[kschrader]

One of the lenses that we look at things through when making product decisions is making it hard to do things that end up feeling like paper cuts for developers all day long.

I've always seen Jira as the "manager's tool" and we're trying to make Clubhouse the "developer's tool."

It's a simple decision that I think (and I'm obviously biased) has had some profound effects on the way we've built Clubhouse.

[x0x0]

Since you said "we", some feedback:

I detest jira. The software fills me with loathing. We also pay them a little shy of $5k/year, and will be paying $12k/year by the end of next year. I've been begging one of your competitors to let me into their private beta. So I'm close to being an active buyer for software like this. Also, I can personally make the purchase decision.

I went to look at your site, and clicked on pricing because I'm scared of the word free. I want to pay for this type of software so I have reason to believe it will be there in a year.

However, it says I have to go to the enterprise plan to get SSO. Monetizing security is shitty of you all, and I don't want to have to take a call to get the price. I just bounced.

[privateSFacct]

I'm in same spot. Willing to pay (ie, routinely pay reasonably big money just for Microsoft VLSC stuff and a bunch of other specialized software 10K+ annually and willing to do $50K investments in licensing), but want to have some $ around pricing.

The problem is there are too many players in most spaces.

I literally DO NOT HAVE TIME to handle all the inbound / DRIP / follow-up sales marketing, go through your qualifications process etc. I need to do a quick pass - and pricing is an obvious part of that.

Ironically, we have dual fiber options at our location. One sales guy - here are our prices. Not cheap. Other sales guy - we offer a broad array of services yadda yadda would like to schedule a time to meet. We already have VPN / 24/7 on-call help for issues with it etc etc. Called first guy back, said give us a gig, static IP etc - send me contract and signed within an hour. Perfect. I don't even care if we are paying more. I'll look again in 2 years and if I can get someone to give me an actual price I'll make a decision then.

The call for quote folks are HARD to deal with when you change things like seat counts etc. - just be prepared to spend a LOT more time on the licensing piece which is harder to delegate than the folks with clear upfront pricing.

[Griffinsauce]

Last bit is so true, stop wasting my time and just tell me the costs. It just indicates that either you're too expensive or you're bad at concisely making a case for your product. Both are a red flag.

"Call for a quote" for software needs to die.

[samhamilton]

Personally also hate the let’s charge extra for SSO but at least with Clubhouse I can login with Google (G Suite account) and use the free product, as that’s what I just did a couple of hours ago to kick the tires.

[tyre]

I think the challenge with this is what happens when you’re in a growing product org.

At a certain point it makes sense to have product managers. Maybe for a while you keep optimizing for developer usecases, but that’s no longer your customer (even if they are most of your users.)

Larger revenue deals come from teams with more people and those are the ones that need more manager-focused features or where there manager is the buyer. From a go-to-market standpoint, you might put a ceiling on your revenue if you limit the addressable market to those teams that are still product managed by developers.

Not that that’s bad! Just a thought.

[healsjnr1]

Our product managers user clubhouse constantly and love it.

Club house has done a great job of organising information into stories, epics, milestones, projects.

All task manager products have some variation on these components but I've found clubhouses organisation of them to be the best.

It allows you to very quickly view the data differently depending on the context: stand up, sprint planning, PM trying to figure what's going on and what should be next.

My gut is that it turns out the way developers want to organise there work is actually a really sensible way of doing it, and so it scales up the management stack well.

[kschrader]

Just to clarify, we think a lot about product managers, but when there's a tug-of-war between making life easier for developers vs making life easy for PMs we lean towards the former.

[dmix]

> At a certain point it makes sense to have product managers

I would just hire more engineers who have a good product sense and give them more power. That was Facebook's approach (initially).

[techslave]

if you’re building a product for engineers, that makes sense. your product managers are then former engineers.

if you’re building a product for normies, you want to hire normies as your PMs.

[cloverich]

This idea that understanding how to build a product means you do not understand why or how someone would want to use it is baffling to me. Yes, some engineers have no product sense and no taste. But there are plenty that do. As is the case for all non-engineering fields as well.

[bengale]

Well you're nailing it IMHO. I'm currently working at a big enterprise place to pay the bills while working evenings and weekends on a startup with a friend. Going from JIRA in my day job to clubhouse at the startup is like a breath of fresh air.

[minton]

From the article:

“Schrader and Clubhouse CMO Mitch Wainer believe Clubhouse can maintain its organic growth by staying hyperfocused on designing for product managers and creating simple workflows that keep engineers happy.”