The Plan

This page documents our plan to build a replacement for Pivotal Tracker. We’ll keep it updated at all times with our progress and future. It will read a bit like a product brief and a strategy document all in one. It’s essentially just a big, ordered backlog that is fairly specific in the current sections, but then less specific and more uncertain as we get into the future.

Strategy

Our mission right now is to build a viable alternative to Pivotal Tracker prior to it being shut down in April 2025. The primary motivation for this is because we believe the world will be a better place with Pivotal than without it. But after years of being shuffled around inside of a trillion dollar firm, it is being shutdown.

To build a viable alternative, we recognize we’ll have to solve the one strategic challenge that Pivotal had - it was never a stand alone business that got the necessary resources and focus to be competitive. While we don’t have full insight into all of the reasons, our goal is to make this project sustainable through a good product that is paid for by customers that sustain further investment in the product. We do not intend to take outside investment and we won’t continue this project if it is not profitable.

So, that is the first step. Get enough features built well enough fast enough to capture enough of the existing customer base to have revenue to continue.

Right now we’re a very small team. So we have to be really selective in what we’re building. There’s simply no way we’re going to get a full set of features by the end of April. We’re thinking about this in the following major phases.

  1. Usable tool - this will just be the absolute basics of story CRUD, ordering, state workflow, and column management. Very basic UI. Just enough to be able to use it. We’ll start using it first.

  2. Alpha - We’ll take the above and layer in enough user and account management to allow other people to start using.

  3. Beta - This is the milestone we’re trying to hit at the end of April. Our hope is to include all of the core functionality of story management, comments, labels, epics, user management, and velocity/planning. We won’t have reporting, advanced search, reviews, integrations.

  4. v1 - The above, but with initial pricing and billing and refinements on all of the core. We will not be prioritizing large enterprises with this first version. But our hope is to serve companies that have a few small teams. We’ll linger here to ensure the product is scaling well, and really refined. We want this to be a better version of Pivotal as it exists today in all of the core features. We’ll likely add a few small things Pivotal doesn’t do well today, but this list will be very limited (see below).

  5. v2 - We’re in the territory of the unknown at this point, but the assumption we’re making is that v1 will get us to the place where we have enough interest to continue and be viable. We’ll focus during this phase on evangelizing the core while building out some of the more ancillary features like reporting, integrations, and fine tuning of things like search

  6. Future - this is where things get interesting. There’s so little that has changed with Pivotal that it feels like there should be big opportunities to improve and expand the product, but we want to do that very carefully and without compromising the underlying principles.

Progress so far

We have a service up and running and basic Story database design is done and implemented. The UI for the backlog and core story management is beginning to take shape, but everything is very very basic. We’re not using it just yet. We’re still getting basic drag and drop and story editing in place. There’s more here than it might seem. This is the heart and soul of Pivotal and we’re working through it piece by piece to get it right.

What’s next

We’re trying to get enough in place to start using the tool ourselves. We need to be able to reorder stories in the backlog, get sorting right inside the stories that are in-progress, and unstarted. From there, we’ll probably start using it ourselves

Future Ideas

  1. Kanban board - This seems like an obvious addition to support a healthy work pattern for so many teams. I’ve personally attempted to use Pivotal for this, but it is inconvenient at best. This would likely be an entirely different view from the core view where the current sprint is shown with columns for each of the workflow steps and the ability to drag and drop stories to move their state.

  2. Image support inside descriptions.

  3. Much better description editing experience including auto save and potentially multi user editing with basic in-line formatting.

  4. Better Github and CI tool integration

  5. Ability to drag an entire Epic into the backlog/Icebox and have all stories move to where it is dropped.

  6. Refined multi select - we’re considering creating a column for multi-select. The moment you select a story, this would work as your clipboard where you can modify them in bulk using similar functions as Pivotal Tracker but with the added ability to more easily place one more all the stories where you want them in the backlog or in an Epic to tag them. This is really just an idea right now, we’ll flesh it out in detail once we get to multi select. It is one area where we may chose a different implementation path than the existing experience and will be looking for significant feedback from users on our implementation.

  7. Possible sorting options for all in-progress stories. We’re going to start with the default sort groupings of Finished, In-progress, and unstarted within the backlog with manual sort within in-progress, and unstarted. But we may add the ability to automatically sort within in-progress according to the state workflow (Delivered, Finished, Started, Rejected).

  8. When moving the acceptance date for a story to the past (so that it is in the done column), collapse the story automatically.