Shortcut Reviews

Pros

Clubhouse brought us a new set of features and ways to organize stories and tasks that we didn't know we wanted/needed. We have always stuck with tools that were able to help improve our kanban based workflow rather than the simple project board tools like Trello that cater to everyone more than software/product development specifically.

There are few tools out there that provide what we are looking for: the ability to organize and label stories with more granularity than a single label (estimates, types, project, priorities, epic, etc), and the ability to have reports like velocity and burndown charts.

Cons

It is a very small thing, but it would be nice if we could adjust the color scheme of both things like labels beyond the default options, as well as adjust the overall interface colors.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

I think the best part of Clubhouse is the robust API that can allow a dev team to add or complement to the existing platform. Clubhouse seems designed for teams focusing on a product or a small portfolio of similar products or complimentary features. It does not seem designed for a consulting or agency style development shop.

Cons

Clubhouse is lacking in a number of areas that should be expected features in agile project management software. Completion dates are buried, no project budgeting or hourly rates, no invoicing or adding expenses, time tracking, resource management, personal task lists, custom fields, dependencies. It also seemed overwhelming to get set up and running.

Pros

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".

Cons

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.

Pros

Every org grows out of Github Issues, Trello, and Asana when they realize a) stories need relationships such as blocking/blocked; b) stories need task checklists; c) different groups have different workflows; d) stories are often mini-project briefs and need to read as such. However, once you find yourself in JIRA, which you've been told is the mature platform for mature orgs, you're operating a nuclear submarine, you need 3 sysadmins, nobody can find anything, and you want to throw your computer out the window. SC has the infrastructure but with the user-friendliness of everyday software. Think of how Mixpanel took what Omniture was doing and made it accessible to the everyday marketer. That's what Shortcut does for eng/prod teams. No sysadmin needed, everyone gets it.

Their API is well-documented and incredible. We do tons with Zapier because of how much they expose.

Their CS team is spectacular, inquisitive, friendly, helpful. They want their customers to succeed.

They have a one-click signup link which has made our onboarding process much faster

They have templated stories and checklists which we use across the org for everything from product launches through onboarding/offboarding hires.

Cons

very few dislikes. it's amazing. if i have to force criticism:

- If you work cross-departmentally, avoid multiple workflows, or you'll be having to look at multiple kanban boards daily
- the "dashboard" (home) isn't as useful as it seems like it should be so we all either use iterations or stories view for our daily lens
- shortcut and productboard both boast integration, but it's not great, and i think this is the fault of productboard

but really these criticisms represent like 5% negative compared to 95% enthusiastic positive

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

Switched From

Pros

Shortcut does a great job allowing us to manage all facets of our product and being multiple teams together for what is most important, client and end user satisfaction. It follows standard agile flow but allows flexibility where engineers and non-engineers can use it alike.
We also utilize their API for templates epics and stories and it is great to work with.
Support team and client success managers have been a pleasure to work with when we’ve had conversations. They always are able to handle a situation or get us in touch with someone who can.
Lastly the product is always evolving and they are very transparent through their website and slack channel of what is coming next to make your life better!

Cons

Some things were less flexible such as naming conventions and required fields on stories/epics, but these are getting worked out over time (for ex projects are not required any more)

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

Pros

best project management software ive ever used, works for technical engineers and nontechnical marketing chaps like myself.

Cons

wish there was a REALLY simple version for mobile that showed me a minimalistic view of my cards or something really creative to change my life there, if anyone could create the perfect on the go project management view, it would be you guys!

Pros

Shortcut is easy to use but very powerful, and has a clean, intuitive interface. It offers a wide range of features, including project planning, task management, and collaboration tools. The software integrates well with other tools, such as Slack.

Cons

The per-user price is a bit steep if you need access to all of Shortcut's features.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

Great tool for managing the team's tasks and it's especially good for teams working with Scrum.
It offers a lot of customizability, thus, you can change it to tailor your needs.

Cons

The learning curve for someone who never worked with it can be steep at the beginning. But after learning the basics it gets easy.

Pros

Unlike other agile management platforms, Clubhouse is setup that you can get a lot of value from the simple Kanban board with the option to go deeper and track more in depth insights into the progress of your work.

We moved to Clubhouse from a setup of Trello with a ton of extensions to help manage the extra tracking we wanted to be doing, and I think the best analogy I can make is that Clubhouse is like Trello on steroids. But in saying that, it's far simpler and more effective than other bloated tracking software like Jira or Pivotal Tracker - which in my opinion try to please the managers who want a lot of fancy yet ultimately meaningless metrics at the expense of user experience for the development team who ultimately has to spend time keeping it up to date.

The GitHub integration which automatically moves cards as they progress through pull requests is a great example of how Clubhouse has considered that the development team is ultimately the user of the platform, and should be designed around getting them to use it effectively rather than bloating it for the sake of what management think looks good.

Cons

There isn't anything major that I would complain about, but there are some improvements like showing epic burn down charts by points instead of the number of stories that I've asked for a few times but haven't been implemented.

The reporting functionality also has a few bugs, but nothing major that stops it from being valuable.

Pros

Its interface is super fast compared to tools like Jira. I find the platform extremely easy to use and configure.

Cons

The interface has changed recently and at times that can be jarring. But I have no major complaints.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Shortcut

Switched From

Reasons for Switching to Shortcut

Pros

Flexibility and ease of the software - Clubhouse is extremely easy to learn and provides the ability to mold the software and functionality to your team's workflows.
Additionally, the Clubhouse team is continuously adding new integration and features that are best practice for most modern and agile product & tech teams.

Cons

Not necessarily a specific con to Clubhouse but in general for all project management tools. Given the need for detailed requirements, it is necessary to write a lot of content on tickets. As such, the mobile experience is not on part with the browser desktop experience. That being said, I tend to create shell tickets on the mobile app or mobile view, then complete the tickets on a desktop when I have full functionality and familiarity.

Pros

* It embraces the modern development process
* It's fast and responsive
* Almost all you need is in one screen
* It has multiple layers of organization (story, epic, milestone)

Cons

* The higher layers of organization do not 100% align with our process
* Some features are not available on different layers and it seems arbitrary. For example, you can't get a burn down on a sprint if that Sprint is not tracked as a "milestone". So if you are using Milestones to track large scale projects (maybe quarter goals or multi-epic initiatives) you have no way to track how your Sprint is going. Either they need a first-class Sprint concept, or allow burn downs on labels.

Pros

As a product manager, I love the usability of Clubhouse (CH). Having come from competitive products such as JIRA, Rally, Pivotal Tracker, etc., CH feels far more intuitive and the user workflows well thought through. I greatly appreciate the ongoing development by the CH team. It's always a pleasure seeing regular alerts come in with rather material improvements.

Cons

Greater attention to how cross-team and cross-account collaborate using the software is a gap for me. Our business has a 2 or 3 different CH accounts mainly due to security needs (limiting certain access for groups of individuals). Which leads me to an additional thought which is, the ability to configure more granular security levels within CH is limited. Especially for an organization working predominantly with enterprise customers, we tend to have highly regulated standards related to third-party approved solutions.

Pros

From usability and technical perspective this is really an amazing piece of software. The easiness to never having to save something is extremely impressive

Cons

Moving stories between different Workflows is sometimes a bit annoying. Also it would be really awesome if you could apply your own prioritsation scheme and rank for it.

Pros

Clubhouse makes it easy to view and organize work across projects. I like the ability to label things by Epic and create custom workspaces is super helpful. The Clubhouse API is useful for getting information about activity and creating our custom metric reporting.

Cons

The reporting isn't very useful. I feel it is geared toward project management reporting and we don't use project management. I would like to be able to see quality related reports (how many bugs were created/resolved, projects with the most reported bugs, number of bugs created by epic/project. It would also be nice to have the ability to set a Release Date and Production/Testing field on cards so that we can track when features/projects go to production and whether bugs were released as well, or caught during testing.

Pros

The ability to create epics and cards at a basic level is good enough for most use cases. However, Shortcut also offers many more features such as teams, projects, iterations, and many more making this tool useful for so many people.

The first thing I do when opening my work laptop is go to my Shortcut dashboard. I look over all of myself and my teams different tasks and track their progress. As well as give myself action items by assigning myself a card. This in result boots my productivity tremendously.

Cons

Has a little bit of a learning curve due to the amount of features and customization it offers. Don’t feel guilty by not using it to its full potential because there is a lot to unpack.

Pros

We use Clubhouse to manage priorities in our design team and it is really easy to use in this respect. It's easy to create stories, boards and tasks and to steer our team to be more productive.

Cons

I'd love to be able to format text without the need for markdown. That would be great!

Pros

I’ve used more complex software for ticket management and simpler tools, and Shortcut is the right balance of features, cost and ease of use.

Cons

Shortcut recently added Teams to their system which doesn’t work well with our workflow.

Alternatives Considered

Pros

It's easy to use and organize, and there are a lot of customizable features that the previous software I used did not have.

Cons

I wish you could add blockers that aren't other stories, i.e. if I am blocked on something because I need to go confirm something with a Stakeholder, that's not easily indicated within Shortcut. We end up using a Workflow State for "Blocked" stories instead of using the Relationships feature.

Alternatives Considered

Switched From

Pros

Clubhouse is extremely simple and intutive. It doesn't force you into certain paradigms or organizing your workspace to their specific way. It's a really flexible tool that works really well and gets out of the way.

Cons

Probably my least favorite part is that it doesn't have a concept of a sprint built-in to it, but this is not really a deal breaker. It's really easy to just create a label that defines your sprint and apply that label to all the stories that are in your sprint.

Pros

Compared to other similar systems, I've found Shortcut's UI to be welcoming and intuitive. Their feature releases are innovative, and their product team has built something that makes work feel more fun. I especially love the Git widget that makes it easy to copy suggested branch names.

Cons

The GitHub integration seems to still be linking to CH- prefix tickets. But that is very minor.

Pros

It is very easy to use. I really like that it supports Google authentication and that other than simple cards you can create Milestones and Epics. We are very early adopters of Clubhouse (and even wrote a post about why we moved from Trello to Clobhouse) and it's incredible to see the amount of new features and integrations they have came up with in so short time.

Cons

Nothing that I can think of. The experience on mobile was poor at some point, but it's been hugely improved in the past year or so.

Pros

I like that they provide you with so many different views of projects. For example, I can easily track burn rate for projects, individual contributor process, story progress, etc. It is feature rich, yet lightweight. I have never found myself needing something that Clubhouse couldn't offer.

Cons

As a negative person, I honestly can't think of anything!