Tools can shape the culture

A decision as simple as which tool to use can shape the culture of a department or an organisation.

I recently read an article by Jari Mattlar where he discusses the impact of replacing Jira with Linear and Slack with Float. He makes the point that tools are part of your culture.

I have definitely seen this to be true.

For years we used Jira as our issue tracking tool. I was never a fan, but it did the job and we worried that moving to something else would be too much of a change. We briefly looked at Linear shortly after it launched, but it didn’t seem quite ready then. Meanwhile, our product team experimented with various tools before settling on one.

Eventually, Linear improved enough that both teams decided to make the move at the same time. Not only is Linear much nicer to work with and significantly faster, but the ability to integrate our teams more closely has led to much better collaboration and an improved workflow.

We’ve seen a similar story with our CI/CD pipelines.

We started with CircleCI and moved to a self-hosted Concourse setup when costs started rising and we hit a few issues. Concourse served us well for a while, but it’s cumbersome and seems to be reaching its end of life, so we are currently migrating to GitHub Actions. So far the move has been a success, allowing us to simplify pipelines that had grown overly complex. In the past, people would put off pipeline updates; now, the process is much simpler and viewing the status of a build is much easier.

More recently, we’ve introduced Notion and are discovering new ways to share knowledge and collaborate. When you throw in the use of AI, the landscape changes even further.

Ultimately, tools change the way people work, interact, and collaborate. They are a fundamental aspect of company culture.

Choosing the right tools can have a big impact and make all the difference.