Clubhouse is the best product management tool this year!

We’ve tried Asana, Pivotal Tracker, Github issues and waffle.io, Zenhub and Jira, but none was really satisfying the whole engineering or product team. So you could say that all team need a different tool, and for us, it is Clubhouse.io.

How do we go about choosing it?

Everyone have their reasons to like and dislike the tool they use many times a day, so to make a decision we at MakeSpace decided to list everything a product management tool should do for us, and then checked the list against all the tools we knew could work:

Issues definitions

1. Each issue can have one entry with a unique URL
2. Each issue can have one entry with a unique ID
3. Issues can be created with title only
4. Issues can be created with title and description
5. Issues can be labelled/tagged
6. Issues can have sub-tasks
7. Missing: Completing all sub-tasks should change the status of a task

Visualizing

1. Issues can be listed
2. Issues can be shown on a Kanban board per label or status
3. Kanban board with multiple swim lanes per project/user
4. Support for multiple projects
5. Support for multiple projects in a single filterable list
6. Support for multiple projects in Kanban board
7. Ability to filter to see 1 project at a time
8. Ability to filter to see assignment to 1 person at a time
9. Issues can reference dependencies
10. Missing: Issues can reference blockers
11. Blockers can be visualized or filtered in list
12. Issues can be prioritized in list and board
13. Issues can be prioritized with drag and drop
14. Issues are assigned to users
15. Issues can be assigned to multiple users
16. Issues can have watchers for notifications
17. List of issues can be embedded or associated with description for EPICS

Interaction

1. Issues have comments
2. Comments and description have support for images
3. Comments and description of issues should support Markdown syntax
4. Images can be dragged and dropped into the issue
5. Updates trigger emails
6. Email response to update comments
7. Issues status can be updated with Github commit
8. Missing: Issues can be updated with Github pull request status
9. Issues should be updated with comments from Github commits

Creating issues

1. Missing: Issues can be created by email
2. Missing: New tickets can be queued by non-dev/prod users (Customer Support)
3. Multiple issues can be created from a same view/page
4. Issues can be created and edited in the same view

Agile flow

1. Issues can have time/point estimates
2. Issues can be added to a Sprint
3. Missing: Sprint velocity can be visualized by points
4. Late task can be highlighted in list
5. Missing: Sprint tasks can be visualized in a burn down chart with time/points
6. Sprint tasks can be visualized in a burn down chart with # of issues
7. Missing: Estimated delay can be highlighted in list or velocity or burn down chart
8. Issues can have status change with different assignees
9. Issues can have status: DEFINED (in backlog)
10. Issues can have status: PLANNED (in sprint)
11. Issues can have status: STARTED
12. Issues can have status: IN REVIEW
13. Issues can have status: CLOSED
14. Issues can have status: DEPLOYED
15. Issues can have a product owner and an assignee
16. Product Requirements (for Epics) can be defined on a Wiki page
17. Issues can be programmatically linked in Wiki pages
18. Status of issues is shown automatically in or next to Wiki pages

Conclusion

We created a table to compare all the different products, and noted some of the points as required while the others are just nice to have.

Not all teams will have the same set of requirements, but this is what we landed with. And it feels great because the Clubhouse team is also in NYC and has been responding very quickly to all of our comments, so it’s only going to get better with time!

• Clubhouse.io — 87% (48 out of 55)
• Jira — 76% (42 out of 55)
• Pivotal Tracker — 70% (39 out of 55)
• Github + Waffle.io — 58% (32 out of 55)