Tools

It was one of those nights, the kind that makes you question every choice you ever made. The neon glow from the sign outside casts a sickly light over the Product Manager’s cluttered desk. He’s staring down an empty bottle of bourbon and a computer screen filled with the hopes of an entire company.

His face, a roadmap of late nights and dashed dreams, looks like it’s been carved out of granite by someone who gave up on art halfway through. Etched with the lines of a hundred late-night crises, each wrinkle a footnote to a different disaster averted at the very last tick tock.

On the screen, Jira—a whirling concoction of issues, workflows, backlogs, sprints, and even Kanban if you fancy it— twitches at him like a terrified informant in a back alley.

He’s thought about chucking it—casting it into the digital abyss and replacing it with some sleek, newfangled app. But even as his cursor hovers ominously over “Cancel My Account”, he always hesitates. His gut, the only thing in this world he can trust, knows the gritty truth.

It’s not Jira betraying him; it’s his own refusal to master what lies before him. “Cancel My Account” is a siren’s song, promising escape but leading only to shipwreck on the jagged rocks of his own inadequacy.

Jira is a tool built for a purpose, they all are, every one of them, as specific and unyielding as a snub-nosed revolver. You can complain about their ways— labyrinthine settings, merciless demands on your time—but in the end, they’re tools that enable you to do a job. The problem is never the tool; its the hand that wields it.

His jaw clenches like a vice grip, refusing to budge in the face of impractical dreams. He has a role to play, and by God, he’ll either master this unyielding beast of an app or go down swinging. He’ll learn its secrets, pry open its complexities like a safecracker, until he and Jira move in unison like a tango in the dark. The art of product management isn’t in your tools but in using them to tattoo your vision onto the skin of reality.

The job doesn’t wait for you to become a wizard at your project management tool of quote unquote “choice”. But when you master that last incantation, it’s like someone lifted a sack of bricks off your back. You didn’t even know you were hunched over until suddenly, you’re standing straight, breathing easier. You know the tool so well it haunts your god damn dreams. But until that blessed day, you’re carrying that weight. Best get used to it.

Switch tools? A coward’s way out, the refuge of somebody who’d rather blame the world than look in the mirror.

Bottom line, whatever you’ve got works. Almost for damn sure it works. Sure, you can keep searching for that mythical perfect tool, but you’ll waste precious time you could be spending on the real work. And that work—your product, your users, your future—that’s the holy grail.

The next time you’re pulling your hair out trying to figure this shit out, don’t misplace the blame. Forget Jira, Version One, Aha, and that farce known as CA Agile Central. The real enemy lurks in the shadows of your own expectations—an illusory magic bullet that you think will clean this whole mess up.

The Product Manager leans back, the leather chair groaning in protest, as if shouldering the weight of his newfound revelations. There’s an odd comfort in embracing the limitations of what you’ve got, a steely resolve that comes from knowing the battleground down to the last pixel. Jira, the software he’s cursed under his breath more times than he can count, has earned a begrudging respect, like a rival who fought him to a standstill.

He knows that before you think about going through the rigmarole of cancelling a tool that’s already got its roots deep in your workflow, you need to think twice. Take a deep breath, count to ten, square your shoulders, and dive back into that tangled web. Master it, so you can put it in its rightful place—use the tool, don’t let it use you.

He snuffs out his cigarette, the last tendrils of smoke curling up like a ghost reluctant to leave. With a flick of the mouse, he shifts an issue to ‘Done’. The computer hums softly, a machine soul in communion with its human counterpart. And as he rises, slipping into his weather-beaten trench coat, he feels a momentary truce settle between him and the room, between him and Jira, between him and the relentless, unforgiving world beyond his office door.