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With more than two decades of product management and product marketing experience in various industries spanning Software, Hardware, High Tech, Pharma, Telco, B2C and B2B, I have seen the industry evolve with new tools emerging to address the changing needs of product teams. Today, I'll compare Shorter Loop and Jira - two leading tools in the product management and software development space.
Shorter Loop is a rising star in product management. It offers a comprehensive, end-to-end approach to managing the entire product lifecycle. Shorter Loop has been recognized as the "Best AI-Powered Product Management Software" by Entrepreneur.com and has quickly gained popularity, with a user base that includes industry giants like Quantiphi, Publicis Sapient, eBay, Rubrik, and MassMutual along with small medium-sized businesses, such as CoolProfs, Recital Software, TrueTickets, Nuronics, Invisia, Tookitaki, and others.
Jira, on the other hand, has long been the go-to tool for agile software development teams. It is renowned for its robust issue tracking, project management, product development features.
While Jira is a powerful platform, the question remains: how does it compare to Shorter Loop's specialized product management capabilities? Let's explore the key differences between these two tools to help you determine which one best suits your product management needs.
Shorter Loop stands out with its focused approach to product management. It offers a comprehensive suite of features that guide the teams through every stage of the product life cycle.
Shorter Loop sets itself apart from Jira's development-centric approach by emphasizing a continuous discovery process or continuous discovery framework and validation. Features like unlimited experiments to validate hypotheses, persona development, and value proposition mapping help product teams uncover customer pain points, validate their ideas, and gain a deeper understanding of their target audience.
Shorter Loop's Impact Mapping capabilities allow product teams to visualize the connections between business goals, user needs, and potential solutions. This helps teams design effective solutions, and deliverables and define what feature to build next to create the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
The combined effort makes sure the group agrees on major goals and features driving maximum effect.
"...Impact Maps is effective in tracking Business Goal to Product Value Proportion" - Archana K, (>1000 Employees), India
Shorter Loop's flexible roadmap capabilities let the teams line up product plans with business target. From the action-based, timeline-based, theme-based, and goal-based to value-driven roadmaps, the platform offers various types of roadmaps to communicate product vision effectively. Also, it provides the one view of the roadmap to the product leadership including all teams' product plans. It also manages product plans by sprint, by short medium and long term. You decide the flexibility of the intervals while deciding the product roadmap. Share with other teams, save as pdf/picture and use in your presentation. Creating a roadmap is easy in Shorter Loop as you can easily 'Drag and Drop' features from backlog under a specific business objective of an interval.
Encouraging teamwork across roles is key for product leaders, and Shorter Loop delivers digital whiteboard, wiki/document management tool. These ensure your squad stays in sync and informed through the making process driving real-time and remote collaboration.
Whiteboard offers rich templates in the libraries to save your time in creatin diagrams from scratch. Browse and add to your current whiteboard. Save finally by adding a frame to your diagram in the library for future use. Plus, the Whiteboard toolbar offers 'Specific features' to use one diagram in multiple whiteboards as you like to save time.
Shorter Loop's full product backlog management features offer a unified view of the overall development progress, allowing teams to efficiently prioritize, track, and review progress on key features and epics. It helps you to see your backlogs in three folds: a. Epic b. Feature and c. User Stories along with their estimation score on value it delivers and effort it takes.
You can download and share this with your other teams to communicate on overall progress without being logged in to the tool.
Evaluation of experiments, metrics, and objectives aids in understanding data. This evidence-based and data-driven approach minimizes risks and boosts product's success potential when developing products by creating actionable intelligence
A dashboard clearly shows essential product and business metrics across the product lifecycle stages. Teams continuously measure impact and learn from data to shape informed choices.
Customer Feedback tools let product teams collect, organize, and act on customer insights. This ensures actionable decisions from customer feedback to influence product development.
Shorter Loop has consistently received excellent reviews across various platforms (4.8 out of 10 from 100+ reviews), showcasing its comprehensive capabilities and user-centric approach.
The collab module has brought our teams closer than ever. We use it for brainstorming sessions, creating process maps, root cause diagrams, user story journey with our UI/UX designer and marketing team, and saving them for future reference. Everyone can contribute (comment, attach file, additional data, doc, image, video) and have a single view, making collaboration seamless and efficient.
From the dashboard to detailed user stories, Shorter Loop empowers me to articulate our product features and plan development with ease. I rely on the platform for defining our value proposition, conducting continuous discovery across all stages of SDLC, and gathering feedback. The AI-powered insights help us build a holistic and realistic product roadmap. Shorter Loop has truly transformed our product development process, driving business growth and success.."
It allows me to manage the entire lifecycle from product management, strategy and innovation in one place. Most all-in-one tools lack in quality, but shorter loop is doing it all really well.
Nothing right now. Onboarding went well, getting started was easy and adding my team was also good."
Shorter Loop currently scores 88/100 in the Product Management category. This is based on user satisfaction (98/100), and other relevant information on Shorter Loop gathered from around the web.
The basic free trial has limited features, but can be contacted Shorter Loop team for end-to-end feature access in the free plan.
Jira is a go-to tool used by teams practicing agile development. Its boards, sprints, and backlogs help plan, track, and manage software projects. Jira allows teams to log, prioritize, and resolve issues – bugs, tasks, requests – streamlining the development process. The tool offers many integrations with other popular tools, enabling seamless workflows throughout the development lifecycle.
Although Jira costs $7 per user monthly, Shorter Loop's Startup plan is priced higher at $21 per user monthly, $15 per user per month billed annually. However, the higher cost is justified. Shorter Loop offers comprehensive end-to-end product management capabilities beyond Jira's development-focused features and it's powered by Design Thinking, Agile, AI, and SaaS.
1. The platform's strong features for ongoing end to end product discovery including vision, persona discovery, value proposition, business model are not present in Jira
2. Shorter Loop provides the Impact Map (helps in creating Minimum Viable Product[MVP]) - which helps product leaders define what to build next tying with the business objective and impact you want to create on your end-user -> Jira doesn't have this.
3. Jira doesn't provide the collaboration suite -> whiteboard and rich library of templates to create anything and everything from user journeys, data flow diagrams, workflow processes, team brainstorming sessions, etc with saving these diagrams for future use in the library
4. Jira doesn't provide planning and roadmapping capability. Shorter Loop provides various types of roadmaps from goal-based, timeline-based, impact-based to value-based, sprint-based, short, mid and long-term roadmaps. Plus, Shorter Loop brings the team to view ONE page of the entire product roadmap - including plans from all product teams - engineering, design, product management, sales, marketing and support, etc.
5. Jira doesn't have the end-to-end product metrics tracking capability in one comprehensive dashboard - However, in Shorter Loop, you create your own metric or you upload your metric via csv or other means.
6. Shorter Loop is integrated with Jira hence you can import workitems (epic, feature and user story) from Jira projects to Shorter Loop and track their progress, also share comments per work that way bidirectional integration is possible.
7. Jira doesn't have user feedback collection or gathering insights to take real time action to customer centric product development. Shorter Loop has user feedback collection ability from any sources - prospect, customer, partner, external stakeholder and internal teams. Plus with Shorter Loop AI 2.0, it can disseminate feedback to related themes and share actionable intelligence - problem summaries, and probable solutions that help you to save time in manual feedback analysis and take real-time action by converting the potential feedback to epic/feature or user story and manage an agile holistic backlog.
8. Also, Shorter Loop AI 2.0 aids in powerful end-to-end discovery from creating personas, value propositions, business models, GTM strategies, and designing impact maps (MVP) to predicting features, and user stories for an epic or feature.
9. Most importantly, while discovering, Shorter Loop allows unlimited experiments to be carried out for hypotheses validation giving you first-hand insights into what will work and not work and thus prioritize what to build next that your customers will gladly pay for.
10. It coaches the product teams by guiding them on what to do next.
This is why Shorter Loop is more powerful and valuable for product teams.
Plus, Shorter Loop focuses on reducing risk for product-market fit and boosting productivity, potentially saving significant costs and driving revenue gains - justifying its higher pricing versus Jira. Choosing between Shorter Loop and Jira depends on your product management needs and company stage. If you want a dedicated, end-to-end platform to guide your team through the full product lifecycle, Shorter Loop is the clear winner.
On the other hand, if your main agenda is agile software development with a strong weightage on issue tracking and project management, Jira can be a valuable complement to Shorter Loop's product management capabilities.
In the battle between Shorter Loop and Jira, the choice depends on your specific product management needs and your organization's stage. Shorter Loop's comprehensive platform offers a powerful solution for product teams looking to streamline their workflows, make data-driven decisions, and build successful, customer-focused products. Shorter Loop is also integrated with Jira so all your Jira product development tasks can be seamlessly seen in Shorter Loop and any status changes, and comments on those Jira Tickets will reflect in Jira Real time.
Try out Shorter Loop and unlock new opportunities to build successful, customer-centric products.
Discovery refers to the process of deeply understanding your target customers, their needs, pain points, and the problems you aim to solve for them. It involves conducting user research, building user personas, and defining the value proposition of your product. The discovery phase is crucial in uncovering insights that can guide your product strategy and development.
Product Discovery, or Continuous Discovery Habits, is an approach to product management that emphasizes an ongoing, iterative process of understanding customer needs and validating product ideas. This involves regularly gathering customer feedback, running experiments, and using data to make informed decisions about the product roadmap. The goal is to continuously validate assumptions and adapt the product to meet evolving customer requirements.
Some key product discovery questions that product managers should ask include:
Jira's discovery process is limited compared to dedicated product management platforms. It allows capturing user feedback, managing experiments, and creating roadmaps, but these capabilities are more fragmented across integrations. Jira's strengths lie in software development and project management, while tools like ShorterLoop.com offer more comprehensive discovery features centralized in a single platform designed specifically for the entire product lifecycle.
Jira, being primarily a project management and issue tracking tool, does not have a dedicated end-to-end "product discovery" module or pricing. Jira's pricing is based on the number of users, starting at $7 per user per month for the Standard plan. While Jira can be used for some aspects of product discovery, it lacks the comprehensive product management capabilities found in tools like ShorterLoop.com, which are specifically designed to support the entire product lifecycle, including discovery, definition, planning, and continuous optimization.
Effective discovery templates should include the following elements:
In Jira, creating a product roadmap typically involves using the Roadmaps feature, which allows you to visualize your planned work and link it to your strategy. However, Jira is not suited for product roadmap capabilities or planning, rather more focused on software development and may lack the flexibility and strategic alignment features found in dedicated product management tools like Shorter Loop.
Shorter Loop, on the other hand, offers a more comprehensive and customizable approach to product roadmapping. It provides a variety of roadmap views (theme-based, timeline, value-driven, etc.) to help you align your product strategy with business goals and communicate your vision effectively. Shorter Loop also integrates seamlessly with Jira, allowing teams to leverage the strengths of both platforms.
Customer discovery is the process of deeply understanding your target customers, their needs, pain points, and the problems they are trying to solve. This involves conducting user research, such as interviews, surveys, and observational studies, to gather insights that can inform your product strategy and development.
The key goals of customer discovery are to:
By focusing on customer discovery, product teams can develop a deeper empathy for their users and build products that truly resonate with their target market.
The journey from discovery to build typically involves the following steps:
By following this iterative process, product teams can build a deep understanding of their customers, validate their ideas, and develop products that truly meet market needs.
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