I personally really like Linear or Airtable. But most of the time it's not up to me anyway.
If you can win any concessions over overbearing dogmatic Agile, that's already a pretty big victory, IMO. The tooling is secondary if you like your team and managers and work can proceed without anyone getting frustrated or too annoyed. It's a cultural thing.
I'm not a huge fan of Basecamp, but it's not the worst either, and it makes the rest of the team happy. That makes me enjoy working with them, and it all works out in the end with very little stress or panicking.
My last job had some sort of half-configured, mostly broken Jira put together by some powerful being who's long since left this plane of existence, abandoning his creation to his unloved mortal children. No one really knew why the columns had the particular workflow limitations they did, what our points were supposed to represent, how our work tied into other teams' work, how their points worked, etc. We didn't even have compatible Atlassian instances, so even though we all used Jira and Confluence, nobody could see anyone else's. I tried to point out some of those problems in a detailed report, but they told me to hide it so it doesn't embarrass them, and then hired an Agile consultant to double down on everything that was broken. I quit two weeks later and am much happier now because of it (much poorer too though, lol... can't have it all, I guess).
If you can win any concessions over overbearing dogmatic Agile, that's already a pretty big victory, IMO. The tooling is secondary if you like your team and managers and work can proceed without anyone getting frustrated or too annoyed. It's a cultural thing.
I'm not a huge fan of Basecamp, but it's not the worst either, and it makes the rest of the team happy. That makes me enjoy working with them, and it all works out in the end with very little stress or panicking.
My last job had some sort of half-configured, mostly broken Jira put together by some powerful being who's long since left this plane of existence, abandoning his creation to his unloved mortal children. No one really knew why the columns had the particular workflow limitations they did, what our points were supposed to represent, how our work tied into other teams' work, how their points worked, etc. We didn't even have compatible Atlassian instances, so even though we all used Jira and Confluence, nobody could see anyone else's. I tried to point out some of those problems in a detailed report, but they told me to hide it so it doesn't embarrass them, and then hired an Agile consultant to double down on everything that was broken. I quit two weeks later and am much happier now because of it (much poorer too though, lol... can't have it all, I guess).