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A Mainstream Choice for Project Management, not a Product Management Tool
Updated October 13, 2016

A Mainstream Choice for Project Management, not a Product Management Tool

Ross Reynolds | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with JIRA Software

We use Jira to manage projects and support tickets in Engineering. It has touch points with Product Management, Customer Success, and Research, but it's primarily an Engineering project management tool.
  • Jira's Kanban boards are easy to use and customize.
  • The option to write your own queries gives you lots of flexibility for how your organize and display the workflow.
  • Jira itself has a lot of traction in the market, so it integrates with a lots of other tools.
  • Jira can be overly complex to customize to the way you need it. The administrative interface has become too complex. I've found myself stuck fixing something I'd really rather not spend time on more than a few times. Some of the concepts like workflows, screens, etc. have to be re-read every time you need to fix or customize something. This comes up often with integrations, where a field simply won't sync because it wasn't configured the right way. I let one of our integrations generate an error message for a couple of months just because I didn't have the time to fix it.
  • Jira was designed as a Project Management tool and generally doesn't work for Product Management. For Product Management, you'll want a tool that can manage multi-product backlogs, user feedback, prioritization schemes, capacity planning and tradeoffs, and roadmaps.
  • In terms of business objectives, it was an easy tool to just go with, and the team is pretty happy using it. Every once in a while, the admin piece is more complext than we'd like or there's something quirky that is annoying, but we can deal with it.
I've used Microsoft Team Foundation Server and will never use it again. It does anything you would want if you have a century to configure it. It's also just not very friendly to agile project management or supporting Product Management needs.

Pivotal is a great simple tool for organizing a backlog, but it fell short when it came to multiple products.
Works well for agile project management approach, especially if you want to go with one of the established players with lots of integrations. Not as strong for product management.