Creating another Project Management Tool
I came across a Reddit post that has kinda stuck with me. The overall summary of the content was:
"It's better to create a poor product in the right market, than a great product in the wrong market."
In the past two companies I've worked in, they both heavily utilized Google Sheets to organize each team member's tasks & projects for the current quarter.
Each task is owned by a team member, and each task consists of many sub tasks, where any team member can contribute.
Why are they using Google Sheets? I think it comes down to these two benefits:
- It's free.
- They aren't looking for something complex.
The ironic thing is that, Google Sheets can get pretty complicated. The "workarounds" or "hacks," just to get a simple feature in place, can look extremely ugly. There's also a ton of manual labor that goes into changing things like, a task from "In progress" to "Done."
Also, due to COVID-19, there are many engineering & IT departments from various companies, that are seriously considering adopting the work from home approach as a normal routine. This puts a bigger emphasis & expands the project management market.
So I think this is the product I'll be making. A very simple project management tool, that's catered to DEPARTMENTS of companies, and not companies as a whole unit.
Tools like Monday.com & Asana.com can be a bit overwhelming to set up. I believe it's because these tools were built with the customer being the whole company in mind.
I recommend reading https://justinjackson.ca/the-main-thing. The gist is that it’s good to either build the main thing in a small market or a side thing in a large market. “Project management tools” is a huge market. Are there anyways you can niche down? You can’t beat Asana at Asana’s game but you could make a new game, say project management tools for realtors. With special features, you can dominate that smaller market as the main thing.
Hey Nick, thanks for the article, that was a great read honestly. Now that I think of it, I don't think my idea is niche enough to be able to carve a small enough percentage of the market. You've given me a lot to think about!
It seems that Jira from Atlassian solves all these problems. It's cheap, https://www.atlassian.com/software/access/pricing. It has a simple configuration of fundamental processes. But it also allows you to do very advanced processes in your projects, including many integrations with the most popular tools.
How will your product compete with Jira?
Thanks for the input!
We use Jira a lot at my current position, but it's mainly used to track tasks via the kanban board & issues in a ticketing system.
The problem is that, Jira still doesn't provide a dashboard that's simple in nature, separated by a date range (in this case, by quarter), categorized by each users individual projects & their priority level. In other words, it's difficult to get a clear understanding of what your tasks are for this quarter, in a high level view.
The goal of this product is to work alongside Jira, not compete with it! So each subtask can be linked to a Jira issue, and if that Jira issue is complete, it'll reflect on our dashboard.
An example could be:
John Doe's high priority task for this quarter, is to migrate Company A into AWS.
This task has several sub tasks, where the first one is to spec gathering: Meet with the stakeholders & engineering from Company A, to get a better understanding of their current architecture.
This sub task would be linked then, to a Jira ticket. When that Jira ticket is complete, it'll show complete on the dashboard. Now this task is 10% complete (if this task contains 10 sub tasks).