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Comment by Mandatum | Hacker News Reader

If you need to use a product like this with JIRA, JIRA isn’t for you.

From what we've seen, it's a control thing. IT or execs want control & reporting. So they force everyone on Jira.

But then the people actually working day-to-day need flexibility. So they end up creating extra spreadsheets off on the side where they work, but those get out-of-date.

During broad pre-build research (even beyond Jira), we found that spreadsheets consistently shadowed the real data in SaaS apps -- ranging from Jira to HR software and everything in between.

It can be the other way round. Our team wanted to use Jira (although it got used mostly like Trello) but the boss wouldn't read it and forced an engineer to manually update a spreadsheet at the same time while running a QA team. This product might have been a godsend during that scenario.

Ugh. Yeah, this is more common than one would hope. I met someone with a Masters in CS who worked at a public database company whose primary role was to keep the spreadsheet up-to-date with Jira data. What a waste of talent!

They would have automated their job and probably working on something else. I've used JIRA's API to spit out reports when people have demanded they fit in their "Agile enterprise project management" Excel templates.

It was a two-directional affair for them. Not just about reporting to a spreadsheet, but also about be able to shift things around during a meeting and then "sync" back at the end of the meeting. So a lot of stuff that's hard to automate, sadly.

This is literally the worst. I came from a background where we used google slides to present roadmaps and they'd get stale within hours. Live data visualization is supremely more efficient; no one wants to build those reports on a daily basis.

Damn. Talk about hitting the nail on the head. This describes so much of life.

It's like taking the concept of materialized views in databases and applying it to all of life's little data pools. The data is what matters, and Jira is a tool for materializing in a certain way. But often, it's just as important to allow to be materialized and managed in a completely different way (spreadsheet views).

I love this and am going to pitch it hard to our product team. Thank you!

Really glad to hear it resonates. I hope it saves your team some time and makes things run smoother. Feedback is very welcome! There's an in-product Feedback button that submits right to our CRM / slack channel.

Jira lacks all sorts of table stakes features, like the ability to view your backlog grouped by epics.

So anything that lets me use the Jira data that I'm forced to create, but in effective ways outside of Jira, is a win.

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