Disclaimer: I work for JetBrains as a Product Marketing Manager for IntelliJ IDEA, but this article isn’t about selling you YouTrack. Granted, at JetBrains, we’re all using it for our daily tasks, because it’s a good issue tracker, but I personally can’t say I am one of its big fans.

Another thing this article isn’t about is convincing you to start using Scrum, Kanban, Agile or anything like that because I myself kind of against following any formal processes just for the sake of it (which applies to the most of people at JetBrains).

So what’s it about? Let’s start with that I found Kanban board (detached from Agile) very helpful in the aspect of organizing myself and the tasks I get to deal with.

Being a Product Marketing Manager means that in addition to my own tasks I need to coordinate other teams which work is relevant to my product. I’m involved in releases, marketing campaigns, events, development and many other activities. On a daily basis, I collaborate with developers, designers, evangelists, researchers, sales, marketing specialists, and dozens of other teams and people. The sheer number of these communications is so massive that without a proper tool I’d be buried under tons of emails and paper notes.

Before I discovered YouTrack Agile Board, I’ve been using Trello to help me organize my tasks. Trello is brilliant, very simple, flexible, and does exactly what it promises. I have to admit that the word “Agile” was one of the reasons I kept myself away from YouTrack Agile Board (well, that, and it’s ugly interface, which, by the way, was improved in YouTrack 7.0). Nevertheless, I would still have used Trello, if not for one thing.

Most of the issues I coordinate were (and still are) YouTrack issues. This means that if I wanted to use Trello, I had to link every Trello card to a YouTrack issue — which I did for some time until Valery from the YouTrack team has shown me that all I did with Trello is possible with YouTrack.

This is how my board looks now: