Shortcut

Vorteile

The biggest win for me personally in the switch to Clubhouse was simply having a nice user interface to look at when dealing with tickets.

Nachteile

The only issue I've had so far has been that I'm not always aware when a ticket has been reviewed. As a customer success manager, I file ticket reports and sometimes they get closed without my being alerted. We've attempted to solve this with a slack integration but I'm not sure that it's working as expected.

Also, it would be nice if they didn't use markdown when you uploaded an image to a ticket comment.

Vorteile

- Simple to learn and navigate so the team could quickly start using the product after switching- Love the dark mode and the colour coding of different story types i.e bug, feature or chore so it's easy to see things at the high level- Easy to create sprints and I like the summaries provided on the story points

Nachteile

- You can only write stories in markdown text. Not a big issue since I've become really good at it! But it'd be good if there was a text editor instead- Sometimes when I create a story and I accidentally click out of it, I lose the progress. It'd be good if they had a draft functionality where the stories get created as a draft straight away

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Jira

Warum Shortcut gewählt wurde

We needed something that was more focused on sprint management

Zuvor genutzte Software

Notion

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Shortcut

JIRA has a quite suite of features however it was too complex for what we were looking for. We need something to track our sprints and features and shortcut was perfect for that.

Vorteile

This is an adequate task management/tracking software. It has a fantastic Zendesk integration and multiple customizable fields. It also boasts decent search and filtering functions but it isn't particularly user-friendly and filling out all the fields that make it function well takes a great deal of time (hence the title of this review).

Nachteile

There are no AI/smart suggestions for related epic/team fields so every time you make a new ticket you have to search through them by scratch. They also don't offer a great tag database or tag definitions so you have to create naming conventions separately offline. You also can't use rich text in story descriptions.

Vorteile

1. The app is very easy to configure & set up.
2. The user experience is seamless & functionality is very self-explanatory.
3. There are multiple ways to configure each component, so you can set up the app according to what works best for you & your company. (No "one size fits all" model.)
4. The ability to set up different workflows for different departments has been a huge help for us.

Nachteile

1. It's a little hard to envision how each of the components should be set up for your organization when you're first getting in there (i.e., projects, workflows, milestones, epics, stories), so we ended up changing the setup as we went along after the initial configuration. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as it allowed us to improve the way we currently did things.
2. The biggest issue we have now, after using the app for a while, is that stories do not populate into the Gantt charts, only epics. This means if we have one-off tasks that are added as stories, those do not pull into the report we'd like. For that reason, we have to set up an entire epic just to set up a single story, for reporting purposes. I think it would be great if you had the option to pull the Gantt reports at the epic or story-level.

Vorteile

Before switching to Shortcut, we used Jira. While Jira has plenty of features, we found it a bit cumbersome and the performance of the interface was atrocious (everything single task was incredibly slow, even the most basic activities had a noticeable delay).

The first major benefit we saw with Shortcut was the speed of interaction - instead of waiting for the interface to catch up, we could just log in and get things done.

The integrations with various source control platforms (we use the Gitlab integration) also helps keep task statuses up to date without even having to open the web interface.

Overall the speed of the interface and the available integrations lead to a feeling that Shortcut never "gets in our way".

Nachteile

We started out paying for Shortcut (when it was still called Clubhouse), but were soon switched to a free plan without even having to ask. Although this was a nice gesture on their part, they then released a beta of their new product called Write. This beta is only available for paying users, which is understandable, but having been moved to a free plan meant we couldn't access it. This isn't a major issue, but starting our subscription back up would require going through the approval process with our accounting department again so we've just stayed on the free plan without access to Write so far.