[Aurornis]

I enjoyed Notion at first for certain tasks, but it became much less enjoyable as everyone tried to force everything into emoji-laden Notion docs. The Notion spaces used by the Product and Program managers I worked with in the past few years have become a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date, hard to find, and often superseded by some new Notion page they created but forgot to tell us about until we had spent weeks following the old one.

In a way, Notion has come to occupy the same space as Jira for me: A tool that tries to be everything to everyone and gets abused by people who feel like using as many features as possible is a best practice.

I’ve had better success lately asking people to step outside of Notion and instead work in an old-fashioned shared Google doc. It’s amazing how much more productive we can all be when the tools are simplified to exactly what we need and people don’t feel like they need to sprinkle emojis and checklists and other features into everything just because they can.

[dgunay]

I don't get why Notion is so popular either, but your complaints about it seem like a skill issue on the part of your managers. I see this a lot too, but in my experience it happens no matter the medium - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, etc. People who don't obsess over keeping it organized eventually spaghetti their documentation all over the place. I wouldn't expect the kinds of people who need to be convinced of the worth of refactoring and getting rid of old code to also understand that out of date documentation needs to be updated or it is often more harmful than just deleting it.

[more_corn]

Try writing documentation in confluence and you’ll get why Notion is preferable. Also go try to find something you wrote in confluence six months ago.

[redsparrow]

> a collection of half-finished documents that are always out of date

I think of company wikis as a place where information goes to die.

A useful feature, which I'm sure exists somewhere, would be "freshness" checks on pages. A timestamp for the last time someone looked at this and said "yes, this is still valid". For pages that are important, a team could set up recurring tasks for people to do periodic freshness checks.

Surely this is already a common practice, although not any team I've been on. Undoubtedly there is some ISO-9000 process for this...

[Majestic121]

It's a base feature of notion, exactly as you describe it : a freshness stamp and notifications to recheck every 7/30/90/custom days

[hnthrowaway121]

> but forgot to tell us about until we had spent weeks following the old one.

To be fair that’s not on Notion per se, there’s an underlying communication problem (which it sounds like your google doc solves!).

[1123581321]

Emoji overuse aside, you are describing the challenge of maintaining a team wiki, regardless of software. Google Docs is taking people out of the wiki mindset, I suspect.

I agree there are issues any time the bored folks in “product” are allowed to set up, well, anything, honestly.

[threeseed]

> A tool that tries to be everything to everyone

Jira doesn't try to be everything. It's a project management app. It does nothing else.

Notion is wiki, CRM, project management, calendar etc.

[Supermancho]

> It's a project management app. It does nothing else.

I would say it doesn't do that very well. You can't manage projects without mapping out dependencies, visually and with integrated relationship tracking. JIRA is miserable at this.

[LizPoggi]

Notion databases easily allow dependencies, integrated relationship tracking and multiple ways to visualize a project roadmap. Can't speak to JIRA but Notion is continuously releasing new updates that respond to user needs. There is a major downside to this of course. As a solopreneur I find it frustrating that Notion's updates tend to serve corporate needs, but it's a good business strategy and allows Notion to continue to serve others with its free version.

[paulddraper]

It's an issue tracker, with some project management/agile bolted on

[dartos]

people also use jira as a support ticket system. Sprint planning system. Kanban system. I’ve seen it set up so that it can track work across kanban teams and scrum teams.

Jira has deep integration with bitbucket, confluence, and GitHub.

It can manage your CI pipelines as well.

Jira is an anything app with a bend towards project management. Setting up jira workflows is a whole career.

Source: I worked at Atlassian for 5 years and they use jira as the backbone for _everything_. It all flows into jira.

[refulgentis]

people also use email as a support ticket system. Sprint planning system. Kanban system. I’ve seen it set up so that it can track work across kanban teams and scrum teams.

Email has deep integration with bitbucket, confluence, and GitHub.

Email can manage your CI pipelines as well.

Email is an anything app with a bend towards project management. Setting up email workflows is a whole career.

Source: I worked at Google for years and they use email as the backbone for _everything_. It all flows into email

[dartos]

…okay?

I mean email isn’t an app, it’s a handful of protocols, but… sure

[threeseed]

a) Support tickets, sprint planning, kanban etc are all part of project management.

b) It can't manage your pipelines. It can visualise deployments and link them to work but you still need some sort of CI/CD tool like Bitbucket, Github etc.

c) It is not an anything app. I can't use it as a wiki, CRM, database, calendar etc.

[dartos]

A) yes

B) it can manage pipelines through those services. Each card change would kick off pipelines whose status updates would cause jira to further change cards potentially kicking off more ci/cd steps.

C) you absolutely can use it as a database, calendar, and a wiki.

It has an api and can store data. You can query cards by label, search by content, and extract structured information from them.

Nested and linked cards provide the tools needed to build wikis.

I’m not 100% sure what the difference between CRMs and support ticketing system are, but Jira instances have been used as support ticketing systems in order to give devs view into what customers want.

It’s not the best at any of those things, but those are all doable (and are being done) with jira.

[llamaLord]

Yeah but saying Jira is like Notion makes fundamentally no sense when Confluence is sitting like... Right there...

[ethbr1]

Sssh. You'll remind the Jira feature team that Confluence exists!

[dartos]

Yeah… that’s Atlassian for you. Why sell just Jira when you can sell jira, confluence, bitbucket, opsgenie, and atlas as part of the Atlassian cloud platform.

This is the company that (already having owned jira) bought trello and did nothing with it for 5 years.

[llamaLord]

Hey!!! We let you put a picture of your cat as the background for your board...

[015a]

Its kind of funny that you'd list four features of notion, three of which people absolutely do regularly and normally use Jira for (e.g. https://support.atlassian.com/jira-work-management/docs/use-...).

The 4th, a Wiki, is of course more-so just Confluence, but I have seen echoes of a wiki make their way into Jira; e.g. in one place I worked, every release was a ticket that was duplicated from a previous ticket, and that ticket had step-by-step instructions on how to run different parts of the release.

You're just wrong on this, bro. Notion tries to be everything to everyone. Jira is everything to everyone, it doesn't matter what it tries to be.

[threeseed]

It's amazing how people think Project Management = Issues (and only issues).

Release Management is a fundamental part of IT Project Management. So of course companies use Jira to track releases. And of course you can tie milestones and OKRs to releases. And of course tickets can have small amounts of text content associated with them. How else would you describe the ticket without them ?

But the idea of Jira being remotely like a Confluence style wiki is just ridiculous.

And your comment is out of some parallel universe where Jira is Confluence.

[015a]

You must of missed the multiple points where I said "three out of four" and "echoes" of a wiki; but reading comprehension is hard, don't worry you'll get 'em next time.