We did a clean Jira setup from scratch as set up by developers for developers. It was fine.
It wasn’t until the company hired full time TPMs who made it unnecessarily complicated with an endless list of plugins and processes that it got to be miserable.
The real killer was the way they wanted us to use it: They declared that only TPMs could move tickets, and only in meetings. So instead of us moving our own work along we had to queue it up and wait for an hour long meeting where we waited our turn to tell the TPM which tickets needed to be moved, then sparred with him in debate for 5 minutes as he tried to debate the done-ness with us through a game of 20 questions.
Repeat those meetings 3X a week and I developed a visceral objection to Jira. Only later did I realize that what I hated most was actually the pomp and ceremony that came with Jira-toting TPMs.
Jira itself wasn’t too bad when we used it efficiently on our own. The modern versions are much faster than the sluggish experience of the days of old
The response time for a "Create ticket" flow gets in the way, I like how snappy Trello feels, I can create a ticket in seconds with just shortcuts and a few keystrokes so it's pretty effortless to split a task in multiple tickets to be worked on. The clickety-clicky nature of Jira gets in the way for that, I need to click "Create", then select the "Project", then click on the modal's text box for writing the description, it doesn't support Markdown so I need to keep in mind (increasing the cognitive load) how Jira's formatting work. Then I need to click "Create" while checking the box "Create another" so I can keep the flow of adding more tickets.
Over time this workflow is fucking terrible, sometimes I avoid splitting some larger task into multiple tickets because I can't be bothered to go through this flow yet-again.
If Jira just simplified the way to create tickets, throwing them into an "Inbox" to be sorted later it'd improve the experience a lot, the way it's designed doesn't help to be fast with it and breaks my train of thought.
My workflow right now is to open a text editor, write down all the tickets I want to create, their descriptions, etc. and later I just copy-paste into Jira's UI when I have the energy to go through the whole song and dance of creating tickets.
It's death by a thousand cuts, the ergonomics of it is pretty bad.
Looking into moving over to GH issues or linear.
Jira's like guns: it can be used for good or evil. But given how bad the worst case can be, would you really want to leave a bunch of rifles lying around your company?
Perhaps people don't remember the days of bugzilla as a product, or various CA (computer associates) software. JIRA is bloated and probably inferior now, but it was a far superior option about 15 years ago.
Just recently I read a nice quote here on HN (paraphrasing):
Either you die young as a hero or you live long enough to become the villain
Like the Olympic biathlon.
Not sure about men's though.
That said, a good TPM is often worth more than a good engineer. Herding all the cats across multiple teams, projects, competing priorities, keeping track of stuff, holding and being held accountable. And part of a good TPM is to find the right way to work. Maybe it's Kanban. Maybe it's Scrum. Maybe it's Waterfall. Maybe it's a mixture of different methodologies, like waterboarding.
That was the whole point of "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools", finding the right way to work for your team. Jira has to deal with the fact that it's meant to be a tool that fits into any company, so it's generic/customizable, and I've seen too many teams go crazy on the customization, trying to model out a massively complicated process when the team really just needs Kanban with a few extra fields.
I don't hate Jira - I don't like it very much, but I acknowledge that a lot of Jira's issues boil down to mediocre PMs being in charge of it.
Having worked with a good TPM that can really make things happen was eye-opening - tools like Jira can work beautifully if they are setup properly.
I'm going to be thinking a lot about this notion. Thanks for the choice wording.
Not true for project management features like, for example, "velocity" measurements denominated in story points (unitless) over time (seconds). Management metrics bullshit seldom benefits a project. In feature-monster tools like JIRA you have to do a lot of work to un-feature a project and those features are still lurking.
That doesn't fix the horrible UX, sluggishness, confusing options, forms that present a lot of useless fields but don't give you the option to present other, more useful ones, ... I could go on.
Jira is a terrible tool.
The UX on modern JIRA has been fine for years, and the options and forms are easy to use. Granted, you can add useless restrictions and weird field configurations, but if someone configures it until it's broken, that would be on them, not really on the product.
Small companies where only a small(er) unit of people use Jira (cloud) is fine, large teams, large workflows, selfhosted or cloud: doesn’t matter. It was always terrible.
We actively discriminate against Jira in our company at the moment, and for us it works pretty good. But that is because it is not essential and we do not lean into it.
We do have all product owners meet up at least once each month and the project collaboration methods are often on the agenda to make sure we don't end up with too many different workflows that are essentially duplicates of each other. Besides the workflows (mostly oriented around kanban boards and backlogs) we just make sure that collaboration across teams use compatible workflows and epics so you don't have to copy-paste information and instead just share stuff.
Each individual team is no larger than 8 people, most are smaller.
I have been reading about how Jira is going to die for the last 10 years. It has not happened yet. And I don't foresee it happening in the near future - there are so many competitors in the graveyard: Asana, Monday, ClickUp, Product Board, Clubhouse, and Linear will be next.
There are no realistic peers to Jira for, developers or knowledge workers have to use the product , it only has to designed for the buyer , which atlassian does very well