[Klinky]

I agree that Jira is not the best project management tool, but it wasn't really designed to be one. It's not terrible a work tracking, but it seems to lacking in the roadmap/pre-planning departments that project/product should be using to feed developers work.

That said, spreadsheets are also not great project management tools either, quickly becoming messy and out of date. Nor do I think relying on senior devs to roll their own project management tools is a good idea.

I'd like to see more WBS(work breakdown structure) tools used to identify needs in advance and ways to monitor their implementation, testing & deployment. The industry's love affair with agile seems to lead to pre-planning & consistent structure being seen as "too waterfall". Basically it feels like no one does agile "correctly", and those that it's worked well for, likely have a workflow and product cycle that aligns with it well, but that may not be true for all products, tech, stacks, etc.

Ultimately we're trying to answer these basic questions: What are we doing? Why are we doing it? How are we doing it? When will it be done? Is it actually done? If those questions cannot be answered easily there are probably gaps in your workflow.