Shortcut Software

Rather lightweight and easy to use once you're used to it

Pros

Shortcut is a light and fast alternative to popular options like Jira. It perfectly meets our needs for tracking product development (although not discovery). Writing stories and attaching information is pretty easy now, and also they seamlessly transform into previews. The reporting function is comprehensive and powerful, although we haven't fully utilized it yet. I also like the integration potential with GitHub through the engineering part, and we are currently exploring its capabilities, which seem promising.

Cons

As a user of shortcut, I find the lack of integrations with other commonly used software by product managers to be a drawback. Specifically, when using productboard for discovery and notion for company-wide documentation, the integrations with shortcut are quite ineffective. We are unable to push a feature from productboard to shortcut as a feature, only as an epic. Additionally, we can't link it to an existing epic. In comparison, the jira integration seems much more powerful, and at times, we wish we were using that instead. For those who are not familiar with shortcut, there is definitely a learning curve due to the amount of information and customization it offers. Although features related to prioritization have been greatly improved with the addition of priority levels, it is still a painstakingly manual process in the kanban view. It would be much more efficient if stories could be auto-sorted by priority levels and then fine-tuned in their relative positions. When there are 20-30 stories in a column, dragging and dropping them in a meaningful way becomes almost impossible. Perhaps it's our fault for not onboarding our developers properly, but they spent a long time looking at "everything" instead of realizing that the most relevant view for them is to go to "Stories" and use a "Space" to filter down to the current iteration and team.

Shortcut the Jira killer

Pros

I can't tell you enough how easy and user-friendly this software is. It's very quick and easy to set up and understand. Moreover, it is not expensive at all. Also the Shortcut team consistently delivers new and exciting functionality that truly makes a difference in our workflow.

Cons

To be completely honest, I have no complaints about Shortcut. It does its job well, with nice integrations and an easy-to-use interface. There really isn't anything to dislike about it.

Powerful management software

Pros

This software is highly user-friendly and intuitive. It provides a native experience and allows me to easily build workflows. Also it's convenient and simple to understand.

Cons

Personally, I'm not a fan of the story search system.