At my startup, in about 10 years we have tried and used tens of tools for product and engineering management, with mixed results ⚖️
Whenever things worked, it was because we spent time on clearly defining the process first, and finding the best possible tool for it later.
I have written more about my experience in this week’s post on 🌀 Refactoring
Let me know your thoughts! If you have any feedback or comments, it would be great to hear from you! 😊
This is pretty interesting. At my day job, we're currently using a bunch of different tools.
Some projects use different management tools than other for stories.
I'm not a huge fan of the more enterprise-y product management tools like Azure Devops, Jira, etc. I like clubhouse. Other people at the company love Azure Devops though.
Have you had to deal with people's preference for one tool vs the other and how do you come up with a good solution for that? We basically use the tools for the same purpose though so it's a little bit tangential to your article.
Yes all the time! People, especially more senior ones, tend to be quite opinionated on which tools are better than others. Sometimes entire teams want to use a specific tool — of course different from the rest of the company.
My main advice is to ask these people why they want such a tool. For example, some people might want Clubhouse because its structure (Milestones → Epics → Stories) matches with their vision of work. So if you get them to talk about the actual "process" behind the usage of a tool, 1) you end up with a good conversation and 2) you can come up with solutions to implement the same process in a different tool.
Doing this, in most cases I found out that people were not so adamant about using a tool as I believed, it was more that they wanted their needs to be heard, and we found common ground quickly.
For whole teams, instead, my rule is do not force the usage of a tool unless we are at the highest level of the company. If you have read the article, our engineering team uses clubhouse and the marketing one uses trello. And that's ok! But company goals are written for everyone on Notion — because that's where reporting happens. Specific teams should be free to use what makes them the most productive
I like that whole team idea. In general that's how we've been doing it but we've been thinking on if it makes sense to choose a company wide tool for each team (even though each team works on completely different projects).
Thanks for the thoughtful response Luca!