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Show HN: Constructor – simple issue tracking for small teams, inspired by Trello

constructor.dev

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Re: Show HN: Constructor – simple issue tracking for small teams, inspired by Trello

#22

Post by phphphphp »

I think this looks great but "process-neutral" gives me pause. Process is important, and hard, and in practice "process-neutral" means "process by committee within each customers organisation" and naturally, that committee probably hasn't designed a great process before and so they're going to end up designing a subpar process... and for people subjected to that process, it'll reflect on your software.

For example, Jira isn't itself bad, Jira is quite nice in a vacuum, but Jira in the hands of an organisation is a nightmare because of the incoherent methods of working layered on top of it by well meaning but inexperienced process administrators who think configuring Jira is the solution to every delivery challenge faced in their org.

I've worked at half a dozen places I can think of off the top of my head where they've excitedly jumped into using a new (to them) issue tracking product, everyone loved it because it was new and exciting and empty and solved a problem... for a few months, and then people grew to hate it because it becomes an esoteric mess again. For example, Trello -> Notion -> Coda in the space of 18 months.

The decision to be process-neutral is a valid one and can be a very powerful foundation of a product, so my question is: do you have any specific thoughts around how you're going to be process-neutral while also stay loyal to the commitments you've made to being pleasant to use? If you can achieve that, a product that doesn't reflect the bad choices of administrators, I think you have incredible potential.

Re: Show HN: Constructor – simple issue tracking for small teams, inspired by Trello

#26

Post by Aalk4308 »

louky wrote: post #24

Demo looks great, however when attempting to sign up I get a blank screen using Firefox - JS enabled and ublock off, not sure why - I'll try a different browser.

Strange, sorry about that! While we investigate, feel free to shoot us an email at support@constructor.dev if you continue to have the issue in another browser.

Re: Show HN: Constructor – simple issue tracking for small teams, inspired by Trello

#27

Post by t3e »

iddan wrote: post #25

How is this better than Linear? Been using it for a while and I'm pretty convinced it solves the problem space perfectly.

Linear's a great step forward but too prescriptive and still too heavyweight for lots of teams. Our focus is on dramatically simplifying, and aligning the core conceptual models with how teams actually want to work, e.g. threaded comments, flexible blockers, user-defined work structures, etc.

Re: Show HN: Constructor – simple issue tracking for small teams, inspired by Trello

#28

Post by t3e »

bachmeier wrote: post #23

This is really nice. Hope you don't add any additional features.

Thank you for the feedback, and I completely understand and share this sentiment. We're very cautious when adding new features and are obsessed with keeping the out-of-the-box experience utterly simple and tuned to exactly what a small team needs. It's a major design consideration for us that as much as possible, complexity is opt-in.

Re: Show HN: Constructor – simple issue tracking for small teams, inspired by Trello

#29

Post by t3e »

phphphphp wrote: post #22

I think this looks great but "process-neutral" gives me pause. Process is important, and hard, and in practice "process-neutral" means "process by committee within each customers organisation" and naturally, that committee probably hasn't designed a great process before and so they're going to end up designing a subpar process... and for people subjected to that process, it'll reflect on your software. For example, J…

Thank you for this thoughtful comment, I’m happy somebody challenged us on this controversial point of our philosophy.

I disagree that a tool being process neutral implies anything about how the process ends up being designed, e.g. “process by committee within each customers organisation”, other than it won’t be decided by the tool. Process neutrality removes a set of constraints that in our experience add a lot of friction when teams want to work differently (and makes designing a great UX harder because of combinatorics).

There are indisputably tons of teams that seek and benefit from process guidance, including the ones I’ve run, but we think that should come from mentors, books, blogs, etc. – not the tool.

I agree that a lot of issues in Jira stem from wretched implementations, but I lay the blame for those implementations squarely at the feet of Jira. If most of the programs written in a language were impenetrable and borderline non-functional, would you blame the users, or the language?

Our biggest beef with prescriptivism in tools is that it impedes exploration and evolution of process changes that we feel are important to teams adapting well to growth and changing circumstances. It’s a much harder proposition to build a flexible tool, but we feel it’s necessary for this reason.

Re: Show HN: Constructor – simple issue tracking for small teams, inspired by Trello

#30

Post by moodini »

Currently testing all kinds of tracking / ticketing software. This one looks really good, I love the simplicity. The design is superb. Congratulations!

For my use case, list views are a must-have. You commented that such feature is on your roadmap. Are you planning to include configurable sorting, like: - list all items per user - list all items per label - list all prio 1 items

Also I could'nt find a way to prioritize tickets.

Are you planning to make the tickets searchable (eg. list all tickets which include the word 'onboarding')?

Will there be a "language add-on"? Some of our customers would need to have access, but rather would like to navigate in their native langauge.

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