The Atlassian Jira Situation

A couple of days ago Atlassian (Jira) announced "Advanced Roadmaps".

I'll admit this looks pretty good. Recently I've seen Product Managers working with the roadmap feature on the next-gen projects and getting some (limited) use out of it. The article mentions:

The feature has been a hit, becoming one of our fastest adopted features of all time

Having said this, I didn't see roadmaps widely used in Product teams because it didn't span across teams and projects. Which, when you think about it - roadmaps are generally going to do that.

So I'm reading along and this new advanced roadmap seems to solve exactly that issue. But they are charging for it. 

This isn't how this is supposed to work. 

I understand that software has regular and premium versions.

I understand Atlassian has to make those profits (look at this beautiful graph!)

What software companies should not do is put features in the 'regular' version (for over a year), gather great feedback and then leave it to rot while the fixes go into a 'premium' version. That really doesn't sit well with me.

Jira (and its related suite of products) is expensive software, and the way they've priced it per user means it adds up fast. To get advanced roadmaps you'll need to dish out $14 per user instead of $7 per user for the base Jira. Add in confluence, service desk, and you are really dishing out the cash.

As a developer I hated every second of using Jira. Especially in the earlier versions. It got better. As a manager I admit some of the functionalities (JQL, automation tools, etc) are handy. Will we still use it? Probably - in the short term there are other things to tackle. 

Would I recommend it to a new startup today? No.