No visible privacy/security policy. I'm going to trust confidential company information to somebody on the net who doesn't address privacy and security concerns on the very first page? No, I'm not.
Yes exactly, Matterhorn's niche is really for managing multiple projects at once, allowing you to have global overview as well as allowing you to focus in on what needs doing in the moment
Disappointed to see it's a saas app with no ability to self-host. For project management I think information is too confidential to be using a third party cloud provider.
I'll keep it bookmarked though, perhaps my attitude in this regard is out of date.
It's not. We've just received a new project which forced us to redo our whole company IT and go back to Selfhosted Solutions in a ISO 27001 Datacenter. (luckily the company that datacenter belongs to is in our building and provides our internet, so we have direct network access to the servers)
Atlassian is so successful in a big part due to their self-hosting option.
I agree, we self host Jira and Confluence for all our sensitive stuff. We'd love to self host our HipChat but the price is just a bit rich right now, so we make sure the teams don't post sensitive stuff there.
Protonet got 3 Mio EUR last year in a crowd funding campaign in Germany for their NAS + collaboration software, with a clear marketing focus on privacy ... so no, it's still a market ;)
Yeah, we got a Protonet Maya some time ago and it's been pretty much a paperweight + expensive wireless router so far. The software is ambitious but ultimately useless.
Funny enough, our biggest boost in communication came from starting using Slack. That thing is amazing, and getting creative with integrations is awesome. It's a somewhat important part of our workflow now.
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I've been looking for a long a time for a good PM software that is standalone (personal use) or can be self-hosted (easy setup a must). Cloud hosting is a show-stopper when you're in a large company.
Did you realize that your demo page for Collabtive does not allow the user to choose their language? It appears to default to Chinese for the user interface.
Because lawyers, pointy hair bosses and so on. Someone simply makes a policy somewhere that all company data should reside on company machines, and no other companies' should share servers, server rooms or ops staff with ours. I'm not saying it makes any sense at all, but this actually happens.
Looks promising. Seems vaguely Trello-ish. Can you compare and contrast? Specifically, why would I pay for this when I get Trello for free? And Trello has a really good API. Anything comparable here?
Hey there, I'd say the key difference between Matterhorn and Trello is that Matterhorn is more aimed at allowing a team to maintain multiple projects at once - for example overviewing the progress of all your projects at once and planning your project from a global planner rather than having to set due dates on individual tickets.
This sounds very good. I see a calendar icon but wonder what the calendar actually looks like. A limited trial may help potential users answer questions like that. Either way, impressive and will keep an eye on this.
First thought: you've priced it quite ambitiously. A 10 user team would be $90/month, compared to $20 for JIRA + JIRA Agile, $42 for Asana premium, $50 for Trello business (or free for normal trello), $35 for Pivotal Tracker, ...
(Which isn't to say it necessarily should be cheaper, only that it seems surprising to see that price without any attempt to compare or justify why you believe that e.g. it's already, at launch, worth 3x as much as Pivotal Tracker).
Agree 100%. Additionally, unless you also ship with substantial APIs, you'll be a nonstarter in the enterprise market, which demands interfaces to other systems (perhaps including code reviews, static analysis, source control (Git[hub], SVN, etc), ticketing, labor/time tracking, resource planning & allocation, SQA testing & validation, human resources, and whatever standard auth (SAML, OAuth, OpenID, LDAP)).
Your pricing is also too high for a large org, especially when one could use something like Phabricator for free. This doesn't even get into MS Project or document management (MS Office? Google Drive?).
Long story short, this looks like a good start and may work well for SMBs, but definitely not a big company.
Just as an aside, my company has just spend several hundred thousand dollars licensing a well-known product & portfolio management (PPM) app. Not surprisingly, all the project managers were 100% in favor of this spend. Also not surprisingly, all the apps management were against it.
Also as an aside, in most large companies, PPM is handled 100% separately, and by different people, than actual product management and dev planning/resource allocation/bug fixing/testing/support/etc.
Be careful with interfaces and enterprise clients. They are both very slippery slopes at first and generally unnecessary unless you're really targeted there (which it appears you are not).
Agreed, Jira is pretty hard to beat for small teams and has a large base of plugins and integrations. This looks really cool but needs something a bit more to really stand out. Maybe at $5/user it could take off.
I'm not the OP, but the last fintech startup I worked at used the hosted version. It was slow (server and client side), a memory hog in the browser, every extra feature was more $$$.
It took a few weeks to get a suitable workflow set up, and in spite of my gripes it's one of the best issue trackers around. I miss working with it on other projects.
What I really want is a fast and lightweight Jira.
I've unfortunately had the same experience with hosted JIRA.
If there should be one place in the world where JIRA runs quickly, it should be on Atlassian's own hosting platform, yet I continue to be amazed at how slow it can be.
Jira is insanely configurable - if using jira is painful, that means that your jira admin has not configured it well for your workflow.
The config my company is using makes it somewhat more pleasant than stock bugzilla or trac (though not nearly as convenient as github issues was).
The amount of crap you can turn on if you like can make the interface completely unusable, of course. But that's true in anything with a lot of configurability. It's the cost of being able to build your own process onto the tool.
Small teams generally not looking to pay someone to spend a long time configuring their tools. Configurability is good, but I'd rather have sensible defaults if I can only have one.
Jira screens & workflow can be configured as simply as you would like, enabling advanced features as the team grows. If you had a bad Jira experience, it may have been due to those who came up with development policies, rather than the software which implemented those policies. Any specific issues with the software itself?
Interesting - we switched TO jira about a year ago (onsite version), and I love it. Yes, it took time to set up our workflow, but I find it does both the small tasks (day-to-day management and issue tracking) and large tasks (cross-team planning) very well, while other tools we used fall down on one or the other. Also, it integrates with everything under the sun.
Both, unfortunately. But if given the choice, I'd go with JIRA, simply because I know
of no better solution. To clarify, maybe there are better tools, but it's not my job
to assess all the PM tools out there.
At my current job we use Jira and personally I think it's a pretty good product, at least for a SCRUM workflow. Definitely beats any similar tools I've used in the past. I think the scrum board looks clear, it's easy to create user stories and tasks and it's also easy to switch between an operational and strategic workflow.
We also use Confluence which also seems to do it's job properly as a wiki.
I'm personally considering using Jira for my own projects in the future.
I know a _lot_ about JIRA. I worked at Atlassian for almost four years, in engineering management and product management roles. (Left in 2011, if you care).
JIRA is a total nightmare to configure sensibly, and the UX is complex enough that there's a real learning curve to get your team using it effectively.
The kicker is, that once the combination of JIRA, JIRA Agile, and Confluence are setup correctly, and your team is using them well, there's nothing else like it. It's spectacular for:
- tying specs to issues to code
- surfacing status to non-devs sensibly
- allowing interested folk to keep abreast of projects without having to attend meetings
- getting rid of huge messy email conversations
- figuring out "why the hell did we do that?!"
I'd recommend JIRA + JIRA Agile + Confluence to any team with more than 10 members, with the caveat that you need to find/hire an expert to configure the product and help your team use it effectively.
ninja edit: JIRA will allow you to faithfully model+enforce your fucked-up development process. So, badly-configured JIRA can be one of the least fun experiences of your working life.
How would you say TFS (Team Foundation Server) and related tools compare to JIRA? I'm working through TFS training right now and haven't found too many weaknesses with it as of yet.
Please help - where can I learn to configure our setup correctly? I think our Agile is pretty ok but the integration with Confluence is almost zero. Where do I find an expert to help with the setup?
I've been a JIRA user for years, and I love it. Rather than turning down jobs over their choice of ticket tracker, consider it an opportunity - take the job and convince them to switch to what you want to use. I made the case for JIRA at several employers because I got tired of less feature-rich alternatives, and the productivity gains were always substantial.
For the past two years we have been developing a commercial product that we consider to be a Jira replacement. It is much faster, as easy to use as Facebook, and profoundly more intuitive to work with and learn. Plus it provides full PSA capability (time, billing, expenses, forecasting/scheduling), and can be used for to model the entire business process, not just software development.
Like anything else, there are things we've chosen not to implement in a V1 release, that we will add in later releases. We focused on differentiating ourselves in the market, not just doing a better job of what Jira does.
So, there is hope. :) It's 'real'. It's awesome. And it's just a few months from Release.
What do you pay 10 people in a month? Probably somewhere between $60,000 and $100,000? Is the $90 vs $20 really that big of a difference? Especially if it's a good tool that helps your team be slightly more productive.
I'm not saying that it will, I haven't tried it so I have no idea. I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.
This logic is sound, but any product will be compared price-wise to its competitors if all marketing statements are taken at face value (e.g. they all offer the same benefit of allowing you to manage your projects).
$70 dollars is a lot in some organizations. Far more than it should be when compared to the overall budget. Even if a 1% boost in productivity would realize $600 to $1000 in savings, the penny wise culture in many organizations would be stuck trying to swallow a $70 payment.
> I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.
The problem is businesses don't just buy 1 tool for their team, they probably buy dozens, and if each one costs and additional $90 per team of ten that adds up quickly. Save money where you can especially when the results are the same.
A perhaps more salient example is one we faced last year: do we switch from Eclipse to IntelliJ? Nearly all of the Java developers we asked preferred IntelliJ. That's ok, no problem ... but we're facing switching 300 people from a free IDE to one that costs several hundred dollars, for internal appdev (not a product company, so all of the above hits the SG&A opex spend ... which the street always wants to be minimal). So, 300x$400, the 150X$400 MSDN subscriptions we have for the MS guys, plus ~1500 MS servers, plus about 300 RHEL servers, plus .... The point is, it all add up, and as Patrick (patio11) has noted several times, large companies much prefer bulk, one time POs to subscriptions. Being able to forecast and accrue for both Capex & Opex is extremely important in many large, thin margin companies, especially ones that are not IT-centric.
Your servers are the lion's share of your opex, so buy the licenses. That said, if Eclipse is working for you, I'm surprised the CE edition of Intellij isn't fine, too.
Of course, if the results are the same, you should decide on price.
But software isn't a commodity product. Each one has strengths and weaknesses. I'm just surprised at the amount of price sensitivity considering a difference of 30 seconds a day between one tool and the other more than makes up for the price difference.
Realistically this tool will be very rough around the edges because its new. All new apps are never polished, and this might not even still be around in 6-12 months. There will be feature requests, bugs to work around, other deficiencies (and some efficiencies as well). $9 per user is a lot to ask for something that is unproven when there are competitors that have a track record for less. Im just being honest this are all things that go in when I consider buying software for my team. And reiterating that this would be only one of many tools I have to buy to keep the wheel on the bus.
This is exactly how I feel. From the marketing, it seems to be exactly what my team needs. But I've got a 50 person team and we're all currently limping along using trello. $450/month is a big spend for something unproven. We're currently leaning heavily towards JIRA, but I haven't pulled the trigger yet.
Which I still wouldn't do. It's a commodity, engine oil, and largely the same between brands. Ditto with PM software. Or most any other software.
If the creators of Matterhorn can continue to shelve egos, keep effecting some humble sincerity and focus on why their tool is better, we may find it's an exception to that rule.
Edit: clarified that the devs are already showing low-ego and sincerity - I realized my wording didn't suggest that earlier.
>Which I still wouldn't do. It's a commodity, engine oil, and largely the same between brands. Ditto with PM software. Or most any other software.
As a former mechanic I would like to point out a flaw in your way of thinking about engine oil as a commodity similar across the board.
Regular engine oils vary in overall quality not due to the oil itself being of substantially better or worse quality itself, but because of the different combinations of surfactants and detergents that the varying brands use, and molecular uniformity allowing tighter tolerances in the engineered part using the oil in question.
The more expensive the motor oil, the less it chemically looks like crude oil until you get to the most expensive types of oils (synthetics), which aren't crude based at all but synthesized using the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Precision engineered parts require synthetic oils. It's akin to placing your smartphone face down on an asphalt sidewalk. At high speeds and temperatures the contaminants in a lower grade oil will destroy the car that calls for the 50 dollar oil cans, and it'd be ill advised to ignore the need for it.
Except, the other sandwich costs 5 dollars, and as far as we can tell, will cause our cars to make the same amount more money as the 50 dollar sandwich, so we need at least some kind of value proposition between the two sandwiches if we are to favor the 50 dollar one. (It's actually quite fun to be reasoning about this at ~2 cuils of overextended analogy.)
I assume that is what the free trial is for. Which would be analogous to getting one free $50 sandwich to test out. Granted, there is the cost of switching from feeding your car a $5 sandwich to feeding it a $50 one considering the sandwich-to-gas converter has to learn how to eat each sandwich. (Is there a word for discussing a point using absurd analogies?)
The difference is $7/person. If the tool saves them 10 minutes over the course of a month, it's paid for itself.
It's more like paying a construction worker $100 an hour and then giving him a hammer that costs $5 instead of $10, but only drives nails at half the speed because it's too light.
If you're already able to pay salaries, you probably don't care, but for small side-project type startups without any funding but with a few people contributing, it's a _big_ difference.
I suspect this is why JIRA has very different pricing for <=10 and >10 users.
Well I don't think that comparing costs this way makes too much sense. Running a successful business requires having more income than spendings. If you can achieve the same thing with $20 instead of $90 than you found a potential competitive advantage, even though not a huge one. :) Being frugal works very well for many corporations, including Amazon. I don't see that priced justified compare to JIRA based on the feature list of this tool.
when we do project cost estimations at the large medical device development company I work at, we use $15,000 per person month. so to answer your question, 10 people would cost $150,000.
so this just further proves your point that some large corporations are less price sensitive than others.
Totally agree with you, yet here is anecdotal evidence: as soon as I introduced it, Slack has had huge success in our company, yet when the time came for getting into paid tier (20 seats), the answer was a resounding "no" from the top of the chain.
I completely agree with you. The project management niche already has a lot of players and I don't see why I should pay double the price when the product i'm getting doesnt have the feature set to justify it.
I run a ~15 person startup, and my first thought was "huh, that's reasonable." And didn't think anything else about it. Shit, we pay hundreds for glorified databases for ATS and several other products. I really think pricing it lower will just push you to a less-valuable userbase.
The lower priced clients can be more demanding and less focused by asking for features they don't really need or use.
It would be nice to track feature requests against customer application engagement as well as uptake by said customer. Attempting to make everyone happy leads to MS like products.
I think it's totally the right thing to do. They can always adjust their price as the market dictates (where "market" is people who do/don't pay for the product, not HN comments).
Way better to charge and learn about what paying customers want, rather than make it cheap and hope to eventually convert them.
I'm working hard enough for our company to pay $2 per user for HipChat.
$9 per user is very expensive when it comes to these services at scale. I can see this on a team of 10-15 people, but certainly not on a company wide basis.
Isn't project management software a solved problem already?
Seems like all this effort on these type of pm systems could have been applied to some niche market that's still using custom MS Access systems built in the early 2000s.
Not to criticize those who have worked on project management systems in the past, but I've found that most systems are generally pretty painful for me. Generally the project management "systems" that work best for me is something like a shared Evernote checklist or org-mode, but those aren't nearly as good for clients/teams to use.
One of the things that I've often encountered is a granularity/association problem: tasks often become either Omnibus tasks where there's a shitload of stuff jammed into a single task, or a spread out mishmash of related tasks that don't have very good linking between them.
A good example would be a web development feature. I'm going to do the backend, someone else is going to do the frontend. Those are two pretty distinct tasks, but there's a lot of shared communication there. And most PM systems I've used don't have a (good) way to link those together. Mostly in my experience, 3rd party tools end up getting used, with links to shared wiki/moqups/google docs/dropbox whatever.
If I need to have 7 tabs open (email, slack, trello, moqups, google docs...) to get all the information I need to figure out what I need to work on next, my PM system isn't serving me very well.
I wouldn't say project management is really a solved problem, and definitely wouldn't claim that Matterhorn solves 100% of all problems with project management systems.
The biggest issue we had in our team was that some team members are just slowed down by having to use a project management tool and would much prefer to just have a written checklist on their desk, but obviously this causes a lot of issues when you're trying to keep track of what's been done and what hasn't. The planner was created to help circumvent this issue, when tickets are assigned to a user and planned for a certain date they become a checklist on that user's dashboard. This way we were able to let checklisters do their thing uninterrupted and still have their progress tracked on the board and the general product overview.
Tasks becoming either omnibus or overly fragmented is familiar to us too. Matterhorn has a feature grouping system that can help but it always comes down to how you use them. It might be an interesting problem to solve for the future.
Heh, the written checklist is definitely something I can relate to! I'll probably give this a try, it seems like you've had some of the same issues I've had :)
Project management is a market that defies solving.
Every company (and person!) has their own workflows and requirements, or there'd be no way for businesses to differentiate themselves on operational efficiency. It's possible to encode those workflows into very flexible systems like Jira, but as is usually the case, that comes at a large cost in design and ease of use.
This creates a market for thousands of small project management solutions, each a well-designed, slimmed down service, often equivalent to a particular customization of ClearCase or Asana but far easier to set up and use.
You're completely correct, but when the software is just a band-aid for the fact that work is hard and planning it is harder - well, you can sell all kinds of band-aids.
It might be solved somewhere but the problem is for each business to find what software solves it for them. I've been evaluating a switch from a mix of little tools and found no package yet that solves all our business needs. Example: we use four teams with staggered sprint times, so planning, burndowns should allow for that (multi team planning and scheduling on a single project). A lot of tools are out already at that point TFS is one tool with excellent multi-team scrum, but last time I checked TFS didn't even account for weekends in its burndowns. A bug/omission like that left unattended for several releases isn't encouraging. So were still searching.
> Isn't project management software a solved problem already?
Not even remotely. By and large because you'll have technical and non-technical people using the same tool for projects that have multiple audiences. There will always be room for change and improvements, and people are always willing to spend money on those types of things. It's sort of a bottomless well of revenue for companies that create this type of software.
Looks great, very appealing landing page, message is passed clearly.
Feedback stuff:
1) agree with pricing plan, too high for large teams
2) call for action - I saw the "sign in" button immediately, but had to scroll all the way down for sign up, will be nice to have a floating sign up button just next to sign in, and in the sign in page, have a link such as "not registered? sign up here" in case people click the wrong button.
3) this is more due to my personal taste, but no gmail sign up is lowering my will to spend time to test the product. I want to click click, play with it a few mins, and if it's good suggest it to my team. I don't have time to fill a form (I'm exaggerating a little, but this goes through a lot of people's mind, filling forms is annoying for some people)
4) I'd like to see a demo the product. having a dummy project that anyone can see with a "guest" login will be really great. (good if you are not willing to add gmail login for any reason)
5) if not a demo, at least a video. the gif is great, so I think a longer video will be even better, seems like a very slick UI.
all in all looks great, I like the hybrid approach, will give it a look.
Hey, thanks for great advice. Demo is a really great idea, we're planning to expand the landing page with more info but went for an early launch just to test the waters. Ended up with a lot more attention than anticipated :)
I have to disagree with you on 1), benefits of this software kick in way better when you have large team, the price is too much for smaller teams, when you have large team you are happy to pay.
I think free for teams till 3 would be nice, I think pivotal was for long time resisting this and had to cave in, that is the only way I will start using it and be in position to recommend for team.
Didn't give much thought to the matching of the avatars to their role, just wrote tham out as they popped into my head :) I'm the female frontend developer that wrote it so I should know!
I agree, this is the first thing that jumped out at me when I was looking at the landing page. I don't know of quantitative evidence that this sort of thing causes harm, but I don't see any harm in mixing it a bit.
Yeah - the whole frontend (and API) running over HTTP is really making me not want to use this. It's 2015 – certificates are cheap, or Cloudflare is free.
Looks nice, but was sorely disappointed there was no self hosting option. I would be very interested if I could keep my data on my servers, but cannot move to this otherwise.
Confidentiality and security. Sharing that level of information with outside organizations is just not possible in some situations. Regulated industries need to have full auditable control of all of their data and infrastructure, and a third party does not allow for that.
Even if it was possible for me, I still would not want that level of information out there with a third party. It increases the surface area for an attack, and puts the company at greater risk relying on an unknown level of security which there is no direct control over.
Perfectly put. I would also add that the SaaS market has shown enough volatility that if I can't run it on my own instance there are no guarantees that a service will exist a year from now.
When it comes to my personal todo list, I'm ok with that. When we're talking about a project management tool that becomes a part of your team's culture, concerns mount quickly.
I see your point, the initial tagline on this was "project management no matter what your team looks like" which made a bit more sense with the aspirational lifestyle props, it does make a bit less sense now. None of us own a moustache brush, unfortunately :)
I think your landingpage looks good, but overall I have a hard time seeing exactly how it makes life easier for me.
I have worked in most of the roles you describe, but even after having scrolled to the bottom, I don't exactly understand how it is tailored to the roles.
What I was left with is that you have boards and progressbars. Doesn't really compare to the stuff I already use.
Maybe you could explain even better how each role can tailor an interface to meet their needs, and what you provide better than other software out there.
Great point, we were working on creating a better tour of the product but decided to launch a more stripped down version just to test the waters, ended up getting a lot more attention than we thought we would! Working on presenting a better breakdown of the features and how they solve pertinent issues for each user type's workflow.
Maybe it'd be better to concentrate on one usa-case. Say Accountant. That way you have more focus. Once you talked to 10-100 accountants and made sure the product is good for them, move on to the next use-case.
216 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadLooks like Asana?, but with a focus for agencies who have multiple projects / deadlines?
I'll keep it bookmarked though, perhaps my attitude in this regard is out of date.
Atlassian is so successful in a big part due to their self-hosting option.
Funny enough, our biggest boost in communication came from starting using Slack. That thing is amazing, and getting creative with integrations is awesome. It's a somewhat important part of our workflow now.
http://contrastrebellion.com/
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Also: The centered text is annoying to read when there's a series of paragraphs.
All the best!
http://collabtive.o-dyn.de/
Disclosure: I'm one of the lead devs.
But you're right, the user should be able to select the language on the online demo before login. I will add this to my TODOs. Thx!
One of the burdens that comes with more than 40 locales... ;-)
www.openproject.org
[0] http://thebuggenie.com/
Why? I know some very large companies that use GitHub (not the hosted version).
The ios app should be coming out by the end of this month.
It's self hosted and has a super simple setup process. I'm the developer.
(Which isn't to say it necessarily should be cheaper, only that it seems surprising to see that price without any attempt to compare or justify why you believe that e.g. it's already, at launch, worth 3x as much as Pivotal Tracker).
Your pricing is also too high for a large org, especially when one could use something like Phabricator for free. This doesn't even get into MS Project or document management (MS Office? Google Drive?).
Long story short, this looks like a good start and may work well for SMBs, but definitely not a big company.
Also as an aside, in most large companies, PPM is handled 100% separately, and by different people, than actual product management and dev planning/resource allocation/bug fixing/testing/support/etc.
How do you know? I made the contrary experience
Open Source full featured ALM, self-hosted or SaaS[2] consistent & easy to go upgrades.
(Disclosure: I'm part of the dev team)
[1] https://tuleap.org [2] http://mytuleap.com
It took a few weeks to get a suitable workflow set up, and in spite of my gripes it's one of the best issue trackers around. I miss working with it on other projects.
What I really want is a fast and lightweight Jira.
If there should be one place in the world where JIRA runs quickly, it should be on Atlassian's own hosting platform, yet I continue to be amazed at how slow it can be.
So they're clunky and slow on any other continent. Including, amusingly, Atlassian's engineering HQ in Sydney.
The config my company is using makes it somewhat more pleasant than stock bugzilla or trac (though not nearly as convenient as github issues was).
The amount of crap you can turn on if you like can make the interface completely unusable, of course. But that's true in anything with a lot of configurability. It's the cost of being able to build your own process onto the tool.
First world problems indeed.
We also use Confluence which also seems to do it's job properly as a wiki.
I'm personally considering using Jira for my own projects in the future.
JIRA is a total nightmare to configure sensibly, and the UX is complex enough that there's a real learning curve to get your team using it effectively.
The kicker is, that once the combination of JIRA, JIRA Agile, and Confluence are setup correctly, and your team is using them well, there's nothing else like it. It's spectacular for:
- tying specs to issues to code
- surfacing status to non-devs sensibly
- allowing interested folk to keep abreast of projects without having to attend meetings
- getting rid of huge messy email conversations
- figuring out "why the hell did we do that?!"
I'd recommend JIRA + JIRA Agile + Confluence to any team with more than 10 members, with the caveat that you need to find/hire an expert to configure the product and help your team use it effectively.
ninja edit: JIRA will allow you to faithfully model+enforce your fucked-up development process. So, badly-configured JIRA can be one of the least fun experiences of your working life.
Please help - where can I learn to configure our setup correctly? I think our Agile is pretty ok but the integration with Confluence is almost zero. Where do I find an expert to help with the setup?
So if a successful & profitable software company is about to hire you but you would decline the offer just because She is using JIRA.
Apparently this also says how hard it is to manage people rather than dealing with just code and tricking the compiler.
Like anything else, there are things we've chosen not to implement in a V1 release, that we will add in later releases. We focused on differentiating ourselves in the market, not just doing a better job of what Jira does.
So, there is hope. :) It's 'real'. It's awesome. And it's just a few months from Release.
Cheers
I'm not saying that it will, I haven't tried it so I have no idea. I'm just surprised that people really want to shave less than $100 off of the tools they provide their team.
But all marketing statements are rarely taken at face value. With self-service free trials, products can be compared and contrasted.
One tool will work better for a given workflow than others. And it's a no-brainer to pay an additional e.g. $70/m to buy the best tool for the job.
The problem is businesses don't just buy 1 tool for their team, they probably buy dozens, and if each one costs and additional $90 per team of ten that adds up quickly. Save money where you can especially when the results are the same.
Of course, if the results are the same, you should decide on price.
But software isn't a commodity product. Each one has strengths and weaknesses. I'm just surprised at the amount of price sensitivity considering a difference of 30 seconds a day between one tool and the other more than makes up for the price difference.
Or: what makes premium oil worth the extra money, compared to regular?
If the creators of Matterhorn can continue to shelve egos, keep effecting some humble sincerity and focus on why their tool is better, we may find it's an exception to that rule.
Edit: clarified that the devs are already showing low-ego and sincerity - I realized my wording didn't suggest that earlier.
pm software is not the same between brands either. each one I've used offers a different user experience and each tends to excel in their own way.
software, in general, is also not the same between brands, as you state. yahoo search is different than bing is different from Google.
As a former mechanic I would like to point out a flaw in your way of thinking about engine oil as a commodity similar across the board.
Regular engine oils vary in overall quality not due to the oil itself being of substantially better or worse quality itself, but because of the different combinations of surfactants and detergents that the varying brands use, and molecular uniformity allowing tighter tolerances in the engineered part using the oil in question.
The more expensive the motor oil, the less it chemically looks like crude oil until you get to the most expensive types of oils (synthetics), which aren't crude based at all but synthesized using the Fischer-Tropsch process.
Precision engineered parts require synthetic oils. It's akin to placing your smartphone face down on an asphalt sidewalk. At high speeds and temperatures the contaminants in a lower grade oil will destroy the car that calls for the 50 dollar oil cans, and it'd be ill advised to ignore the need for it.
It's more like paying a construction worker $100 an hour and then giving him a hammer that costs $5 instead of $10, but only drives nails at half the speed because it's too light.
I suspect this is why JIRA has very different pricing for <=10 and >10 users.
so this just further proves your point that some large corporations are less price sensitive than others.
It would be nice to track feature requests against customer application engagement as well as uptake by said customer. Attempting to make everyone happy leads to MS like products.
Maybe he's not trying to make a billion dollars and instead is planning on making a great product.
If you want outrageous pricing have a go at Slack!
https://broadmargins.slack.com/pricing
Way better to charge and learn about what paying customers want, rather than make it cheap and hope to eventually convert them.
I'm working hard enough for our company to pay $2 per user for HipChat.
$9 per user is very expensive when it comes to these services at scale. I can see this on a team of 10-15 people, but certainly not on a company wide basis.
Also Slack integration is coming in the next few days
Seems like all this effort on these type of pm systems could have been applied to some niche market that's still using custom MS Access systems built in the early 2000s.
One of the things that I've often encountered is a granularity/association problem: tasks often become either Omnibus tasks where there's a shitload of stuff jammed into a single task, or a spread out mishmash of related tasks that don't have very good linking between them.
A good example would be a web development feature. I'm going to do the backend, someone else is going to do the frontend. Those are two pretty distinct tasks, but there's a lot of shared communication there. And most PM systems I've used don't have a (good) way to link those together. Mostly in my experience, 3rd party tools end up getting used, with links to shared wiki/moqups/google docs/dropbox whatever.
If I need to have 7 tabs open (email, slack, trello, moqups, google docs...) to get all the information I need to figure out what I need to work on next, my PM system isn't serving me very well.
The biggest issue we had in our team was that some team members are just slowed down by having to use a project management tool and would much prefer to just have a written checklist on their desk, but obviously this causes a lot of issues when you're trying to keep track of what's been done and what hasn't. The planner was created to help circumvent this issue, when tickets are assigned to a user and planned for a certain date they become a checklist on that user's dashboard. This way we were able to let checklisters do their thing uninterrupted and still have their progress tracked on the board and the general product overview.
Tasks becoming either omnibus or overly fragmented is familiar to us too. Matterhorn has a feature grouping system that can help but it always comes down to how you use them. It might be an interesting problem to solve for the future.
Every company (and person!) has their own workflows and requirements, or there'd be no way for businesses to differentiate themselves on operational efficiency. It's possible to encode those workflows into very flexible systems like Jira, but as is usually the case, that comes at a large cost in design and ease of use.
This creates a market for thousands of small project management solutions, each a well-designed, slimmed down service, often equivalent to a particular customization of ClearCase or Asana but far easier to set up and use.
Not even remotely. By and large because you'll have technical and non-technical people using the same tool for projects that have multiple audiences. There will always be room for change and improvements, and people are always willing to spend money on those types of things. It's sort of a bottomless well of revenue for companies that create this type of software.
Feedback stuff:
1) agree with pricing plan, too high for large teams
2) call for action - I saw the "sign in" button immediately, but had to scroll all the way down for sign up, will be nice to have a floating sign up button just next to sign in, and in the sign in page, have a link such as "not registered? sign up here" in case people click the wrong button.
3) this is more due to my personal taste, but no gmail sign up is lowering my will to spend time to test the product. I want to click click, play with it a few mins, and if it's good suggest it to my team. I don't have time to fill a form (I'm exaggerating a little, but this goes through a lot of people's mind, filling forms is annoying for some people)
4) I'd like to see a demo the product. having a dummy project that anyone can see with a "guest" login will be really great. (good if you are not willing to add gmail login for any reason)
5) if not a demo, at least a video. the gif is great, so I think a longer video will be even better, seems like a very slick UI.
all in all looks great, I like the hybrid approach, will give it a look.
I think free for teams till 3 would be nice, I think pivotal was for long time resisting this and had to cave in, that is the only way I will start using it and be in position to recommend for team.
The avatars are quite stereotypical: male developer, female designer, male project manager. Why don't you switch it up? There's female developers too.
Even if it was possible for me, I still would not want that level of information out there with a third party. It increases the surface area for an attack, and puts the company at greater risk relying on an unknown level of security which there is no direct control over.
When it comes to my personal todo list, I'm ok with that. When we're talking about a project management tool that becomes a part of your team's culture, concerns mount quickly.
I agree with earlier comment asking for a demo project.
http://vision.ucsd.edu/~blaxton/sneakey.html
The create new project button was broken.
It's unclear what the pricing is. The homepage says $9/user/month. When I logged in I think the price was 9£/user/month
I have worked in most of the roles you describe, but even after having scrolled to the bottom, I don't exactly understand how it is tailored to the roles.
What I was left with is that you have boards and progressbars. Doesn't really compare to the stuff I already use.
Maybe you could explain even better how each role can tailor an interface to meet their needs, and what you provide better than other software out there.
Maybe it'd be better to concentrate on one usa-case. Say Accountant. That way you have more focus. Once you talked to 10-100 accountants and made sure the product is good for them, move on to the next use-case.
I mean this is not aimed at causal users but to people who might want to use this on a daily basis with very important stuff.
And they are suppose to trust an anonymous website?
This is really confusing for me.