What is NitroIQ?
NitroIQ is a JIRA plugin (only available by invite-only currently) that helps Agile teams improve performance through insights, scorecards, and metrics powered by machine learning.
It's purpose is two-fold:
- Answer basic questions that engineering leaders and teams need to know about their performance sprint-over-sprint.
- Using machine learning and decades of combined experience, recommend ways to improve processes.
NitroIQ is in Private Beta
We've had NitroIQ installed with friendly software organizations for a few months now, and the feedback has helped a lot in mapping out our next steps.
Being in private beta has fed the team important information, we would not have otherwise had, such as:
- Product-Market fit. Is this useful?
- Price sensitivity. What is this worth to you?
- Roadmap feedback. What would you like to see in the next version?
Additionally, every shop seems to configure JIRA differently, so building a tool that seemlessly plugs into an existing configuration and does not require changes in JIRA was nice to have pulled off.
But Really, what are people saying?
More important than what they're saying, is what they're doing with the app!
Our team has witnessed teams change their behavior in several ways, from heavily pruning/adressing backlog items that are > 120 days old or issues that score badly with our algorithms, to engineering leads using the data we expose to have honest conversations on performance with team members and conversations with the business on engineering throughput and technical debt.
No one wants a high Doom Score, right?
Why NitroIQ?
It is a tool that I've always wanted in my hands as I built high-performing teams in an Agile shop. Similar tools do exist, but they seem to focus on vanity metrics, random charts without a purpose, and all share the same trait in that they're horribly expensive for the typical SMB shop to justify.
What's more amazing is that the team has designed NitroIQ to run entirely in the browser.
So... our hosting costs ar near-zero and no data leaves your JIRA instance!
- Cheap? ✅
- Secure? ✅
- Profit! 💲
Meanwhile the few competitors that exist have taken on millions in funding, price their product outside of the reach of most companies, and require consultants and training to get up and running.
Next Steps
We're on track for publishing NitroIQ to the Atlassian Marketplace within a month. Current plan is to make it available as a 30-day free trial to all that sign up. Hopefully I don't regret writing this part on this blog post and we stay on track for that.