The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Software / engineering practice

Shortcut Blog

shortcut.com/blog

Articles and thoughts on engineering, product, design, best practices, and more from the team at Shortcut.

Software / engineering practiceEngineering management / careers

’15’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
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322 from 21 Jul 2015 to 8 Oct 2026
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monthly (9 in the last year)
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company blog
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2026 3

  1. Customer Story: How Tablogs Scaled on Shortcut
  2. What's the Best Free Project Management Tool for Engineering Teams in 2026?
  3. How to Handle Constantly Changing Priorities at Work

2025 25

  1. How To Stay The Course & Develop Great Products
  2. How High-Performing Teams Are Planning for 2026
  3. An Easy Way for Teams to Submit Product Requests
  4. Designing a Calmer, Clearer, Faster Shortcut
  5. Get Started Now
  6. What Makes a Good Objective: A Guide for Product and Engineering Managers
  7. Best Project Management Alternative to Spreadsheets
  8. Trello Alternatives for Engineering Teams (2026 Edition)
  9. Best GitHub Issues Alternatives: Top Tools for Engineering and Product Teams
  10. Best Project Management Tools for Engineering Teams in 2026
  11. Best Jira Alternatives for Engineering Teams (2026 Guide)
  12. How to Align Product Roadmaps With Engineering Sprints (2025)
  13. From Milestones to Objectives: How Teams Move from Shipping Work to Achieving Outcomes
  14. Big Ideas Are Now Easier to Build: Sub-tasks in Shortcut
  15. To Build the Future: Ada Lovelace and the Unseen Worlds of Engineering
  16. Introducing Korey: The AI Agent For Product Engineering Workflows
  17. How Marketing Teams Can Use Shortcut to Work Alongside Product Development
  18. Shortcut MCP Server: Connect AI Tools to Your Data
  19. A Fairly Thorough Guide to Understanding Velocity vs. Capacity
  20. Best Project Management Tools for Startup Teams in 2025: The Real Guide
  21. Collaborate with your AI Teammates in Shortcut
  22. Alternatives to Height.app
  23. Shortcut Has A New Look
  24. See Story Relationships At A Glance
  25. Pivotal Tracker Alternatives for Project Management

2024 19

  1. Backlog Refinement: Benefits, Steps, and Best Practices
  2. What Is Project Management?
  3. What Is Project Management?
  4. Anniversary Release Event Recap
  5. Keep Work Moving with Work In Progress Limits
  6. Sharing Progress with Roadmaps
  7. Keep Your Conversations Seamlessly Connected with Slack Thread Sync
  8. Importing From Pivotal Tracker to Shortcut
  9. Jira vs. Pivotal Tracker: Which One is Right for Your Team?
  10. Improvements to Backlog Management in Shortcut
  11. 6 Shortcuts to Work Faster in Shortcut
  12. A New Markdown Experience in Shortcut
  13. How to Prioritize Work When There's so Much to Do
  14. A NEW Stories Page Rebuilt from the Ground Up
  15. Is a Code Review Checklist Necessary?
  16. How Startups Use Shortcut to Drive Results
  17. The Software Developer's Guide to Choosing the Right Kanban Board Software
  18. Align your team's work with your company's goals with our latest feature: Objectives
  19. Burndown Chart: Are we on track?

2023 22

  1. We're Transforming Reports
  2. A New Logo to Mark a New Shortcut
  3. Introducing Shortcut's 'Curated Roadmap': A Revolutionary Approach to Roadmap Visualization
  4. Automations for Epics and Iterations
  5. Get visibility into blockers and work harmoniously as a team with Overlapping PRs
  6. Git more done with our updated VCS Integrations
  7. Introducing HelpHub: A smart and streamlined help experience
  8. Leverage Shortcut and Notion for stronger collaboration, better alignment, and efficient workflows for all software teams
  9. Embed your Miro boards in Shortcut stories, docs, epics, and more!
  10. A new Team-Focused Navigation for better focus, reduced noise, and more joy in Shortcut
  11. Take a walk on the dark side with Shortcut Dark Mode
  12. How Shortcut Uses Holistic Feature Planning to Reduce Unwanted Surprises
  13. How to Transition Away from Jira, Risk-Free
  14. 6 Rules (You are Free to Ignore) for Managing Your Backlog
  15. Unlock better prioritization and planning in Shortcut with the Backlog
  16. Stats vs. Surveillance: Is Jira Breaking Your Team's Psychological Safety?
  17. Unlock better prioritization and planning in Shortcut with the Backlog
  18. Ultimate Setup Series: Best Practices for Backlog Management
  19. Why It's Important to Maintain Your Product Backlog, Especially Now That We Have a Backlog Feature
  20. 5 Ways Jira Slows Everyone Down
  21. Ultimate Setup Series: Best Practices for Managing Bugs
  22. The Best Issue Tracking Tools in 2023

2022 48

  1. Why does Agile remain such a popular methodology for project managing software development?
  2. How Shortcut Uses LaunchDarkly
  3. Ultimate Setup Series: Best Practices for Monitoring Progress
  4. The 2022 Shortcut Hackathon Round Up
  5. 9 Signs It's Time to Consider a Jira Alternative
  6. Trick or Treat... or Both? 7 Tricks in Shortcut That are Actually Treats
  7. Ultimate Setup Series: Best Practices for the Shortcut Hierarchy
  8. A Guide to Story Pointing
  9. Advanced Custom Fields are here for more control..
  10. Product Management: An In-Depth Guide
  11. Ultimate Setup Series: Best Practices for Iterations
  12. How to Be Productive at Home
  13. What is Lead Time and Why Should Agile Teams Care?
  14. How I Learned Clojure and Datomic at Shortcut
  15. How to Bring Engineers on Board with the Product Vision
  16. How Shortcut supports Agile development: Scrum, Kanban, and everything in between
  17. When to Cut Scope to Get a Product Out the Door
  18. Product Development the Shortcut Way
  19. 4 Keys to a Good (Even Great) User Interface
  20. Why Agile Product Management Works
  21. Use Product Analytics to Improve User Experience
  22. Scrum vs Kanban: a Comparison Guide
  23. Docs are here to help you plan, manage, and document your work, in one unified experience in Shortcut
  24. An Introduction to Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC)
  25. Common Room values freedom and flexibility in their issue tracking tool
  26. 10 Ways to Use Shortcut Docs
  27. How to help software developers and PMs like each other
  28. The Designer's Toolkit: What Tools Do Shortcut Designers Use?
  29. The Product Manager’s Toolkit: What Tools Do Shortcut PMs Use?
  30. Prioritize your work and manage your backlog with Priority and Severity Fields
  31. Continuous Empirical Planning
  32. The Software Engineer’s Toolkit: What Tools Do Shortcut Engineers Use?
  33. Kanban, Scrum, Scrumban: What's the difference?
  34. Structure and Flexibility: Why Vanta Uses Shortcut
  35. How we improved conversion by changing one word
  36. Product Management: An In-Depth Guide
  37. Ultimate Setup Series: Best Practices for Workspaces
  38. Shortcut Write will return as Shortcut Docs
  39. Custom Fields are here for better categorization, structure, and organization of work
  40. The Shapes of Shortcut
  41. Keep Interfaces Small
  42. Convince Your Team to Use Shortcut in 5 Easy Steps
  43. Thirty Madison Scales with Shortcut During Explosive Growth
  44. Ultimate Setup Series: Best Practices for Teams
  45. Task Management, Issue Tracking, Project Management, and Product Management: What's the Difference?
  46. Use Threaded Comments in Stories for more focused conversations
  47. The Best Issue Tracking Systems for 2022
  48. 12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff

2021 50

  1. 12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: React-Spring
  2. 12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: Google Sheets
  3. 12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: Rollbar
  4. 12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: LinearB
  5. 12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: GitLab
  6. 2021 Year in Review
  7. 12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: FireHydrant
  8. Add (more) Joy to Shortcut!
  9. 12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: Productboard
  10. 12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: Slack
  11. 12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: GitHub
  12. 12 Days of Partners, Integrations, and Other Good Stuff: Sentry
  13. What is software project management? 4 things to know
  14. Ultimate Setup Series: Get Started with the Basics
  15. Software engineering teams are more productive when they work at a comfortable pace
  16. 8 Ways to Improve Cross-Team Collaboration
  17. Transparency: messy but worth it
  18. A Shortcut to Importing Your Data Into Shortcut
  19. Shortcut vs. Trello: Choose the best software project management tool
  20. Trello vs. Shortcut: Choose the best software project management tool
  21. Shortcut vs Jira: Choose the Most Powerful Project Management Tool
  22. Not Bad at All: Part II
  23. Not Bad at All: Part I
  24. Scaling Your Organization and Operations Together
  25. 5 Ways to Enable Cross-Team Collaboration in Agile Software Development
  26. A guide for transitioning to the new Shortcut Data Model
  27. Streamline your setup with our updated Data Model
  28. Performance is key to bringing joy to day to day work
  29. Previewing our streamlined Data Model
  30. Clubhouse's name is now Shortcut
  31. How to choose the best software development project management tool
  32. Set your mouse aside with our keyboard powered Power Bar
  33. Connect product strategy to execution with the new Productboard + Shortcut Integration
  34. How to choose the right Shortcut plan for your software team
  35. Our May Release Event Recap
  36. How Tidelift uses Shortcut to develop their product from ground zero
  37. Connect Shortcut to Google Sheets for custom reporting and analysis
  38. Shaping our new brand direction
  39. Scaling a company with Shortcut from early stage to exit
  40. Gain insights and plan more effectively with Cycle Time and Lead Time Chart
  41. Make sound decisions with deeper reporting insights
  42. How to bring technical and non-technical teams together
  43. Roadmaps get even better with Presentation Mode, Milestones, additional filters, and unique + shareable URLs
  44. Making sure Shortcut is there when you need it
  45. Organize Shortcut around your Teams
  46. Track actionable Sprint metrics with our new Iteration Velocity Chart
  47. Use the Shortcut API to find and update external links, and more!
  48. Use the Shortcut API to find and update external links, and more!
  49. Looking back on our 2020 Diversity and Inclusion efforts
  50. Our 2020 product launch year in review

2020 37

  1. Twelve Days of Integrations: The Shortcut API
  2. Twelve Days of Integrations: Rollbar
  3. Twelve Days of Integrations: Zapier
  4. Twelve Days of Integrations: Dropbox
  5. Shortcut Labs Reporting Enhancements
  6. The Twelve Days of Integrations: GitLab
  7. The Twelve Days of Integrations: Google Drive
  8. The Twelve Days of Integrations: Sentry
  9. The Twelve Days of Integrations: Slack
  10. The Twelve Days of Integrations: Figma
  11. The Twelve Days of Integrations: GitHub
  12. Shortcut Labs gives you early access to our latest and greatest features
  13. An update to our Terms of Service
  14. Going from a kitchen table to 100,000 customers, an interview with Dave Hayes, VP of Product at Sentry
  15. The Shortcut guide to burndown charts
  16. What's a branching strategy and why would you ever even need one?
  17. Some version control best practices you might want to follow. (Up to you, though.)
  18. Cycle time: a secret weapon of efficient software teams
  19. A quick look at our new layout and navigation
  20. Project managing your way through technical debt
  21. Use our Importer to easily switch from Jira to Shortcut
  22. Why choose DevOps or Agile, when you can instead choose DevOps and Agile?
  23. Outgrown Trello? Use our Importer to switch to Shortcut
  24. Custom Workflows help make Shortcut work for everyone
  25. Commitment to Action
  26. What is acceptance testing and do you really need to do it?
  27. Communicate faster with @mention notifications in Slack
  28. How a Product Manager uses filtered Spaces to zoom in on key work
  29. Next up for Build: New Reports, Timeline View, Importers, and more!
  30. Next up for Write: Story and Doc relationships, better discoverability, and more!
  31. 13 SQL skills that might make you a better engineer. Or at least better at SQL.
  32. How to manage your backlog with Shortcut
  33. What we've learned from being a remote first company
  34. Distributed teams are the future of software. Embrace it.
  35. Execute commands more efficiently with the Action Bar
  36. Building the next stage of Shortcut - announcing $25M in Series B funding led by Greylock Partners
  37. How the VP of Engineering at Glitch plans and prioritizes work for a 40 person software team without stifling creativity

2019 39

  1. Shortcut’s 2019 in review
  2. Leveraging psychological safety to ship business value
  3. Automate work and ramp up productivity with our new Zapier integration
  4. Real-time design collaboration with the new Figma integration
  5. Upgrade to the Shortcut API v3 for more stability and support
  6. Evolving logging from free-form text to structured data
  7. Building Dark Mode into a complex web app
  8. More reliable webhooks with queues
  9. Every software engineer asks questions
  10. Why you should teach your non-engineering team members to code
  11. Shortcut for Designers and Creative Teams
  12. Lessons learned on our journey to SOC 2 compliance
  13. Monolith, meet mono-repo
  14. A cautionary tale on using microservices (when building software for others)
  15. Common fails in a remote software team (and how to fix them)
  16. How to use Iterations and track velocity in Shortcut
  17. Iterations is here to support sprint planning!
  18. How we didn't rewrite Shortcut
  19. 6 ways software engineering leaders lead successful teams
  20. Why every developer should have a passion project
  21. Why you should always involve junior developers in code review
  22. Find work faster with Autosuggest for Search Operators
  23. A developer's guide to hacking joy at your local hackerspace
  24. Fix errors faster with the new Sentry Integration
  25. How we use clojure.spec, Datomic and webhooks to integrate with version control systems
  26. Find work faster with enhanced Navigational Search
  27. "It's free", "it's open source" and 5 other reasons why VS Code is so popular with developers
  28. Merge projects seamlessly with the new GitLab and Shortcut integration
  29. "Don't deploy on Friday" and 3 other "unwritten rules" of software engineering
  30. How we use Labels for the product management of Shortcut + how it all fits together
  31. How we use Milestones & Epics for the product management of Shortcut
  32. Accountability is what separates a software engineer from a programmer
  33. How we use Story Workflows (née Teams) & Projects for the product management of Shortcut
  34. How we use Organizations & Workspaces for the product management of Shortcut
  35. Letting go of frustration is the first step to tackling legacy or inherited code
  36. How to know when it's time to refactor your software's code
  37. Automate your workflow with the Bitbucket Cloud and Shortcut integration
  38. What is your product’s belief system?
  39. Organize your Workflow with Shortcut Spaces

2018 20

  1. How we use ES modules to speed up frontend development in a large application
  2. Collaborate and organize, effortlessly, with drag and drop Stories, push notifications and more on Shortcut for iOS v2.1
  3. Introducing Enterprise Edition
  4. Introducing Story Templates and 5 steps to get started!
  5. Introducing Organizations & Workspaces
  6. Announcing Custom Epic Workflows
  7. Searching Across Time
  8. Gaining experience and growing empathy with Mia Judkins of ModCloth
  9. Sowing seeds with Idan Cohen of GROW
  10. Sharing a love of dance music with Pam Hernandez of Boiler Room
  11. Making metrics matter - a conversation with Baremetrics and Geckoboard.
  12. More Visibility with Observers
  13. Error tracking with Sentry, Rollbar, and HoneyBadger
  14. On The Move with Blue Thomas of Updater
  15. What in the world is a developer evangelist?
  16. Now With Zendesk!
  17. Announcing Shortcut for iOS
  18. Re-envisioning search
  19. Daily standups with Shortcut
  20. Tips for building an international team with Siavash Ghorbani of Tictail

2017 44

  1. Conveying warmth with Jaclyn Spangler of FullStory
  2. Shortcut Series A Financing
  3. Bug reports to Shortcut with new Instabug and Bugsee integrations
  4. Iterating in People Ops with Thaisa Money of Geckoboard
  5. Continuous learning: An interview with LaunchDarkly Co-Founder/CTO John Kodumal
  6. Rolling into the future at Piaggio
  7. How we empower our users with Webhooks and APIs
  8. Overcoming Challenges at the Intersection of Health and Technology
  9. Building for growth: A conversation with Shortcut’s Paul Groudas and Stuart Sierra
  10. Customer-focused Product Management with Molly Wolfberg of Wistia
  11. Announcing Story Workflows for Shortcut
  12. How the former CTO of Kickstarter finds meaning in leading
  13. Growing a transparent team with Brett Collinson of Backpack Health
  14. What does it really take to scale a tech team?
  15. Onboarding and Reducing Churn with Kelly Wu of PolicyGenius
  16. Getting Remote Teams On The Same Page
  17. Octane AI’s VP of Product on fostering open communication
  18. Iterating with your team in Shortcut
  19. Building and motivating your development team: An interview with LearnZillion’s CTO
  20. How to Add Value With Cross-Functional Teams
  21. Going mobile with React Native
  22. How to lead better brainstorming sessions
  23. Visualize and improve your team’s progress with Shortcut
  24. What Your VP of Engineering Wants You to Know
  25. Summary of the Shortcut service disruption on June 1, 2017
  26. Labels for Epics and Milestones!
  27. How Shortcut became remote-friendly
  28. 5 common product development mistakes (and how to avoid them)
  29. The Shortcut calendar integration is right on time!
  30. What your Designers want you to know
  31. How to generate awesome ideas (and then develop products with them)
  32. B2B vs. B2C Product Management
  33. Auditing with Reified Transactions in Datomic
  34. 10 must-read books for Project Managers
  35. Reporting for Shortcut: Now in Beta!
  36. What your CTO wants you to know
  37. How to use Story Types
  38. What your Software Engineers want you to know
  39. What your Product Managers want you to know
  40. What your Project Managers want you to know
  41. Using Datomic? Here’s How to Move from PostgreSQL to DynamoDB Local.
  42. Why we redesigned the Story view
  43. 7 tips to help you set (and actually meet!) your professional goals this year
  44. How we build Shortcut with Shortcut

2016 11

  1. How to stay focused through the holiday haze
  2. Archiving in Shortcut explained
  3. Do good. Use Shortcut
  4. Tracking deploys with Shortcut and GitHub
  5. Shortcut API V1
  6. Building a SaaS App? You should probably stick to a single subdomain.
  7. 3 tips for preventing team tool fatigue
  8. Automating Shortcut using your existing Github workflow
  9. Consider yourself notified!
  10. Branch out with us!
  11. The Shortcut activity feed

2015 4

  1. Meet the Team: Andrew Childs, Co-founder of Shortcut
  2. Meet the team: Kurt Schrader, the CEO
  3. Better tools
  4. Shortcut: Better tools for software engineering teams