Alternatives to Pivotal Tracker

We knew how we wanted to build our Design System, now it was time to choose the tools to get us there. The essence of Scrum is a small team of people. The team is highly flexible and adaptive. Perfect, so we'll work in 2 week sprints where each sprint can be a mix of new R&D stories, a presentation of decisions made, and showcasing key development milestones.

We are also able to run content stories in parallel, focusing development efforts around key areas of the site that our authors need first. Our stories would exist in a Jira backlog, documentation would be hosted in Confluence , and GitHub would host our codebase. If developers identify technical improvements during the sprint, they can be added as GitHub issues and transferred to Jira if we decide to represent them as stories for the Backlog. For Sprint Retrospectives, @groupmap proved to be a great way to include our remote members of the dev team.

This worked well for our team and allowed us to be flexible in what we wanted to build and how we wanted to build it. As we further defined our Backlog and estimated each story, we could accurately measure the team's capacity (velocity) and confidently estimate a launch date.

As a new company we could early adopt and bet on #RemoteTeam setup without cultural baggage derailing us. Our building blocks for developing remote working culture are:

• Hiring people who are self sufficient, self-disciplined and excel at video and written communication to work remotely
• Set up periodic ceremonies ( #DailyStandup, #Grooming, Release calls and chats etc) to keep the company rhythm / heartbeat going across remote cells
• Regularly train your leaders to take into account remote working aspects of organizing f2f calls, events, meetups, parties etc. when communicating and organizing workflows
• And last, but not least - select the right tools to support effective communication and collaboration:

1. All feeds and conversations come together in Slack
2. #Agile workflows in Jira
3. InProductCommunication and #CustomerSupportChat in Intercom
4. #Notes, #Documentation and #Requirements in Confluence
5. #SourceCode and ContinuousDelivery in Bitbucket
6. Persistent video streams between locations, demos, meetings run on appear.in
7. #Logging and Alerts in Papertrail

As a small startup we are very conscious about picking up the tools we use to run the project. After suffering with a mess of using at the same time Trello , Slack , Telegram and what not, we arrived at a small set of tools that cover all our current needs. For product management, file sharing, team communication etc we chose Basecamp and couldn't be more happy about it. For Customer Support and Sales Intercom works amazingly well. We are using MailChimp for email marketing since over 4 years and it still covers all our needs. Then on payment side combination of Stripe and Octobat helps us to process all the payments and generate compliant invoices. On techie side we use Rollbar and GitLab (for both code and CI). For corporate email we picked G Suite. That all costs us in total around 300$ a month, which is quite okay.

There are lots of project management tools available nowadays. The choice ended up between Trello and Basecamp. Asana , JIRA and monday.com got a fair review but they didn't make it to the final list for several reasons (either way to complex or some UX issues or just too many options - good in some cases but not a good fit in this case).

Between Basecamp and Trello the battle was between ease of use and price. Basecamp packs a great set of features and if you are ready to move to an all in one solution: chat, file storage, and a PM tool, then @basecanp is by far the right choice. But since all the features are within one package that cannot be customized, moving to Basecamp but only using a part of the tool feels.. well.. not right. On the other hand Trello has the #kanban format that is just too easy to use and the price point for small and midsize team that no one can beat.

At the end, all solutions have a good fit in some cases. A better fit. But I think Trello can do the job in any case - it can fit with any scenario.

There are lots of project management tools available nowadays. The choice ended up between Trello and Basecamp. Asana , JIRA and monday.com got a fair review but they didn't make it to the final list for several reasons (either way to complex or some UX issues or just too many options - good in some cases but not a good fit in this case).

Between Basecamp and Trello the battle was between ease of use and price. Basecamp packs a great set of features and if you are ready to move to an all in one solution: chat, file storage, and a PM tool, then @basecanp is by far the right choice. But since all the features are within one package that cannot be customized, moving to Basecamp but only using a part of the tool feels.. well.. not right. On the other hand Trello has the #kanban format that is just too easy to use and the price point for small and midsize team that no one can beat.

At the end, all solutions have a good fit in some cases. A better fit. But I think Trello can do the job in any case - it can fit with any scenario.

I use Trello, the macOS app for my personal projects and Google Chrome for work. At work, I have 7-8 active boards for various projects.

At first, I wasn't sure about Trello. The last company I worked at used Asana and I was really used to that. Before then I was using Jira. Now I ❤️Trello. It is amazing. Power-Ups™️ are so awesome!

For personal projects, I have used it for planning a move across town. I'm also using it for my Wedding. I got my fiancè almost loving it too.

We've been really happy with Clubhouse for project organization / task management / kanban board while developing FeaturePeek. The featureset is rich and the UI uncluttered. Clubhouse is different in that it makes some assumptions on how things should be (workflow state, the relationships between stories/epics/milestones, etc). having it be opinionated from the start helps you hit the ground running, while still being editable / extensible for tweaking things to your liking.

The pricing is spot-on too – a flat $10/month for teams of 10 or less. This really made it attractive to us to try out.

If you think Trello is too basic / lightweight but Jira is too full-featured / heavy, you should give Clubhouse a shot – I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.