Evan Fishman - Quely for Jira Atlassian Partner

Your engineers know what they built, but they have no idea why. The decision was made in a meeting — maybe Tuesday, maybe three months ago. The reasoning, the tradeoffs, the alternatives you rejected, they stayed in that room. Someone writes an ADR and commits it. But the next engineer who touches that system either can't…

12.5 weeks of engineering time. Lost to daily standups. Every year. Across your team. For a ritual most teams admit isn't working. Here's the thing: 63% of developers genuinely dislike daily standups. That's the opinion of 2,300+ developers surveyed on Blind. Not occasionally frustrated. Not burned out from a bad sprint.…

A standup where 3 product managers ask for percent complete is not a standup. It's a status report. Some engineers have started calling this Agile with none of the actual agility: → 90-minute daily standups → Story cards created with no requirements attached → Estimates at the epic level, months out → Retros that produce…

4 hours of sprint planning. Dead in 48 hours. Every single sprint. This keeps coming up in engineering communities, and the responses are almost always the same: "your sprint isn't locked anyway, why pretend it is?" And they're not wrong. In most orgs, sprint protection is theoretical. Stakeholders pull priorities…

We have the best collaboration tools in history. So why does collaboration still feel hard? It’s because each tool works great on its own. But everything begins to splinter when different parts of a task live across three of them. Multiply that by every project your team has ongoing. The information exists but it's hidden…

We've been running standups async using Quely for a while now, and honestly, I don't miss the meetings. This video shows exactly how we use Quely to stay on top of sprint work. VIDEO: https://youtu.be/m4P8l-hrUe4 Everything's in one place: the tickets, the context, the decisions. I can share updates, flag blockers, and…

From an engineer's perspective, this is dead on. But not for the reason you think. Go to the comments on any post about this and you'll see the same argument playing out. One side: "You're just running it wrong." The other: "The standup itself is the problem." But here's the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to say: The…

Who owns the backlog. Who talks to customers. Where the line is between discovery and delivery. Here's the thing though: The one thing that keeps breaking, no matter the title, no matter the org size, is context. Not the roadmap. Not the backlog. Not the sprint goal. The why behind decisions. What the customer actually…

I keep running into this policy. More than I'd like to admit. And every time, the same sequence plays out. Developers start optimizing the number, not the work. Estimates balloon to protect individual track records. Sprints stop reflecting what the team can actually do. And when something slips (and it always slips) it…

If the only power a Scrum Master has is ceremonies + reporting, expect ceremonies + reporting. And a ton of resentment. That’s how you end up with your Scrum Master policing Jira fields. Not removing impediments. Not changing anything. Just… auditing. I saw a rant from an engineer who’s on their “n-th” Scrum Master. The…

Story points didn’t fail this team. They were being used for something they were never designed to do. They were never meant to be time. They were never meant to be precise. Story points exist to compare effort, uncertainty, and complexity relative to other work. That’s it. And honestly, I get why that’s confusing. Most…

Slack, Jira, docs, meetings… None of them are the problem. The gaps between them are. That’s where the real work is happening, quietly, expensively, and over and over again. As a result your team is constantly rebuilding context from scratch. Piecing together what was said, what was decided, what changed, and why this even…

Who else can relate to the detective work required to find the information you need about a task? It's a special kind of chaos where the Slack message says something different from the email and meeting notes. And the ticket is super bland. How're you dealing with it?

Jira tickets are static for most teams. A title. A description. A comment or two. But the real context lives somewhere else. Slack has half the conversation. Standups and calls carry decisions no one will replay. Docs and Notion pages drift out of date the moment they are created. So the ticket tracks status, not the work…

A lot of teams act like it is, and there are reasons why: It’s a simple number that helps forecast capacity. It trends upward when processes stabilize, signaling improvement. It’s built into every Agile tool, so it’s easy to track. Executives love it because throughput is visible sprint-to-sprint. Velocity is useful, but…

Every notification costs you 20+ minutes of deep focus. Multiply that across your day, and you see why modern work feels like drowning. Research from UC Irvine shows that once interrupted, it takes 23 minutes to regain flow. Now think about how many pings, “quick questions,” and meetings reset your brain’s recovery clock.…

The best ideas or decisions aren’t made during a meeting. They’re made when people have the time to think. That’s why async is quietly reshaping how teams work. Async communication ensures that communication itself doesn’t become a blocker to productivity. PS: The key isn't just “communicate async.” It’s how you do it.…

Someone dropped this comment on my last post today, and it stuck with me. One Slack ping? A Jira ticket? A quick meeting? We tend to bounce back. But when context is spread across chats, docs, tickets and meeting notes, every return to a task feels like starting from scratch. It’s the drip that quietly floods the room.…

Not everything you ship gets noticed. And that’s fine. A small fix, a cleaner diff, a decision written down so no one has to ask again. These aren’t flashy. But they keep the team moving. Some of the most useful things I’ve worked on felt forgettable in the moment. But they saved hours. They unblocked someone. You don’t…

What if the real productivity killer isn’t bad code or poor planning, but a calendar full of meetings with no real purpose? In too many product teams, Agile rituals become rituals for ritual’s sake. Standups that don’t stand for anything. Planning sessions that go nowhere. Syncs that don’t actually sync. And it’s not just…

Most companies “async” work isn’t async at all. It’s just delayed work. Here’s how it usually goes: - Waiting for overlap hours - Delaying decisions until the next meeting - Chasing context across Slack, Jira, Confluence etc By the time everyone’s “caught up,” you’re rehashing the same points you covered last week. True…

Ever finish a meeting certain you’ll “remember the exact tasks or ideas that popped up during the convo”… Only to realize a few hours (or days) later, your bot missed some of the context? Or maybe you mentioned something important about a ticket on Slack…Then discussed it again in a meeting. Time to write the ticket, and…

Saw this post on Reddit where a PM asked how people manage the chaos in Slack. Team uses Slack heavily, but: → Decisions get lost → Ideas resurface every few weeks → Same questions keep coming up → No one remembers what was agreed last sprint meeting This is a context problem Slack was built for communication, not…

Came across this Reddit post that perfectly described a problem I have been seeing around for a while… Context-switching fatigue. The poster described a scenario I’m sure will sound familiar...teams bouncing between projects, standups, feedback, strategy docs, and sprint tasks all within a few hours. On paper, you are…

If your team needs 4 meetings to align on 1 thing… You don’t have a meeting problem. You have a clarity problem. More Zoom calls ≠ more clarity. More check-ins ≠ more collaborations. In fact, the teams I’ve seen collaborate best are the ones that talk less but still move in sync. Because they’ve built systems for clarity…

We got the kind of mail no founder wants to wake up to. A trademark cease and desist. A few months ago, we were officially asked to stop using the name “Rally.” If you're wondering, “Didn’t you check first?” Fair question. But here’s the thing: Rally started as a feature built to rally the team around what mattered inside…

Long meetings are a problem, but not THE PROBLEM The root cause is invisible on the board Tickets/ Work Items that can’t answer their own questions. When a ticket is vague, the team fills the gap with meetings, side threads, and endless “quick” calls. The Hidden bill: Flow broken → slower cycle time. Every interruption…

Some teams estimate based on effort. Others use complexity. And some… try both. But which one actually helps your team plan better? That depends on more than you think. Here’s what we unpack in the full article: Mike Cohn’s view: Story points should reflect effort; how much total work a team can take on. Eficode’s take:…