from Hacker News

Show HN: Two-way Jira sync in a collaborative spreadsheet and Gantt

by electric_muse on 4/20/22, 3:11 PM with 53 comments

Hello HN,

Our startup nearly died 2 years ago. We kept losing customers to spreadsheets. And it made us see a problem right under our nose: everyone just wanted flexibility & speed from a spreadsheet. But they have to stay in sync with {Jira / Salesforce / insert SaaS app}.

When we followed this thread, we discovered how broken the integration experience was for flexible products like Airtable, Smartsheet, Monday, and Google Sheets. Their big problem is that they transform external data into their own format. This makes setup harder, since you have to get the mapping just right. And often you can’t sync back.

We took a different path when building Visor. We essentially made a data lake & ETL tool with a front-end. Visor integrates with your Jira instance, reads its schema, helps you import the right data, and lets you work in a flexible spreadsheet* that syncs both ways. There’s also an interactive Gantt & Timeline view.

*Spreadsheet is a generous term for now. Formulas are still on the roadmap. As are many true “spreadsheet” features. But we’re working towards it.

Our roadmap is public, here: https://support.visor.us/visor-roadmap

And for VueJS devs, we eked out more performance from Vue 2 by modifying the core, documented here: https://www.reddit.com/r/vuejs/comments/u6tzv8/how_we_resolv...

For database geeks, you might enjoy learning about the realtime graph DB we built to power the product: https://blog.visor.us/cloudstore-part-1/

I’ve seen so many great companies start out by launching on HN. It’s quite a special personal moment finally to be sharing with you all.

I’m happy to answer questions, take criticism, and generally hear what you think.

  • by closeparen on 4/21/22, 6:10 AM

    Thanks for making this. Maintaining parity between Google Sheets Gantt charts and JIRA tickets is a real problem I have and one that is underserved by existing tools.

    On the other hand this is a cursed development methodology. There's an infinite mine of No True Scotsmans about Agile, but really, when you find yourself putting your Agile stories in a Gantt chart and projecting sprints several months out, you are unambiguously rejecting substantive principle and content of Agile as a methodology. At this point it would be much more productive to admit that you're doing waterfall and put some effort into doing it well, instead of farting around with backlog grooming, sprint planning, etc. where the outcomes are all committed before the meeting in a master schedule.

  • by hestefisk on 4/20/22, 10:45 PM

    Very cool but also slightly ironic since Jira set out to replace excel sheets and Gantt charts in the first place :)

  • by thenanyu on 4/21/22, 3:06 AM

    This seems like a roundabout way to get more locked into Jira. Switch to Linear, or Height, or Shortcut, or Taiga or anything other than continue your abusive relationship with Atlassian

  • by julee04 on 4/21/22, 4:56 AM

    It might be just me - but I don't understand why any company would want to make their roadmap public. I feel like only the company's competitors ever look at it

  • by itomato on 4/21/22, 10:59 AM

    I solve this with ImportJSON.gs and/or Atlassian’s native integration for sheets.

    I wouldn’t encourage anyone to buy a tool just to make a single type of chart, even less if it is a for-pay SaaS wedge.

    Spreadsheets are over-used and I’m not sure meeting users where they are works in this case. Hasn’t paid off (in my experience) with anything more than additional layers.

  • by catketch on 4/20/22, 10:51 PM

    How does this play with issue type hierarchies used in advanced roadmaps —- goals / initiatives

  • by alephnan on 4/21/22, 3:50 AM

    Has anyone ever done something similar, but with spreadsheets in Org-mode?

  • by Mandatum on 4/20/22, 10:51 PM

    If you need to use a product like this with JIRA, JIRA isn’t for you.

  • by fruit_snack on 4/20/22, 3:39 PM

    I appreciate the in-depth look into your architecture in the linked posts. Have you considered open sourcing / selling that database solution by itself?

    I can see how it'd speed up dev time for my team, I'd be curious to hear how something like that (reactive no-sql frontend for a SQL DB) would work for others outside of Vue.

  • by ultimatessjoten on 4/20/22, 3:21 PM

    Just checked out the site - this is going to bring grooming and planning sessions down from 3-4 hours a week to under an hour

  • by polishedbadass on 4/20/22, 3:15 PM

    Following the Visor journey for the past few years has been inspiring to say the least. Excited to see what the future holds!

  • by Gkarelitz on 4/20/22, 4:10 PM

    This is great and solves a real problem!

  • by gio_tangoHQ on 4/20/22, 3:17 PM

    pumped for this, great stuff