[SeanKilleen]

Jira is a perfect example of how culture influences tools. I've seen and been a part of environments where I agreed with this sentiment, and also where I felt the opposite. The difference between those places: whether a culture empowers its teams to think on their own and succeed.

In the places where I've hated Jira, it's been locked into overly complicated workflows that didn't match what I needed; into the inability to create new views that provided insight into the work; into many tedious required fields even though we didn't use that data in our work stream at all. I've been locked into "one-size-fits-all" workflow approach.

Turns out: that's pretty much all configurable! Jira doesn't mandate the use of a one-size-fits all approach. Shitty company culture mandates that.

In my current position, I have admin rights to Jira and also a mandate to keep teams empowered and processes simple. Guess what -- Jira is pretty awesome here (I use it to develop, too.) In roughly a day or so, I created an entire automated hiring process via a Jira board [1] that got us phenomenal feedback from candidates. I actively ask teams what parts of the process are annoying, and then automate them or fix them, because I am empowered to care about developer experience.

Once you're a part of a generative culture that truly cares about empowerment and enablement, you start to see how much of your disdain for tooling was actually a disdain for a culture that prevented even very useful tools from having a positive impact.

[1] https://seankilleen.com/2024/01/how-i-created-an-automated-a...