Transitioning from Jira to Tara
How AltoIRA Accelerated in Shipping and Delivering with Tara
About AltoIRA
AltoIRA is an innovative fintech startup based out of Tennessee. Their platform enables everyday investors to diversify their retirement savings by investing in alternative assets such as private equity, venture capital, or cryptocurrency.
Bradford Winfrey is the VP of Engineering at AltoIRA. He manages the engineering team and oversees the product build. Working closely with him is Brad Hughes, VP of Product, who is responsible for maintaining their technical roadmap.
How Tara Changes The Game:
- Zero configuration completing the switch from Jira in minutes
- Cost-effective, low maintenance solution to manage a remote team
- Smooth integration with Gitlab to tie in commits and merge requests with tasks
- Easy team management with split specs between multiple pods
Making the switch from Jira
At AltoIRA, the engineering team previously relied on JIRA as a ticketing system and a project management tool. While configurable, JIRA overwhelmed the team due to its hyper-complexity. Despite the heavy price tag, JIRA was not the most suitable solution for AltoIRA.
Bradford searched for an agile-focused tool that enables tight integration with Gitlab while reducing operating costs for the company. AltoIRA’s engineering team decided to turn to Tara for a more cost-effective product management tool that solves some of their biggest pain points, including Gitlab integration and simplicity.
Unblocking team sprints and understanding engineering performance
AltoIRA’s engineering team runs a two-week sprint with a sprint retro on Monday and a backlog grooming session on Wednesday. They needed a sprint management tool to easily keep track of their development and engineering performance as the team continuously focuses on shipping features.
Unlearning habits from years of using JIRA was a hard muscle memory to break. With Tara’s prescriptive workflow and sprint-focused, the team eased into best agile practices which helped improve their planning, daily check-ins, and prioritization.
By integrating with Gitlab, AltoIRA can view ongoing commits, merge requests, and upcoming feature releases in a few clicks. The automated update in request status is also a great bonus, making the entire process less manual which saves engineering hours spent on administrative tasks.
All development data is clearly communicated within Tara, enabling Bradford to understand engineering performance on a pull request and code commitment level.
Managing a team remotely with Tara
The recent iterations around team and backlog organization fit the need of a fast-growing team. Different pods run their own sprints, while still having visibility over their teammates’ progress. Backlogs and requirements are also split by team, keeping pods organized.
The AltoIRA team has grown significantly over the course of a few months with teams remotely working across the US. With a distributed team, a fluid and collaborative workflow is important in building a team with a culture of velocity that’s shipping faster, more often. With Tara, the team now has a real way to measure engineering performance in a more productive environment.
