If you were the PM for Jira/Asana how would you position them against a spreadsheet? What specific jobs are they a much better solution for? What outcomes do you get from using them that you don’t get from a spreadsheet?
This is a perfect opportunity to train your PM senses!
It’s worth drawing your development processes on some board then thinking of a solution to improve it and automate it. There can be some point that using the right issue tracking tool will be an improvement from the existing habitat.
I’m also not a big fan of Jira so I can recommend you to check out this site https://whyjirasucks.com/ and then decide which tool should be best for your use case.
Very interesting perspective to view the problem at hand. Thank you so much for this useful advice 
Thank you. I think it’s important for someone to be devil’s advocate as it makes my recommendation more strong and data backed. Thank you for sharing the information. I will assimilate it before going to him with a suggestion
In addition to what others have said, most tools have a free plan. You could build out a proof of concept and visually show how you would manage things in GSheet vs. How it would be managed in the tool.
One caveat is that Jira is mainly for developers, and doesn’t have a lot of great timeline visualization/dependency mapping that most PMs want. Alternatively, Asana is pretty good for managing large projects… but I have yet to see an Eng team use it.
ClickUp is a much newer tool than both, but seems to do a good job striking the balance between what Eng teams need (issue tracking, sprints, agile, etc) and what PMs need (backlog management, timelines, gantt, documentation, etc). It’s also free to try out.
Definitely. Let me try. However how i can have a Proof of concept? In the beginning my product details will be scattered over both Excel and on of these tools. Should I begin by having one feature completely developed on Jira and that becomes my POC or migrate one developer completely on it for sometime. How should I strategize it?
Not an expert on your workflow, but you could try importing your gsheet details into one of the tools and then configuring each to show the right status / sprint / etc. It would take a little work but showing how easy it is to assign / drag / drop / estimate work and run some basic dashboard or reports might be enough to visualize the value.
Also automatically generating timelines / roadmaps / burnup reports would be an easy way to showcase some value as well.
So I will first kill you, then give you advice.
Why I’ll kill you is because I know so many people that can articulate the need 10x better than you just did and they are struggling to get the position you have.
Now that I killed you, and thank you if you are still reading past my sting…
You have so many ways to go about this:
Why do I hate google sheets
They’re a nightmare to keep up to date
Why are they so?
They don’t have a way to control user input per task to one specific place… jusr making shit up as an example here
Why is there no specific place
Because it is designed to be flexible for number crunching
Anyway, this should lead you to answers.
There is no theoretical answers here. It’s all about getting to the reality or the root cause of your need and not the perceived problem.
For me, maintenance is probably the biggest headache with Google sheets. Take for example you created a great sheet with formulas and automatically updates other tabs. Then a new factor comes in and you need to rebuild that sheet and fix broken formulas. On a smaller scale, the comments feature of the tickets make it really easy for a user to focus on the discussion of that specific ticket and it’s details and what it’s linked to. In sheets, having a comment thread opened on the side is pretty difficult if you’re focusing on one cell line amongst hundreds on the screen, especially in a meeting.
On the other hand, Jira has the ability to intergrade and automate updates with Jira Align and Confluence. You can even write a Jenkins job that automatically updates the ticket progress status by the linked PR. Granted, this includes more monetary investment than just Jira.
Lastly, its a hard sell if they’re trying to hire new talent in my opinion, esp after having worked with PM tools for a while.
I am not sure if i understood your last point. The point about sheet formulas is so true. I have to fix formulas whenever a new metric is added
I’m tangentially referencing the above point with the last point. If an interviewer asks you what PM tools you use and you say Google sheets, they’ll probably give you a look since it’s not common and feels like half of their time will be pent on sheet management.
Exactly. That is also one of the reason for me to switch to such tools.
If the PO needs a justification for it, I think they’re missing the whole point.
That’s true. However I still feel I owe him some explanation so that I am clear in my mind of implementation details.
This was not my opinion when i posted the question. But after having numerous inputs from experts here, I feel it this way
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