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.

Your comment reads a lot like something you'd say during a chat with friends on a sofa in a café.

Maciej knew Delicious inside out, and he knew what Delicious being acquired by Yahoo meant. So he started building Pinboard (a Delicious alternative) in 2009, caught the various exodus waves from Delicious in the later years (esp. 2011) and ended up acquiring Delicious for $35k in 2017.

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.

I do. You might not have demands to migrate all data from all of your potential customers, but far, far more people than you might expect treat their issue tracking system as a system of record and external memory for a HUGE assortment of things.

One hugely (and obviously) useful query chain that such a system answers is "Hey, this customer problem sounds familiar. Did we investigate it before? Did we solve it? If so, how? If not, why not?". For long-running projects, it is impossible to select the correct 10% of data to retain to also retain the ability to reliably -er- service those query chains.

Respectfully: if it was obvious, I wouldn't have come to the conclusion I did and written up what I wrote.

> So 100% of the data migrated from 10% of the Pivotal user base...

Yeah, maybe. I don't know how large the slice of the Pivotal Tracker userbase you'd be able to retain even if you had a perfect clone. I bet it would be notably larger than you imagine it would be... it's my understanding that it has some pretty rabid fans that used it.

Sorry about that, I think I assumed some familiarity with moving data around/migrations, and moving 10% of a customers data around from a legacy service to new service wouldn't make much sense in that context.

> I bet it would be notably larger than you imagine it would be

I think being able to capture 10% of existing users is already a very large guess, realistically it would be closer to 1%.

But, without any numbers from Pivotal and actually trying to launch a cloned service, all we can do is guess :)

I am familiar with this sort of thing, yes.

I'm also professionally familiar with people who seem to think that it's totally acceptable to obligate folks to throw away large fractions of their valuable historical data in the name of cost savings. "Surely you can identify the most valuable 10% of your data!" they say.

Given that I don't know you and what you know, and given that I've encountered a shockingly high number of these fools with a fetish for data destruction, I chose to expect the worst from your somewhat-ambiguous statement... which would ensure that at least one of us learned something, regardless of the truth of the situation.

Yeah, I noticed that too. Not that my feelings are hurt or anything, but you might end up in friendlier and more productive discussions if you try to stick to the HN guidelines, which includes:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Was this discussion unfriendly?

As for discussion productivity: I know that -historically- I've spent TONS of time going round in circles because of unexamined incorrect assumptions that crop up when both sides "steelman" the others' arguments, rather than speaking plainly, clearly, and politely about what they believe their conversation partner to have said. "Steelmanning" can be an acceptable backup strategy, but -IME- speaking clearly and plainly is the strongly preferred strategy between conversational partners who can remain civil.

I assume folks can remain civil in the face of polite questioning and assertion, and switch strategies if it turns out that they can't. To do it in the reverse order is just much, much slower and error-prone.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says ... [a]ssume good faith.

Thing is, that was the strongest plausible interpretation of what you said. I assumed that you were making totally good-faith statements based on your background and structured my reply to be both polite and gather the most information reasonably possible about which of the totally plausible backgrounds you were speaking from with the fewest round trips. Had I not done this, and had you actually been one of those fools who revels in data destruction, we would likely have gone several rounds in mutual misunderstanding, rather than the half-round of solo confusion terminated by your reply that immediately cleared up the misunderstanding.

Anyway... if you have a couple of (6+) free months, you should TOTALLY clone Pivotal Tracker. IMO, the two HARD, HARD parts will be to replicate its ability to work offline, and its ability to integrate incoming changes from the server with unsaved changes on the client. Whoever wrote the data handling system for that program did a really, really, really good job.

I dunno, that felt obvious to me. Both the idea that you’d somehow manage to get all customers to migrate to your new service, as well as that they’d migrate only 10% of their data sound preposterous.

Ah, I might be unduly affected by some big data (not Big Data, mind you) migrations that I'm currently involved in, where the Powers That Be are telling us that we have to throw away a huge fraction of our historical data. Well, that and the many times we've had to fight beancounters who popped on by to demand we save the company what amounts to pocket change by throwing away tons of historical data.

(It's flabbergasting how beancounters tend to ignore the price of programmer time when making their cost-cutting spreadsheets.)

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.

Remember we're not talking about the general case here. We're specifically talking about the feasibility of seeing a specific product being shut down, and then building a clone of it on a small resource budget in an attempt to snatch up their soon-to-be-former customers.

And in the most recent case of this I’m aware of, at least two different groups got to sell the company to new suckers before the bill came due.

If I show each user of a website a highly customized, user- and workflow-specific page for the same url based on context and previous activity, then I have to generate it every time ("hand crafted, artisanal web pages") so the weight of the backend is now proportional to traffic.

Amazon.com tries to split the difference. You and I see the same bones of a page for an Apple Watch 10, but little bits load in and show you laundry detergent and me pickles. But Amazon makes more money every time I click on pickles and add to my cart, so there's an expectation that the fractional penny they pay to load the page fragment results in more sales. That doesn't work the same for SaaS applications, so you need to use even this trick sparingly, not build your whole product value statement around it.

For the control issues crack, the paying customer (not their users) is attracted by all the levers and dials, but cannot appreciate the cost using them exposes them to. The development cost can amortize over time, increasing your profit margins and letting you recoup the R&D costs, but the cost of keeping a cluster running cannot. And you've painted yourself into a requirements corner you can't get out of. Eventually their eye drifts to competitors with fewer high-cost, high-value features in favor of low-cost.

Is Gmail a highly customized website? What about Atlassian suite?

Does showing different snippets of existing texts for each user,and providing sorting and searching functionality is highly customized in a way that will usually be too costly on the backend to make viable money?

When in reality, there is no risk free anything.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> Whilst I wouldn’t recommend remote team members having to endure a subpar experience, for example during the daily Kanban meeting, is that really a good reason to degrade the experience for the rest of the team, losing out on all the benefits that gathering around a physical board can bring?

Are they seriously proposing _physical kanban board_ as a viable alternative to JIRA? This got to be a joke, right?

(Checks post date, it's 2019... Ah, that explains it)

They are fundamentally different things, and you cannot always infer one from the other.

  - "Accepted" is the final state. Deployed to prod and verified. Story is finished and can be hidden from active view.

  - "Delivered" is set by QA when they believe the changes are complete and correct, ready for deployment.

  - "Finished" is set by the developer when they finish, push, and create the PR.

It happens sometimes that a Finished story is deployed to staging in integration build X, but then omitted from integration build X+1, for reasons unrelated to the quality of the changes. In this case the story stays Finished (or Delivered) and we set the @staging label when deploying X to staging, but clear it when deploying X+1.

This works really well, especially after writing some glue code to integrate Pivotal and GitHub and your build/deploy flows.

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.

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).

Project management software isn’t made for the benefit of engineers, that’s on purpose. The customer is the business, not the engineer who works there.

Any issues with the engineers have with workflow really aren’t the fault of the software, it’s the fault of the project managers/engineering managers’ configurations.

You can’t blame the company that makes the paint for the choice in paint color.

Personally I think the only way Jira has dropped the ball is on page load performance.

When I create a ticket and don't open it right away before the popup is gone, poof, it's gone into the depths of that project backlog.

If I want to create a multi-project board, oh, now tickets don't have the same statuses, set up a mapping first.

Or figuring out the artifical limits between epics, tickets and subtasks.

And slowness, don't get me started there.

Yes, just like you are blaming the paint shop for only having the basic colors, I too can blame the paint shop for having 1M green hues to choose from.

I've seen many custom JIRA workflows, where you define specific states that can progress to other states. Nearly all of them, over time, were modified so that any state can move to any other state.

And if you engineers don't use the tool you provide, the data in it is useless. Engineers are typically very smart and will just twist any tool they don't like.

Declaration: In order to have accurate state between projects and bugs, everything needs to be tracked in JIRA.

Result: 70% of your Jira stories are now "This JIRA tracks an issue stored in the Github repo, see the repo for current status"

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.

I think this viewpoint -- that these processes somehow could increase efficiency if only they were good -- has a lot to do with why engineers dislike systems like Jira, because they will never see the increased efficiency they are looking for.

Let me restate it in a way that I think is a little more nuanced:

The point of systems/processes is to lessen the amount of inefficiency in a group of people working together as that group a) gets larger, and b) experiences turnover.

Nothing's ever going to be as efficient as a single engineer that can build everything with all the details in their head at that very moment. But there's a limitation on size of problems you can solve doing that! So many people working on large problems hate their processes, because each individual person is doing less than if they were in a tiny, stable team, and they can feel this, even if the organization is making great progress.

(And then, at the largest sizes of organization, it's almost impossible to stop the org from crumbling from the weight of its own complexity. People do spend an awful lot of effort trying, though).

But, I've also worked in shops so hidebound that the aim of the organization seemed to be to Follow The Process above all else. Didn't ship anything all quarter? Well, at least we Followed The Process! Customers are screaming? That sucks, but The Process doesn't accommodate their needs this quarter. Principal engineers are leaving? They just don't appreciate The Process!

In my experience, Jira seems to resonate with PMs who adore The Process for the sake of The Process. Lighter, more opinionated systems like Pivotal or Linear seem to help teams deliver features more quickly than teams using Jira to march in line with The Process.

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).

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.

At least in the "agile" (actual or lookalike) software development.

But carve it in immutable, legal stone that there will always be a classic (reddit style: old) version of the product that's feature-complete but maintained.

... my suspicion is there's actually legalese somewhere that mandates the continuity of old.reddit.com. Otherwise, I'm at a loss to explain its continued existence in light of aggressive app pushing.

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.

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!

You will be missed old friend. Nothing else comes close.

It is arguable if it was ever sufficiently polished, but at least we tried our best.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://confluence.atlassian.com/plugins/servlet/mobile?cont...

> We originally used Bugzilla for bug tracking and the developers in the office started calling it by the Japanese name for Godzilla, Gojira (the original black-and-white Japanese Godzilla films are also office favourites). As we developed our own bug tracker, and then it became an issue tracker, the name stuck, but the Go got dropped - hence JIRA.

It's just that I've never worked with someone I considered a good PM who loved Jira. The great ones wouldn't care if we did all the planning on papyrus because they were more concerned with getting things done than documenting them in excruciating detail.

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...

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!

Thanks for the tip!

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.

If something can't be significantly better than Excel, then product specs probably need refining.

It's not that Excel is amazing or perfect in any one thing, but it is a pretty amazing blend of simplicity, flexibility, out of the box features, programmability, and presentation.

ETA: obviously not all good startup ideas fit into that thesis, just the ones i tend to enjoy working on.

Sometimes, the nature of the problem makes flexibility irreducible.

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.

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.

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

It's explained pretty clearly in the first edition of Extreme Programming Explained, but i can't find a copy of that online right now. The second edition was absolutely ruined for some reason, but still contains a rough description of it:

> Whichever units you use, hours or points, you will need to deal with the situation where actual results don't match the plan. [...] If you are estimating in points, modify the budget for subsequent cycles. A simple way to do this, dubbed "yesterday's weather" by Martin Fowler, is to plan in any given week for exactly as much work as you actually accomplished in the previous week.

Tracker uses some kind of rolling average rather than just last week's number, but it's the same idea.

Doing what PT does, with index cards, would have been a nightmare on any sufficiently large project.

The concept comes from Extreme Programming. Software implementations came later. I think Pivotal Tracker does something useful, but you need a larger team for it to matter.

Here are some photographs of the team room:

https://williampietri.com/writing/2004/teamroom/

My buddy and I built what ended up being an $80m/yr gross revenue business entirely using PT for ourselves. We shipped a MVP exactly to the week we predicted. It helped that we both worked at Pivotal and knew exactly how to use PT correctly.

You certainly were early with the process and I applaud you for that! PT wasn't released until 2008.

I still use all the terminologies I learnt from PT — Icebox, backlog, current — across other project management apps.

Sad, and you will be missed.

While pairing could be exhausting, it built a really incredible culture there that will be hard to recreate.

RIP

Maybe Tracker belongs in different time that we will not go back to, who knows.

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.

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.

No idea how Asana is still valued at $3B it's literally just notepad with checkboxes.