How Thundra plans and tracks software development in Fibery

Product company 🚀

11-50 ppl 🎩

Software Application 👻

Switched from Jira 😎

Templates used in this customer story

Software Development Product Management Github Integration

Thundra is an observability platform which brings the invisible part of your software product(s) to your screen with a few clicks including your CI/CD workflows, applications, and services.

Süleyman Barman I am Süleyman, the VP of Engineering. 👋

What do you use Fibery for?

We are using Fibery to manage different processes for our startup, from the definition of product ideas to marketing and sales activities.

With Fibery, all the teams can see the same global product picture and in the meantime can add their own Spaces based on their perspective and needs.

Here is how our Workspace map looks like 👇

Why did you switch to Fibery and what tools did it replace?

We switched to Fibery from Jira. We were looking for a tool that allows us to manage our software development process and also other activities like ideation, product management, design, marketing, and sales. Also, we needed more flexibility and better usability.

We chose Fibery over Jira even though we were Jira users for like 10 years.

Now spill the tea: How does your Product Management process look like?

How do you scope & plan development?

Our processes start with adding Ideas to the backlog. An Idea turns into a Feature after clarifying scopes, flows, and details. Each Feature waits for its time to be moved into an in-scope state which means it is selected for development in the next cycle.

A cycle is a 4-5 week time period for implementing Tasks that are part of product Features.

We know Agile and Scrum and we already followed these practices over ten years — but we do believe that they are not enough to support productivity and meet expectations of both development and product teams. So we removed Epic, Story, and Sprint complexity. We just use Feature and Task definitions but they have states which define their scopes and level of shaping.

A Feature contains decisions, designs fields, and Tasks entities. A Task contains a description with a scope, subtasks, a state, and a cycle label. States include: to-do, development, in-review, ready-to-merge, in-staging, ready-to-prod, in-prod-checks, done. Basically, that’s all.

How do you track and analyze progress?

We have many boards to track progress in product development phases with different perspectives like design, product, or development. Timeline boards are the most useful for us but we also follow cycle progress with custom calculation scripts.

How do you store a development wiki?

We have a lot of documents on Google Docs, but we started to move some architectural and code-related definitions to Fibery documents. We do not aim to move all documents but try to build linking maps to them.

Praise time: What is your favorite Fibery feature and why?

Custom domain. It’s easy to define and modify any database at any time to map your business processes in various ways depending on your team’s expectations and needs.

Criticism time: What you don't like/lack in Fibery?

Some third-party integrations like Github and Intercom could be improved.

Github integration was broken two times and we had to uninstall it, then our entities related to it were lost. Then we installed it again but it was stuck somewhere so we decided not to use it anymore.

The Intercom conversation message area can be more user-friendly but it is better than last year. We tried to use conversations in Fibery to track customer needs but integration has read-only capabilities so we could not change the state of those conversations. We had to quit using it.