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Show HN: Two-way Jira sync in a collaborative spreadsheet and Gantt
Hello HN,
Our startup nearly died 2 years ago. We kept losing customers to spreadsheets. And it made us see a problem right under our nose: everyone just wanted flexibility & speed from a spreadsheet. But they have to stay in sync with {Jira / Salesforce / insert SaaS app}.
When we followed this thread, we discovered how broken the integration experience was for flexible products like Airtable, Smartsheet, Monday, and Google Sheets. Their big problem is that they transform external data into their own format. This makes setup harder, since you have to get the mapping just right. And often you can’t sync back.
We took a different path when building Visor. We essentially made a data lake & ETL tool with a front-end. Visor integrates with your Jira instance, reads its schema, helps you import the right data, and lets you work in a flexible spreadsheet* that syncs both ways. There’s also an interactive Gantt & Timeline view.
*Spreadsheet is a generous term for now. Formulas are still on the roadmap. As are many true “spreadsheet” features. But we’re working towards it.
Our roadmap is public, here: https://support.visor.us/visor-roadmap https://support.visor.us/visor-roadmap
And for VueJS devs, we eked out more performance from Vue 2 by modifying the core, documented here: https://www.reddit.com/r/vuejs/comments/u6tzv8/how_we_resolved_hitting_major_performance_issues/ https://www.reddit.com/r/vuejs/comments/u6tzv8/how_we_resolv...
For database geeks, you might enjoy learning about the realtime graph DB we built to power the product: https://blog.visor.us/cloudstore-part-1/ https://blog.visor.us/cloudstore-part-1/
I’ve seen so many great companies start out by launching on HN. It’s quite a special personal moment finally to be sharing with you all.
I’m happy to answer questions, take criticism, and generally hear what you think.
- catketch 4y agoHow does this play with issue type hierarchies used in advanced roadmaps —- goals / initiatives
- electric_muse 4y agoThe import should respect hierarchies from advanced roadmaps (e.g. initiatives). That was a whole project. It was launched in this release: https://support.visor.us/release-notes/11822-release https://support.visor.us/release-notes/11822-release
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- polishedbadass 4y agoFollowing the Visor journey for the past few years has been inspiring to say the least. Excited to see what the future holds!
- electric_muse 4y agoThank you! We're very excited to be at this point.
- gio_tangoHQ 4y agopumped for this, great stuff
- electric_muse 4y agoThank you! Hope it helps you and your team.
- ultimatessjoten 4y agoJust checked out the site - this is going to bring grooming and planning sessions down from 3-4 hours a week to under an hour
- electric_muse 4y agoAwesome! Let me know what you think.
- idebugonprod 4y agoWe use Visor internally, and it definitely has for us! Prioritizing user stories with other engineering tasks has never been simpler for us -- easily saves our team at least an hour a day.
- fruit_snack 4y agoI appreciate the in-depth look into your architecture in the linked posts. Have you considered open sourcing / selling that database solution by itself? I can see how it'd speed up dev time for my team, I'd be curious to hear how something like that (reactive no-sql frontend for a SQL DB) would work for others outside of Vue.
- electric_muse 4y agoThat's a great question. We've thought about making CloudStore available sort of like a Supabase. We've been following their progress, and it's inspiring! We haven't really tried CloudStore + other frameworks. That would be a fun experiment to try next. :)
- idebugonprod 4y agoDefinitely something on our radar! We always imagined CloudStore as it's own product, and much of it's infrastructure and code are written with that mindset. Can't wait until we are at a point where we can easily ship that!
- Gkarelitz 4y agoThis is great and solves a real problem!
- electric_muse 4y agoThanks! Hope it saves your team some headaches and time.
- hestefisk 4y agoVery cool but also slightly ironic since Jira set out to replace excel sheets and Gantt charts in the first place :)
- electric_muse 4y agoYeah, huh? It's funny how everything in software comes eventually full circle. I heard monorepos and megaliths are making a comeback, too.
- pjerem 4y agoI’m patiently waiting for us, the programmers, to discover again server rendered HTML and native desktop GUIs.
- haswell 4y agoThe original reasons people used spreadsheets still exist. The original reasons people needed to move those spreadsheets into tools like Jira still exist. I'm glad to see a product like this acknowledge that people want both: a) The flexibility/speed of navigating spreadsheets b) Centralizing that data for consumption by other people participating in the overall process Jira and similar products seem to assume people moved away from spreadsheet because spreadsheets suck. This is not the whole story.
- hestefisk 4y agoIt’s not about spreadsheets per se. It’s more how the advent of agile and scrum forced a negative sentiment towards waterfall thinking and large steering committee meetings with lots of Gantts, budgets, and multi year roadmaps. So people turned to Jira to be agile. And here we are, producing good-looking diagrams for executives because Jira is too messy and hard to roll up to something executives can grasp.
- idebugonprod 4y agoI'm one of the Visor engineers, and you've stated perfectly what many of our users are running into. In addition to creating these "good-lucking diagrams for executives" (which is time consuming in itself), people need to keep them up to date. So they waste so much time updating the raw Jira data that feeds their charts. If we could get all of that data, make it "live", and put it in a spreadsheet so you could roll it up in whatever way you want, making those diagrams becomes trivial!
- Mandatum 4y agoIf you need to use a product like this with JIRA, JIRA isn’t for you.
- electric_muse 4y agoFrom what we've seen, it's a control thing. IT or execs want control & reporting. So they force everyone on Jira. But then the people actually working day-to-day need flexibility. So they end up creating extra spreadsheets off on the side where they work, but those get out-of-date. During broad pre-build research (even beyond Jira), we found that spreadsheets consistently shadowed the real data in SaaS apps -- ranging from Jira to HR software and everything in between.
- ajb 4y agoIt can be the other way round. Our team wanted to use Jira (although it got used mostly like Trello) but the boss wouldn't read it and forced an engineer to manually update a spreadsheet at the same time while running a QA team. This product might have been a godsend during that scenario.
- electric_muse 4y agoUgh. Yeah, this is more common than one would hope. I met someone with a Masters in CS who worked at a public database company whose primary role was to keep the spreadsheet up-to-date with Jira data. What a waste of talent!
- cube00 4y agoThey would have automated their job and probably working on something else. I've used JIRA's API to spit out reports when people have demanded they fit in their "Agile enterprise project management" Excel templates.
- electric_muse 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thenanyu 4y agoThis seems like a roundabout way to get more locked into Jira. Switch to Linear, or Height, or Shortcut, or Taiga or anything other than continue your abusive relationship with Atlassian
- electric_muse 4y agoI've heard great things about some of those tools! The challenge is that many people working as part of bigger teams can't pick their own tools or really make a change unilaterally. So they need a way to make things work for them as part of a bigger structure.
- thenanyu 4y agoYou’re totally right of course. You’re doing God’s work by making Jira more usable. It’s just an unfortunate state of affairs that this is needed. Bless.
- johnx123-up 4y agoOr, Restya Core as it has Excel-like UI/view. Disclosure: Using it since its private beta
- hlesesne 4y agoAre there any suitable open source or on premises competitors to Jira that also support service desk functionality?
- kennydude 4y agoGitLab has this functionality https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/service_desk.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/service_desk.html
- alephnan 4y agoHas anyone ever done something similar, but with spreadsheets in Org-mode?
- hirple 4y agoI assume you've taken a look at org-jira?
- julee04 4y agoIt might be just me - but I don't understand why any company would want to make their roadmap public. I feel like only the company's competitors ever look at it
- Lucasoato 4y agoWell, investors may find it more convincing if you committed publicly to reach some results.
- kevsim 4y agoI'd say if your competitors are relying on looking at your roadmap to compete with you, then they're in trouble. Single features are often easy to copy but it's a losing battle if your competitor is way out in front of you and you're trying to copy them feature-by-feature. Similar argument with open sourcing your product. Couldn't your competitors look at your code? Sure they could, but if that's how they're trying to compete, they're going to lose. Plus, their engineers will probably look at your code and think they can do better anyway ;-)
- sofixa 4y agoWhy not? If i'm a potential customer and i see some features are missing, having the roadmap to visualise how they plan to evolve is great. Without that, why would i waste time contacting them, bothering with an NDA and what not just to know if they plan on adding X or Y?
- electric_muse 4y agoHey, thanks for the (implied?) question. We are a lot more concerned with making customers feel like part of the company’s growth than worrying about competitors. Our customers love seeing the roadmap. And we are lucky to have an engineering team that really does deliver what’s promised. So we like to show that (hence the public release notes that connect to items on the roadmap). This gives customers confidence that we really will deliver what we say we will, and they can plan their adoption of the product around it. The community also really loves seeing their own suggestions make it into the roadmap. The way I see it, we’re all building this together. At the end of the day, it’s not the best product that will always win. It comes down to community.
- closeparen 4y agoThanks for making this. Maintaining parity between Google Sheets Gantt charts and JIRA tickets is a real problem I have and one that is underserved by existing tools. On the other hand this is a cursed development methodology. There's an infinite mine of No True Scotsmans about Agile, but really, when you find yourself putting your Agile stories in a Gantt chart and projecting sprints several months out, you are unambiguously rejecting substantive principle and content of Agile as a methodology. At this point it would be much more productive to admit that you're doing waterfall and put some effort into doing it well, instead of farting around with backlog grooming, sprint planning, etc. where the outcomes are all committed before the meeting in a master schedule.
- flarg 4y agoThis is the reality of most mid and large sized organisations, fake Agile with Scrum, which is really better for waterfall anyway
- electric_muse 4y agoHey, that means a lot. Thanks. It does seem there are a lot of methodologies being used with the product. And agilefall does seem to be making a comeback. But a fair number just use it as a faster way to plan the sprints and run standup. (Vs in Jira) The thing about “spreadsheets” is that they seem to be flexible enough to fit all the idiosyncrasies of how different teams work, regardless of methodology. I hope the product can save you time, frustration, and copy/paste drama.
- marsven_422 4y ago
- itomato 4y agoI solve this with ImportJSON.gs and/or Atlassian’s native integration for sheets. I wouldn’t encourage anyone to buy a tool just to make a single type of chart, even less if it is a for-pay SaaS wedge. Spreadsheets are over-used and I’m not sure meeting users where they are works in this case. Hasn’t paid off (in my experience) with anything more than additional layers.