything at one time or another since Fogbugz back in the day. Recently canned Jira at current shop and went through several rounds of "what's next" with the team. The goal was not to find something everyone liked but to arrive at something everyone could agree sucked just a bit less than Jira.

TL;DR We arrived at Google Projects Beta and to our collective surprise just about everyone likes it a lot. Took a bit of experimentation with custom fields to setup — what makes our boards sing is the timeseries custom field type. Makes it easy to map our long term goals over the individual data points.

One minor quibble we solved with some name spacing conventions for issue titles to make it easier to scan a gird of issue titles and see what are "parent" issues and what are "task" issues.

Summary of our decision making process:

Jira

Because of complexity, at the mercy of the individuals putting the most time in Jira doing the setting up, organizing, creating tasks, managing workflows, etc. This encourages top-down flow, not team collaboration.

Has a lot of structure and opinions about data buckets and workflows. This is optimized for project managers types managing engineering types. Encourages treating engineers as a fungible commodity (imo).

To state an opinion bluntly, terrible tool for non-engineering tasks. Which engineering tasks should be synergizing with.

Trello

Easy, everyone can use and understand. Without creating a whole bunch of additional structure, happy path is a hodgepodge of cards organized loosely. This scales very badly.

Creating structure in Trello mirrors the mind of the person who does the structuring...per board. A single team might have a nice snowflake to be proud of but diffs between teams/boards can be jarring. At the organization scope you still have hodgepodge.

Shortcut

Easy, anyone can use, people like to use, different disciplines can use, comes with Just Enough™ structure, organized view from any scope (org level down to specific teams over to specific sprints down to specific individuals), easy to zoom in/out....

Gitea looks good. I'm going to try it myself.

obsidian with excalidraw plguin

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