Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams
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Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams
#2OP if you are creator of Zepel ,just wondering why you build something against giant,like Jira?
Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams
#3OP if you are creator of Zepel ,just wondering why you build something against giant,like Jira?
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.
Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams
#4JIRA is largely bought as a top-down decision from management and forced upon teams that don’t really want it. Do you see Zepel as being a tool that would be bought bottom up? By that I mean, is it the type of thing you want engineering teams begging management for, or do you plan to sell top down?
Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams
#5This looks nice and sleek, I hope it improved upon the pain points of Jira and builds upon new strengths.
The thing that kills me about Jira is the inconsistency I experience between projects. Everybody sets it up differently, and work based off entirely different views and contexts. It is exhausting and there's always too much friction. Maybe managers love it cause they got more time to waste on tools like Jira than us engineers, but if I have to spend more than 5 minutes figuring out how to progress forward my ticket, you've screwed up.
One really awful thing about Jira: If you create a state for a ticket, and then clone it for a new project, and then update the labels of those states, you're now screwing over the original project because all those states will be updated too.
Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams
#6JIRA is largely bought as a top-down decision from management and forced upon teams that don’t really want it. Do you see Zepel as being a tool that would be bought bottom up? By that I mean, is it the type of thing you want engineering teams begging management for, or do you plan to sell top down?
It also comes with BitBucket which I'm fine with.
Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams
#7JIRA is largely bought as a top-down decision from management and forced upon teams that don’t really want it. Do you see Zepel as being a tool that would be bought bottom up? By that I mean, is it the type of thing you want engineering teams begging management for, or do you plan to sell top down?
Neal, we see Zepel being bought bottom up. We are engineers ourselves and we built a tool that we would be happy using. We also plan on having a data sync with Jira mainly to help teams within larger org switch to Zepel, while the updates still flow back to JIRA without breaking the “managements” view.
Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams
#8Zepel looks great, a much cleaner and more pleasant experience than JIRA. Everyone uses JIRA because it's become synonymous with agile, so companies purchase and use JIRA to show that they're agile. In practice though, JIRA is ridiculously cumbersome and slow. It's time for it to be challenged.
If you can market yourself as a simpler and faster way for agile teams to run projects, and deliver on that, then you'll probably get some decent traction with SMBs and work your way up from that. Make teams feel like they'll be agile by using Zepel.
Great work and good luck!
Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams
#9the most important piece of jira for us is the API. How/When do you plan to have an open api that will assist in navigating issues through webhooks? (i didn't see it listed anywhere if you already do)
Re: Show HN: Zepel, a Jira alternative for product teams
#10As someone who absolutely despises JIRA, this looks so much like JIRA that I'm unlikely to even try it out.