Shortcut Blog

A few years ago I worked for a company that used https://shortcut.com/ (at that point, it was named clubhouse I think). I loved it. I think that tool can do everything Jira does in a much better and saner way. It looks a lot more organised, more flexible, more polished, more performant and it doesn't look like it will force you into full SCRUM if you don't want to. You even get to use the same syntax (markdown!) everywhere. Last time I had to use Jira I needed to keep in mind the syntax for writing links in the issue description was different than the syntax for writing links in comments. Tell me that's not some top level suckery.

Jira sucks big time, and there are better tools now. The reason no one "toppled the Jira crown" is just inertia, specially management inertia who are the ones deciding what tool to use. For the same reason we're still mostly using petrol for cars, not because there aren't better options, it is because it is not easy to change.

Shortcut was formerly called Clubhouse for anyone who used it before September 2021 [1].

Somewhat ironically, they renamed the company to de-conflict with the other Clubhouse (the audio chatrooms app) although at this point said app has all but faded into obscurity less than 6 months later.

With respect to the Shortcut product itself, my experience with it ~1.5 years ago was positive and I would try it again.

We switched off to Jira + Confluence for feature parity that Clubhouse lacked, at least at the time. But it looks like they are very rapidly iterating on the product and adding new features (threaded comments look awesome). I look forward to giving it another shot and watching as it evolves.

It looks like they also now have a Confluence competitor [2], currently in private beta.

[1]: https://shortcut.com/blog/clubhouse-changing-our-name-to-shortcut

[2]: https://shortcut.com/write-beta

Having spent 7 years now building https://www.shortcut.com/ it's very clear to me that at a certain point in the life-cycle of many organizations a bunch of people get hired who can only "think in Jira" and the vast majority of feature requests are attempts to get us to add whatever feature(s) they love using.

Conversations about why it's bad for developers or product managers or attempts to show them how to get the same value in another way often fall on deaf ears (or don't happen at all) because it's the only way that they know how to work.

One of the key indicators that this is happening is when people start saying things like "this can't do Agile because it doesn't have PET_FEATURE"

Jira isn't just software, it's a way of working that's become the de facto standard, and it's hard to get out of that box for a lot of people.

It doesn't take much to beat JIRA ;).

But seriously, Linear is one of the best project management tools I've used. They do an SPA pretty well, which is rare, and its powerful yet pretty simple to use. I do find it a bit hard to wrangle saved views and find things via search sometimes, but overall its one of the 'least bad' tools in this category.

The only other app that I would say is comparable is Shortcut (https://shortcut.com), which I've used in anger at previous jobs. It's a bit simpler than Linear, a bit easier to get up to speed with, but less powerful.

But both are very good. And god help you if you have to use JIRA.

Shortcut | Senior Product Manager | Remote (US time zones) | Full Time | https://shortcut.com

Shortcut builds project management tools for modern software teams.

We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager who is excited to work on building tools for how product and engineering idea/plan/build/ship software.

Bonus points if you have used Jira before and are excited at the prospect of taking some of their market share!

More information at https://boards.greenhouse.io/shortcut/jobs/6454623002.