Hi there kopiblanca, One of the founders of Zepel here.
We believe JIRA and most other project management tools have evolved from the core use case of issue tracking. While they might be great for tracking issues and ad hoc work items, when it comes to product development, bug tracking is only a part of the equation.
We believe 2 key aspects make product/feature development different.
- Unlike bug tracking, a feature needs to be conceptualized and the form-based interface of these tools make it ridiculously difficult to spec out the requirements for a feature.
- Shipping a feature involves multiple disciplines and rarely follows a single fixed workflow.
Our approach to solving these two problems is,
- A text editor like interface that lets you specify your features and making it super simple to change or update items.
- Multiple boards per project to capture every discipline and the flexibility to move items across these boards as per your use case.
We believe its painfully hard for product teams to plan and ship features using JIRA and that's why we have created Zepel.
Product teams don't hate JIRA. They love JIRA. Engineers hate JIRA. From your explanation, I still don't understand how this is different from JIRA (apart from the theme).
A subset of engineers hate Jira. A lot of us love it. It's orders of magnitude better than any other issue tracker out there. It's an absolute powerhouse with its "Jira Query Language" query support. It scales from tiny one man shops (in which case it costs you a tenner), to massive organizations like the Apache Software Foundation.
It's got bells and whistles to spare, including several kitchen sinks, which can make it a bit daunting to configure. But you can configure it to suit your needs, instead of having to conform to some harebrained workflow someone else decided was Good Enough.
What I really hate is that, even after all these years, it doesn't come with a good planning tool. Portfolio is terrible. I've evaluated several Gantt plugins, which were all terrible. A closely related problem is the missing calendar integration. Atlassian has a calendar plugin for Confluence (wiki), which makes zero sense to me. In my world, issue tracking and planning go hand in hand. And you can't plan shit without a calendar. Surely I'm not the only one who feels that way?
Edit: while I'm out praising Jira, have you seen their SDK? You can roll your own Jira plugin in 15 minutes. Bam. Frictionless. Engineers hate it? Those are some weird engineers.
I agree with this. OP, if you have 2 way sync between JIRA working already, then why not let the product folks keep using JIRA as they like and make a new approach that engineers can love and adopt without forcing the entire team to switch? Basically an engineer-driven front-end for JIRA. Focus on viewing/searching, allow the UI to be hackable/customizable on a per-user basis, etc.
Currently, you’re not competing against JIRA, but rather Asana, Basecamp, Trello, etc for customers. While not rational, a large part of their appeal is they look nothing like JIRA, which can’t be said for you.
