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

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-...

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

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.

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?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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