People often ask: how do I find business ideas?
Well, here you go: many people publicly saying how they love a product that is going away.
This is a validated product: people were paying for it. Apparently quite a lot of people. It doesn't get better than this.
All you have to do is to clone the product. You can literally market it as a Pivotal Tracker clone. It's not like VMWare will care.
You can research companies currently using Pivotal Tracker and build a database for cold calling / e-mailing when you have the product.
It's also a product that is doable as a single person or very small team. With modern technologies (React or Svelte, hosted databases etc.) it's relatively simple to clone.
Staying small is important: those businesses topple over when revenues don't justify expenses, especially if VC funding is involved and VCs are pressuring for going big or going bust. Or when a profitable product is acquired with the hopes of growing the profits but they don't grow.
Stay small to keep expenses in check and you can build a profitable company.
This is a bootstrappable business: a $100/mo Hetzner box, backend in efficient language (Go, C#), front-end in Svelte or React and you can serve lots of customers. The rest is your time and hustle.
I think the biggest challenges are that a) the vast majority of solo devs capable of pulling this off quickly are well-employed, and b) the timeline for MVP++ is effectively January 1st, else the migrators will make different decisions.
And that as soon as migrations happen, your storage costs will balloon, so you need a billing strategy on launch.
Unless people somehow figure out a way of hosting stuff somewhere else than Amazon/$host_that_charges_per_mb_transit (Hint: they exist)
Considering it would have to be a lean operation (assuming bootstrapped), then figuring out basic stuff like "We don't want to pay per MB sent" should be a pretty high requirement.
If it was some kind of excellent business to be in it wouldn’t be shutting down.
An analogy would be to say that it would be a great business model to clone Redbox now that it’s gone. But it’s not because its competitors ate it alive.
Sure, there are a bunch of Redbox customers that liked the product, but that number was declining.
The core product is relatively simple. But software packages like Pivotal aren't sold on their core functionality, they are sold on their value-adds like integrations, automations etc which take much longer and much more manpower to build.
I've built a bunch of web apps for big companies, and I love the hell out of Pivotal Tracker and am crushed that it is gone. I immediately fired up my editor and took some exports from my pivotal tracker account and am working on building a data model to import them into and move from there to the UI.
The base product is pretty straight forward, but there is a lot of nuance to how some things have developed in it.
I will likely not capture everything in an MVP, and I am wondering if there are some key pieces that might be not thought of for an MVP, but you absolutely love about Pivotal Tracker that would be sorely missed in a new product trying to fill it's nitch.
I also see some things that could be broadened and improved that are common in other project trackers. What are some thing you feel pivotal tracker was missing that really made it a difficult sell in businesses?
Feel free to comment on this thread your feedback. I'll be watching it, and also, if any other competitors want to lock horns on developing it, they can have at your feedback too!
If you want to be alerted to when I release this, as well as other things from me, sign up to my email list: https://mailchi.mp/73f113e474f1/robert-kohrs-blog or just follow my blog's rss feed at https://robkohr.com
As someone who's built and launched something this big in a few months once upon a time, it feels like way too many technologies, it increases cycle time in ideation land.
This would need to just be a postgres server, extended maybe by things like hasura and supabase, and a single codebase front end for all platforms. If postgres can't do it, don't do it.
Front end... might be flutter. Could be svelte.
Still, being a polyglot agnostic, for the dollar, in speed of development and more importantly iteration, per feature or update, in not needing to create an entire build, environment, nothing really seems to be as complete or as fast as Laravel, as much as it can shock to hear (I am not a heavy user, but considering it).
Different strokes though, its just about speed of iteration.
Previous user of Pivotal Tracker - I'll tell you everything that I loved and hated about it.
I know a couple other devout users as well that I could introduce you to.
It forced everyone to ruthlessly prioritize and make the hard decisions.
In this moment, do you want me working on this bug, or this new feature? You have to decide - you get one or the other.
It avoided the "Everything is a high priority" dilemma.
The nth circle of hell looks like a Jira workflow. https://i.imgur.com/dQE9vWn.png and https://medium.com/@daitcheson/you-can-do-better-than-jira-1...
https://longform.asmartbear.com/jit-backlogs/
Each client manages their queue order, so the dev team just needs to focus on the head of each queue. (Of course, the dev team should also work with clients to clarify the requirements for the next few tasks in their queues so the head task will be shovel-ready). The dev team can then choose which queue heads to prioritize and maintain a balance, such as always have one tech debt task and X bug fix tasks in progress in addition to client work.
A good productivity tool doesn’t dictate how teams work.
I’d rather have a tool that’s more customizable.
It simply slows everyone down, but when it's your only tool for tracking work, it's still better than nothing.
Now, the problem with Jira is not necessarily customizability but that it's dog slow, complex, integrations suck, and permissions system is chaotic. Still, I have yet to see fully customizable work tracking system that's better made than Jira.
But also, a fixed set of features does not force you to ascribe the same meaning to them like the authors intended: I've used "bug" tracking systems to manage large projects with great success (including big features, enhancements, but also big and small fixes).
You think you would, until you do, and by then it's too late.
It's important to have good processes, but the point of all those processes is to help you make things more efficiently. Anything that leads to you spending extra time serving the process directly reduces the amount of real work you can do.
It made it easy to do the things that were frequently done.
It limited customization down to a sane level.
And it generally seemed to stay out of the way (significant look at Jira).
For now. Looking at the competition it's only a matter of time before it becomes bloated to justify valuations.
This is like Excel - nobody needs more than 20% of all its features... but a different 20% for everyone. Project Management/Tracking needs can vary a lot between orgs or even people.
What are alternatives that are light on the customization and day-to-day management?
To set up a new Shortcut workspace:
1. Sign up 2. Invite teammates, group them into teams if desired 3. Activate the GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket integration, so as engineers work via VCS their work in Shortcut progresses automatically 4. Set your workspace's timezone 5. Turn on/off Iterations (sprints) based on your process. Unfinished stories can be set to automatically roll from one iteration to the next. 6. Turn on/off point estimation based on your process
Then start writing Stories (tickets/issues) to track work.
Going further: Stories can be grouped into Epics. Epics can be grouped into Objectives (with associated Key Results if that's your thing). You can put Epics on a Roadmap to "share out" what your team is planning to work on. All optional, based on how you work and the size of your org.
It was clear the VMWare was going to gut the company, and Broadcom only made that clearer.
It was once a great company... (Pivotal Labs)
Now it's toast.
Collaborative/online spreadsheets can work. Carefully designed, with appropriate field constraints and filters and sort templates... especially for smaller lists or smaller groups, they can be OK.
A few areas where they break down though:
- No attachments to stories (test cases, screenshots, etc)
- No comments/history view or threaded discussions
- Poor usability of notifications on @mention
- Inflexible UI/data formatting (cells instead of layout)
Sometimes I keep the spreadsheet for internal stakeholder issue reporting. It's a business-familiar tool for gathering input, which then gets synced to the more purpose-built tool for action.
Those discussions need to happen earlier
I've never been as productive or had that much fun at work.
1 computer, 2 mice, and 2 keyboards. Had a few mice wars that got frustrating at times, but still loved it. Had my best manager there of my career — Guss.
Quite sad that they’re shutting down Tracker as it’s just such a good tool compared to others.
I’ll pass all team player marks and metrics, but if there’s too much custom tooling, distributed knowledge and gatekeepers, my performance will suffer more than those that pair all day
I had good experience with it, fwiw.
You will be missed old friend. Nothing else comes close.
When I tried to explain other people afterwards how to do this, they just shrugged, as if I told a fairy tale. I had a chance to demo it maybe a couple more times while migrating other systems, and very successfully (and with very low mental and emotional effort) - itemizing the tests cases first, building fakes, frequent commits, trunk-based development, small stories, incremental improvements.
But it's never been perceived as a designed success, they are typically so prejudiced that they saw it as a fluctuation in the monkey circus of software development they got used to.
Now I'm at the stage we need a support group for ex-alumnis.
You mean iterating and pivoting.
It is arguable if it was ever sufficiently polished, but at least we tried our best.
Shortcut as a product is team-oriented with solid GitHub/Gitlab/Bitbucket and Slack integrations.
Pivotal Tracker - ice box, backlog, or current iteration.
I see companies in Trello Hell - well meaning, but often conflated, grey area states. There's like 10-15 columns on their boards.
It's a hot mess.
The task list in Jira is good enough for finishing or marking one task as blocked and starting another. If anyone is using the interface like Tom Cruise in Minority Report, dragging things around at pace, it’s because people aren’t keeping their tasks updated and a tool can’t and probably shouldn’t try to fix that. You fix that by orienting the UI so devs benefit from using it, not by guilt tripping or lecturing.
Looking at it 16 years later, and… what is this nonsense? It’s so customizable that it’s loaded with footguns.
Then, someone I believe decided to make a "Bugzilla in Java", because they didn't like Perl (reasonable).
But whoever that was didn't have the deep knowledge of how the thing was supposed to be used. Lacking that insight, they created a "Swiss Army Chainsaw", implementing simultaneously everything, and nothing.
Next, some MBAs got hold of the thing, and made everything 10X worse.
Meanwhile, Bugzilla is still the same and still the best software project management tool, if you know how it's intended to be used.
TL;DR it's so completely customizable that it's more like a DIY project management toolkit. Pivotal and Linear have/had a more opinionated approach: "here's how you manage projects. Good luck and have fun!" Jira almost seems to push otherwise rational people to build the most baroque processes imaginable.
HOWEVER, on a slight tanget from that point...If this company and its software have ever received any sort of taxpayer funds, then my opinion is that from the beginning, such software should have been open sourced. Publicly-paid software should be publicly available. Of course, said business has every right to earn profits from providing the service such as hosting said software for convenience for customers. But, every citizen who paid taxes has a right to see (and access!) all the code...well, that's my belief anyway. ;-)
I used to self-host a Phabricator instance, which I liked a lot, but the upstream maintainer made the reasonable decision to step away.
My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are addressed by enterprise SaaS.
Redmine:
- https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/repository/svn/show...
- https://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/wiki/Download
RequestTracker:
- https://github.com/bestpractical/rt
- https://github.com/bestpractical/rt/releases
A bit like Phabricator, these are almost frameworks that can do a ticketing UI.
// But really, probably something mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Taiga:
I was also very fond of Phabricator (all though my team preferred GitHub style pull requests) but I haven't had a need for it recently, so I haven't tried phorge myself.
Taiga.io?
> My guess is there is not much of a niche for self-hosted solutions anymore. The GitHub Issues free tier covers most of the low-complexity use-cases, while higher-complexity use-cases are addressed by enterprise SaaS.
Especially with the presence of free SaaSes such as Trello, and integrated project management in self-hosted GitLab, yeah.
VMware can't sell Pivotal Tracker to some company that will keep it going longer (and perhaps try to migrate customers to their own product)?
Most of my job as a developer now is wading through bureaucracy that other people created (e.g., figuring out a poorly-designed, poorly-implemented, and poorly-communicated third-party API that often would be easier to do myself from scratch).
When I do hold my nose and wade through someone else's bureaucracy, and become dependent upon it, it had better not be pulled out from under me by some coked-up MBA who doesn't care what customers think of them.
I don't get it. You buy a company, then deliberately destroy it. How is that profitable? I get that there are tax benefits to being able to show massive losses, but certainly the net at the end is still a loss.
I always wondered, did Pivotal Tracker invent this paradigm? They were surely using it before any of the big players utilized it.
At our height, the owner started bringing in more projects than our current workflow could handle. Customers started getting angry because their projects would slip through the cracks and get delayed if they weren't calling us up weekly to nag us for status. I sort of became the project manager by default because I touched most of the projects in some way and I was the go-to guy when someone had a question about the status of a project. I wasn't really happy about this because I liked doing tech stuff more than I liked managing projects.
In an attempt to preserve my sanity and get back to logging billable hours, I grabbed a deck of blank index cards and wrote down the company name, project name, status and for each project we had. (I didn't like spreadsheets at the time and this was faster than writing code.) That way, I didn't have to actively remember the status of every project. When needed or when asked, I could just grab the card and look. Once a week or so, I would update the status of each project on the card.
Not long after, I got to noticing that there was really only four (or five, I don't recall) states that any project could be in and decided to stop writing them on the cards. Instead I placed the cards in dedicated piles that represented the project's status and moved them around as needed. That worked well. Eventually, I thought it would good if everyone on the team could see the projects and their status as well, so I grabbed an old whiteboard, hung it on the wall behind me, drew a column for each status, and taped all the cards into the column corresponding to their status. This was a BIG improvement. I stopped wasting an hour every morning just going over project status with the boss and other employees. Everyone could just walk over to the area near my desk and look at the wall behind me. (It was an open-plan office before those were "cool.") Others could move the cards between columns themselves. When a client called demanding an update, I could just glance behind me.
A few jobs later, I took a compulsory three-day seminar on Agile and saw that they called this thing a Kanban board.
Before tools like Tracker or JIRA, people who were doing agile development did everything with physical index cards. There was a lot of controversy even about digitizing those workflows back in the day - "we lose human connection and conversation by putting it in the machine!" Nobody has those conversations anymore as far as I'm aware.
Like others have mentioned on this thread, the true innovation of Tracker was to have a single view where stories are ordered vertically in a single column and grouped by status. This really changes the conversation around what is top priority. Everything can be urgent and have a high level of priority, but if you put something at the top, something else must shift down in compensation. No more doing that thing where there are five number one priorities at the same time.
The Agile view in Jira actually owes some inspiration to Tracker, if you can believe it. I know because I was there. I was a client on a Pivotal Labs project way back in the day, back when Tracker was still not publicly available, but only available to clients of Pivotal Labs. Our PM loved Tracker and wanted to use it but knew we could not get approval for it back home, all other teams were on JIRA. So our PM found a JIRA plugin called Greenhopper, tracked down the developer, and fed this person feedback to try and turn Greenhopper into the most Tracker-like thing possible. Greenhopper eventually got absorbed into Atlassian and turned into what is today known as Jira Agile.
Tracker felt like such an amazing breath of fresh air and forward looking technology at the time when it came out. Tracker used Ruby on Rails and did sexy AJAX stuff on the frontend (big wow factor back then, this was the age of IE6).
I loved Tracker for many years. I could sing its praises all day long. That said, the people who worked on the product had some philosophical things that got in the way of the product evolving. Reasonably, they did not want to turn into a huge enterprise tracking tool. Problem was, there were never any more features built into Tracker that really gave a good view for people who were higher level than the daily boots on the ground folks. So no good visualizations or features for projects where multiple teams must execute in tandem, and there are complex interdependencies between the teams. So while Tracker was awesome for the folks on the dev team, it wasn't very helpful for people in middle or upper management who needed birds-eye visibility easily and at a glance.
So although I am sad to see this announcement in a way I'm quite hopeful. There are so many people who love this tool and will miss it, now there's no excuse for them not to go build something better!
I actually liked using Tracker.
As a subset of users, they seem to want the flexibility of Excel, except it also has the specific workflow they want out of the box (which is different for every PM).
Every product that's chased that rabbit down the hole has ended up with something customizable enough that (a) users need training to actually use it & (b) nobody is ever trained on it.
I'm sure Jira is great... if I and everyone else at the company went to a two-week training course on configuring and using it. But none of those people, nor I, am ever going to do that.
Tl;dr - project management/tracker tools should have a complexity feature cap, defined by what a reasonable person can intuit in the course of normal use over a month.
We lost our CTO recently, and he was also the "jira admin" (ie. the only person who knows how the hell to do anything with jira) and it's just been a clusterf*ck ever since.
Only Trello really "beat it" fairly - Jira was always top-down forced, and Asana only won with designers because it was pretty while Pivotal was more tactical (not to mention they clung to skeuomorphic UI a little too long). The rest is history.
I guess we can say Pivotal was quite pivotal in the AGILE/sprint/PM software race. RIP
Pivotal provided a nice middle ground and was so easy to use with just the right amount of customization and power user functionality.
But I always felt like there was a small group of users and it just never got a foothold in companies.
If you end up on Jira, once you get it configured, put the admin password in a bottle and throw it into the ocean. Do not let anyone say "you know, if we made this one little change to our workflow...", because once that dam breaks all hope is lost.
https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/what-s-the-best-way-to...
No, you could not have.
The environment that birthed Pivotal Tracker had the same culture, and the death of PT is a consequence of multiple profitable acquisitions, eventually into a multinational semiconductor corp that has no use for a small SaaS devtools product.
You could probably have called it based on the acquisition chain though. Many of us have been hoping to be surprised. Our luck has run out.
Back when I did contract software engineering, Pivotal Tracker made managing client relationships a breeze by giving the client perfect visibility into the impact of feature requests, and allowing them to make the tradeoffs that made sense for their business.
"Want to add this new feature, and do it right away? No problem, but as you can see, if I drag it into this week, as a 4-point task, it pushes everything else back by two days, which means we'll have to cut something else or change the launch date."
Great UI, great vibes, and was just a delight to use. Even as PT dies, its legacy lives on. Thank you, PT team!
I just logged in for the first time in years and found that I still had two side projects in there. Time to download them I guess.
Simplicity is reinforced with a great information density: lots, but not overwhelming. Current design trends make information density super low, forcing you to scroll a lot and spending much more energy/time just to be able to look at things.
When you need to "open" an item, you remain in the same screen (no modal, no context change): metadata, description, conversation. Nothing more!
In Linear I'm totally lost with projects, cycles, views, projects...
I'm stuck with Github Issues/Projects, but I miss Pivotal simplicity!!
I've just exported a 10MB Pivotal CSV...
- https://www.easyredmine.com/
I still use all the terminologies I learnt from PT — Icebox, backlog, current — across other project management apps.
Sad, and you will be missed.
https://help.shortcut.com/hc/en-us/articles/205965835-Import...
p.s. Yes, we tried all of the alternatives and none works for us.
While pairing could be exhausting, it built a really incredible culture there that will be hard to recreate.
RIP
would love to make a clone.
Is the possible purchase cost below the minimum that Broadcom's legal department even accepts to look at? (i.e. they don't get involved with "small" sub-10M deals..?)
https://github.com/Codeminer42/cm42-central
> An agile project planning tool and Pivotal Tracker drop-in replacement
Maybe Tracker belongs in different time that we will not go back to, who knows.
Then several years later, after working in large Silicon Valley tech companies, and seeing how they run with Jira, I decided to start https://linear.app
So much team's time and effort went in to configuring their tools instead of actually working on things. We do more than PT did, but aim to keep the experience straightforward and focused, regardless of the size of your team or company.
No idea how Asana is still valued at $3B it's literally just notepad with checkboxes.