Jira vs airfocus: Which is a better fit?

Jake D.: My name is Jake, my company is Uni. We are one to 10 people, and my score for Jira was a four. Before we were using Trello and we didn't like it as much as Jira, because it really only was good for task management, but the tickets and organizing complex projects weren't as strong on it. We also really liked the documentation and the ability to do other things in Jira that Trello didn't offer. So in general just as we grew and had more engineers to manage and more complex software projects to manage, Jira became a better fit for our company. I chose Jira first and foremost, because the devs at my company really liked it and had experience working on it. It also allowed us to manage a front-end and backend team more easily and collaborate with ease compared to the other products we were looking at. It was affordable for startups and also supported us scaling all the way up if we were to grow our org to be much larger. As I had used it in previous companies that were bigger enterprises and saw it used for everything from documentation to ticket management to product management and development, so it just made the most sense for our org as we grew and was very affordable. Getting started with Jira was pretty easy, it took us about a week. We had a designated project manager who went about kind of setting up every user and getting the board set up the way we needed. We had engineering leads trained in how to do ticketing and how to move tickets from beginning to end pretty quickly. I think a lot of people use Jira and have experience with it coming out of school or bootcamp, so it was a pretty easy switch for us. Coming over from Trello, we found it was pretty fast to recreate the tickets and our processes from that. I think my biggest recommendation is just making sure that the engineers really want it. I think that project managers, it really caters to and has a great amount of tools for documenting, doing product recs, doing task management, QA, all of that. But I think if the devs aren't comfortable using it for pointing, using it for work management, it kind of gets out of line or doesn't get set up in a proper way. So, asking your developers to make sure that that's the tool they want and making sure it's set up in a way that's optimal for them I think makes it a much smoother transition, and easier for the business leads and product leads to engage with as well.

Dee: Hi there, my name's Dee. I'm a Head of Product, and I work in Environmental Services in the industry in the UK. I am currently reviewing airfocus, and I'd probably give them a 5 in terms of the product itself. So we considered utilizing 2 specific product softwares. One was Roadmap, and one was ProductPlan. This was after a significant period of research. We did trials with them, and with ProductPlan actually we went ahead with getting a license as well. What we did notice was the lack of functionality around prioritization, which is really key within the product software industry. In terms of getting stakeholder decision alignment. And also in terms of knowing what to work on first. So that's a really key decision. And we found that both of these softwares were probably around a 3 or 4 out of 10 in terms of their usage. So we decided against them and we went out to the market to find out some more products. We chose airfocus after a period of research around Roadmapping Software. And we found quite quickly that airfocus provided us the value that we were looking for in terms of strategic priority scoring, customized views of fields, in terms of specific views within, say environmental services as an example. And also something very interesting called as Priority Poker, which means when we align ourselves with 3 or 4 people on call, we do not sway anyone's decision around what the priority of this particular product should be. And actually do it as an individual. Which we thought was really cool, because we can then collectively come back after launching a Priority Poker session and then reaching a conclusion, which is a lot more cohesive and mutual, rather than a lot more driven by say an executive board. So we thought this was a really cool feature, along with all of the other really neat priority scorings that were available on airfocus. And that's why we put in ahead in terms of the other Roadmapping Software, and that's why we selected it. The integration piece we found, it was very simple actually, because there's a couple of sessions whereby the CEO of airfocus actually led demonstrations in a Webinar. So I introduce a lot of my team to that particular Webinar and they found it very engaging, and they adapted to the airfocus terminologies pretty quickly. So that was excellent. That was a good starter point for us to go on this roadmapping journey with airfocus. But I think the integration that really got great points with us, was our integration with Jira, which airfocus was very committed to, rather than the other softwares that we looked at in the market. And we found Jira integration to be at least an 8 or 9 out of 10. Which was super important for us, because our tech team utilizes Jira quite a lot. And any software that we use for product management and roadmapping needed to have that sort of significant Jira integration. So these are a couple of examples of getting adoption of the system high, right at the start with demos. But also having a significant suite of integrations like Jira, Asana and Trello, which really made it comfortable for us to adopt a system quite quickly. We found airfocus really useful, especially in terms of prioritization, strategic indices and also integration. However, there's a couple of things that we have fed back to airfocus in terms of better customization, a little more of a colorful interface that'd be found in other Roadmapping Software. So if anyone's very super creative or if there are any UX designers out there utilizing Roadmapping Software, I would say airfocus is more focused on the prioritization and the strategy elements, rather than the super cool color palettes customization elements. But that's not giving away too much, in terms of them not having this on the roadmap. Because we are informed pretty much all the time in terms of what's coming up next within the airfocus journey. And we have been promised of a presentation worthy, super colorful display mechanism, which would be quite useful for creative designers and product creatives out there. So from that particular perspective, it's on the roadmap and it's happening shortly. But from a perspective of product managers and owners out there, I think it's a fantastic tool, because prioritization is absolutely key and fundamental to what we do in our jobs day to day. And I couldn't recommend airfocus more highly after all the significant research that me and my team had done, in terms of acquiring a Roadmapping Software. So they come pretty highly recommended on that.