2020-11-30 Dan Lines, LinearB: Jira is great for product managers, not developers

Owned by Joerg Mueller-Kindt (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Dec 01, 2020
5 min read

This is the 35th  of our Monday Night Specials, a series of virtual events with voices from the Atlassian ecosystem.

Bevy: https://ace.atlassian.com/e/m45w2m/

Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/ACBEBB/events/273792457/

Community Post: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Berlin-Brandenburg/RSVP-Dan-Lines-LinearB-Jira-is-great-for-product-managers-not/gpm-p/1501688

Dan’s Original Blogpost: https://linearb.io/blog/jira-is-a-microcosm-of-whats-broken-in-software-development/

Video: https://youtu.be/2N9FI019eRc

Slides:

 

 

Presenter: Dan Lines, Co-Founder and COO, LinearB

Dan Lines is the Co-founder and COO at LinearB.io. Formerly VP of Engineering at Cloudlock, acquired by Cisco, Dan has over 10 years of experience as a developer and is now venturing off on his own to help development teams improve the way they work with his LinearB developer platform

Dan here. A few things about me… First of all, the only thing I find more awkward than writing a bio about myself is asking someone else to write one about me. So first person it is! I’m a software engineer at heart. Two years ago I started a company with another engineer, my co-founder Ori Keren. I pulled the short straw so actually at the moment I’m responsible for customer success, marketing and sales. Which is crazy because I had never done any of those things before LinearB. I wish I had more time to write code but I love being customer facing because I’m learning a lot of new stuff.Before LinearB I was a dev team lead, and VP of Engineering. I’m obsessed with how dev teams work together. Like what makes great culture? And how can engineering leaders be data-driven without being performance tyrants? And why can cars drive themselves but I have to spend 30 minutes every day manually updating my project tickets? :-) More importantly, my partner Lauren and I just had a beautiful baby girl named Leila. We recently moved to sunny Southern California which is a welcome change for this suburban boy from up-state New York.

Jira is great for product managers, not developers

“Jira has *never once* made my life as a developer easier or better… It’s overly complicated and the workflow is painful.” - Justin James, Chief Architect at Cloud Development Resources.

Most project management tools are plan focused, which is why they become less valuable to the technical team members once development starts. Knowing that a ticket is “in-progress” is not very useful when you need real-time info about code, branches, PRs, releases to make good decisions during the iteration. Many engineers say that the development process is fluid, real-time, and doesn’t always follow a linear path but project tools force dev teams into a workflow that does not match that reality.

Unfortunately, project tool problems are not solved by switching out Jira with Asana or Trello. The root is actually a problem with culture, management or process.

In this session I will be speaking about 3 common developer complaints about project management tools, and the true business driven problems they come from.

About Linear B

Hybrid remote dev teams deliver more with LinearB. We analyze code, Git logs, Jira data, and team health to help dev leaders accelerate delivery, set data-backed team goals and improve asynchronous collaboration. Achieve more, with LinearB.

Linear B Website: https://linearb.io/

Promotion URL - Free forever for teams of up to 8 Devs: https://hubs.ly/H0xs6DF0 

Shownotes

Dan Lines, LinearB, got up early to join us from Los Angeles and explain to us, why Jira is great for product Managers, but not for developers, which wasn’t as controversial as it sounds, on the contrary: Dan shared with us his extensive experience from many software projects about how to turn the discussion between business and engineering from plan first to develop first and what metrics really matter in that discussion.  

All the details here: https://aug-bb.atlassian.net/l/c/ejHZkz1p

You can continue the discussion here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Berlin-Brandenburg/RSVP-Dan-Lines-LinearB-Jira-is-great-for-product-managers-not/gpm-p/1501688

Q&A starts: 20:40

 Useful Links:

 

Join us again next week for an anniversary with Lukas Gotter, Meetical, who will tell us all about their amazing journey since he visited us in November of last year. From their “Cloud First” decision, via winning Grand Prize at Codegeist 2020 and becoming one of the investments of Atlassian Ventures.

All the details here: https://aug-bb.atlassian.net/l/c/3XVErHwH

RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/ACBEBB/events/274486602/

 

Don’t forget to RSVP for or Christmas event on December 24th: Warten auf das Christkind (Virtual International Edition) when we want to test a new platform (https://wonder.me) for virtual events and invite you to pass the time with us, until we can unpack the presents.

Details here: https://aug-bb.atlassian.net/l/c/DP1X6R0W

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/de-DE/ACBEBB/events/274819988/

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