Pain points & Challenges
- Wasting time babysitting Jira and Monday.com: "There are so many little things about Jira and sprint cycles we were doing that felt like a waste of time. There's also a lot of back and forth within Monday for the departments that use it. It was clear to me we had to replace Jira and deprecate Monday at some point," Daean shares.
- Meetings that drain everyone's energy away: "We had daily scrum meeting that's supposed to be 15 minutes but often turned to more than 30 minutes, where we literally just went through the Jira board and push cards around. No one comes in excited to these meetings; it felt like pulling people into dentist's chair and a massive waste of time."
- It takes a lot of time and energy for everyone to follow a process: “Ensuring people adhere to the process was very difficult in Jira and Monday - it took a lot of specific management which is no longer required in Motion.”
- Micromanaging people on their projects is mentally exhausting: "I was exhausted," Daean shares: "Jira and Monday were not being updated. I had to keep chasing people to update their tickets." People did not want to update tickets all day - they want to get real work done.
- Setting up automations in Jira and Monday was too complicated and a bandaid solution: "It was a lot of manual work to set up every automation needed inside Jira; and Monday was an even bigger pain with how the rows worked," Daean shares with us: "at some point, there's a cost benefit ratio: the amount of effort to set all these automations up, versus just doing things. Plus, the automations in Jira and Monday felt like a bandaid to tape everything together."
The Solution
Automatic prioritization and re-prioritization completely replaced scrum meetings
"What really sold us was just the fundamentals of how Motion works. Jira and Monday never invented anything - it's like 1997 but just prettier; there's no intelligence. Whereas Motion, at its core, is a modern way of getting work done; it feels like an intelligent assistant."
"The biggest thing about scrum meetings was handholding on the process itself - looking at every task, ask each person if they finished something, push deadlines back, run the math of how that affects timelines, what to do about missed projects...etc. I just don’t have to do that anymore with Motion because everything is set up in a way that the process is managed by the intelligence. And Motion does everything by time - if there's more than 40 hours of work for a person, it just won't get done."
The project moves itself forward
When using Jira or Monday, employees had to move a project forward and change statuses manually whenever someone finished a task.
The automations were hard to use and felt like bandaid solutions, and still required a lot of human in the loop.
Whereas in Motion, a project just automatically moves forward - when all dependent tasks are done, the next person gets notified & the next task appears on their agenda.
"Inside Motion, when one stage is finished, it just start the next one automatically. In Jira, we had to keep changing the status of a single task that moves through stages. When dev finished something, they needed to move it to QA; and then reassign to someone else. We always had to say in scrum meeting: 'did you finish this task. If so, for the 500th time, please take the task and move to QA; otherwise QA can't start their work.' Now with Motion - something is done, it just moves to the next thing automatically."
The team just gets work done without follow-ups
"The team just gets tasks done now. Before Motion, they didn’t."
And it wasn't because of the people - it was because Jira was too confusing and cumbersome to use. Things were easier to track inside Motion too.
Daean shares:
"Granularity of Motion task is a lot more fundamental than Jira: subtasks in Jira are very hard to track. With Motion - the structure is very clear with tasks. This allows passing tasks to others easier. If frontend needs something from backend - just assign them a task instead of slacking them and following up. In Jira, we’d have to leave a comment, hope the other side sees the comment, and they probably won’t, and ping them a few times. Whereas in motion: it’s just be pushed in front of the employees in a simple list - does not require a lot of thought process. It's like: can you get this 15min thing done - and that thing just pops up in the other person's auto-prioritized and personalized agenda.""Instead of micromanaging people and constantly following-up, it's so much easier when the software just does it itself."
Easy migration and adoption across the company
"The biggest worry and hesitation before signing Motion was migration and adoption. Will people actually use this new software. It turned out - that wasn't a problem at all; everyone at the company became easily on board with Motion and use it daily."
"Single best vendor onboarding we've ever had"
"Y'all are the best at implementation support we've had. Often times with other vendors, we sign the paperwork with some sales guy, and they are like "cya!" Motion's onboarding is very structured - training for execs, managers, and employee ICs are done in separate sessions. "There was a good amount of handholding without overwhelming people."
The full migration and implementation finished in under 3 weeks.
The Impact
- It frees up a lot of my time. "It’s important for me to also be a contributor - I’m an engineer myself. I have several backend projects. I'm now able to offload a lot of babysitting time, to contribute to my own projects."
- Much better mental headspace and feeling relieved: "not having the frustration of running around constantly. I'm in a better headspace - not having to worry about 'did this thing get done.' I feel relieved. The ability to do more value-add work is very fulfilling."
- Focus on bigger, higher-leverage things: "the amount of time I no longer have to do all this micromanagement stuff allows me to spend more time on requirements, system design, reviewing all these things."
- More time spent on mentoring junior employees: "the saved 1:1 time on just going through task statuses. We used to have 100 tasks on a sprint - having to go through each of these things ate up a lot of time." Now, Daean can spend that 1:1 time on mentoring his team and helping them solve problems.
- Overall, "5 hours per week was saved per team member because we no longer had to do scrums. We eliminated all that."
- Things moved faster: "we have team members in other timezones. If it's late and I needed an urgent bug root cause analysis, I had to sit there and wait - and hope I can catch them before I go to sleep. We'd lose a lot of time just in waiting. Now it's easier to communicate in async - I just assign them tasks in Motion and I know they'll get to them. This adds another 5-10% efficiency in addition to the time savings. Other things got faster too - the async communication allows us to not have to wait until the next week for a requirement meeting, for example."
