[jondubois]

My view of Atlassian's project management tools and services is that they can allow terrible managers to become mediocre managers (which is not great but still an improvement) but no matter how much they try, they can never turn a mediocre manager into a good manager.

The value proposition of Atlassian is that their software can give a manager more visibility over the technical/engineering processes within their company; but this improved visibility is useless unless the manager has both a clear vision and a deep technical understanding of their project.

No amount of tooling can match the value of having technical understanding of the project. For example, Jira can generate a lot of pretty charts and workflow visualizations which create a great illusion of progress but this illusion typically comes at the expense of real progress.