If Jira didn’t exist, someone would build it, because said managers have the budget and authority to spend.

If we want a different management culture, we have to work on the culture directly. Which is the entire point of agile, lean, and other movements.

As for managers buying it and imposing it on their engineers, we need to recognize that said managers are users too, and their needs matter. It’s not like there’s a good tool and a shitty tool, and the engineers and managers put in a requisition for the good tool, but the CFO plays golf with the shitty tool’s VP of Sales and they buy the shitty tool.

Managers want Jira for a reason. We may not like the reason, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong, and it especially doesn’t mean that if we burned Jira down to the ground its replacement wouldn’t address the reasons managers want Jira.

If we believe that software can do what managers and engineers need doing without being as craptastic as Jira, we need to build it.

But we can’t ignore what managers need. We either give them something else that solves their problem, or we stop worrying about Jira and get them to approach software development in a new way.