I wish there were a sort of gentlemen’s agreement that cool projects like this that don’t make it as businesses would be open sourced.
Almost every project is based on open source stuff somewhere in the stack, whether it’s the OS, the main programming languages, frameworks, or whatever. And most people don’t have the time to contribute a ton to the tools we all use.
It would be really neat if companies that don’t make it could give a bequest to the various communities and help build a massive library of stuff that, at least at one point in time, ran successfully in production, delivered a certain level of scale, and was able to make some money. If for anthropological or historical or research purposes if nothing else.
Always a shame to see a company shut down that many people have poured years of effort and belief into.
Maybe a lesson here - I have engineering and PM responsibilities and couldn't be more squarely in the target market - still I have never heard of this product, I wonder how they marketed it…
Indeed, I'd never heard of this, which is unfortunate as I've previously tried to find something - anything! - in the void between "not so complex as to be unusable" JIRA and "perfectly simple - too simple" Trello.
This is an aside from the conversation, but did Zoho acquire your Site 24x7 product or build it from the ground up?
I enjoy the product a lot but when our IT people first sent us the documentation and accounts I thought I had clicked on the wrong link since the design of Site 24x7's dashboard and the Zoho site seem so different
I use YouTrack, which retains a lot of the power of Jira, but I find nicer, especially multi project planning ( ie it makes it easier for planning when you have people spread across multiple projects )
I felt the same woes. My research found Pivotal Tracker and Clubhouse. I'd say the complexity continuum goes Trello -> PT -> CH -> Jira. We chose clubhouse and it has been working well.
Clubhouse is amazing. I could never stick to Trello and just didn’t want to use Asana after some time. Clubhouse for software dev even when it’s just me has been great. You also don’t need to use Clubhouse’s “advanced” features and wouldn’t even really feel a burden or like you’re missing out.
It’s only a reasonable onetime effort to configure Jira to your needs.
You can even pay a consultant for that. After that you can use it with your the sweet spot complexity.
Or is it just that you don’t like their UI?
I’ve used sprintly in the past and overall quite liked it, but there were bugs and feature requests in their tracker, untouched for years, with comments like “yes, soon”. Besides the odd few reporting features, it just felt to me that development stopped and stagnated. This is a large reason why I didn’t go back to using it.
Overall, I liked sprintly and am sad to see it shut down, but I’m surprised it survived this long given how it started to feel a bit abandoned. (Sure you could argue if it’s not broken don’t fix it and sprintly mostly worked great, despite some issues being untouched so long, so I don’t think that’s what happened here. I do think it was perhaps a marketing problem not a feature/product problem, but it just gave a very abandoned impression)
I found out about it on recommendation by one of their advisers. I would never have heard about it otherwise so definitely think that it could have been better marketed. Although, with that said, it’s teue that sprintly was opinionated and that most teams have their own opinions that may not match up. For example, I wanted a way of having a pool of tasks that people could choose from rather than strict ordering (eg maybe a priority system where any equal-priority task at the top can be taken, not just the top task) but sprintly didn’t have any way of marking priorities or groups and they didn’t want to add the feature because it went against their strict top task next workflow. I’m not at all saying they should have supported that feature, of course, just how even small differences in opinion on workflow can make the tool less of a fit.
JIRA is the opposite in that it lets you customise it to fit whatever workflow you like, but in the process becomes a complex beast that I dislike using. I at least enjoyed using sprintly even if it didn’t always fit perfectly.
I don't use sprint.ly, although I've been aware of it for a while, but this does slightly worry me, and certainly it's sad to hear of something that's been a very personal investment for somebody failing.
We use Clubhouse, another project management system cut from the "more than Trello, less than JIRA, and somewhat opinionated about how you should work" mould. I don't love it in some ways but, y'know, it's pretty good. Our tech team, plus a number of people outside the team use it and, in the last 12 months, we've added getting on for 16,000 stories.
If Clubhouse failed I'm not sure exactly what we'd do: possibly use GitHub projects given that these are starting to get close to good enough (they've been good enough for my side-projects for a while). Hell if I'll go back to JIRA, but the thought of migrating all that data makes me feel slightly unwell no matter the eventual destination.
My company used sprintly a few years back and our experience ranged from not-good to god-awful. It seemed like all feature requests were either ignored or met with the attitude of "We know better than you do", which was unhelpful at best.
> we offered an opinionated way of managing teams and it turned out not enough people shared our opinion. In hindsight this is pretty obvious since workflows are kinda like opinions in that everyone has one. I think this is why tools like JIRA and Trello are so successful. They let you decide how to manage your workflow.
It's a thing for a company to do that internally. It's a bad thing, as evidenced by sprintly's failure, for a company offering a SaaS product in this space.
That's too bad. It seemed to be going strong for more than half a decade. I was bummed when SimpleGeo, also cofounded by Joe Stump, got shut down after being acquired by Urban Airship [1] and glad to see Sprintly thriving. I think both can be counted as successes, but it's too bad that both no longer exist. I look forward to see what Joe Stump does next!
I have this feeling you are implying Pivotal Tracker is lacking some things? (Excuse me if I'm wrong.) If so, what sort of things would you like to see improved? (I've no relation to Pivotal Tracker, I'm just curious.)
At first but then I spent a lot of time making help videos that walked through each feature I was able to get tech support near zero with 30 new signups a day and about 1,200 daily users.
That’s too bad. I wanted to work on the product a few years back but I could tell they really just wanted me to work on consulting projects, and the Sprintly work (if it ever came around) would be a “reward”. Too many aspects of it made my Spidey senses tingle to accept.
There are more tactful ways to present valid criticism than to say "shit UX" and "The world is a better place now that this is gone." This isn't constructive criticism - you're just flinging insults (I have nothing to do with this project, but I would be offended by this if I did). How would you like to see someone say such things about a project that you had worked on for years?
