From its start, SummerOS set out to help property managers thrive in the short-term rental market with a SaaS asset intelligence platform that was fast, reliable, and intuitive. But building a product that good meant they also needed an equally effective way to plan, track, and deliver their own work.

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As the company scaled into a thriving SaaS startup with a distributed engineering team and a rapidly-growing customer base, their project management setup began to slow them down.

"We had been using Jira for about a year, but it was clunky, hard to customize, and didn’t fit our growing team,” said Alex Gignac, SVP of Technology. “It was time for a change."

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When Alex joined SummerOS three years ago, he already had the answer in mind. In a previous role, he had swapped Jira for Shortcut and seen how it could help a distributed team move faster, stay organized, and collaborate more efficiently. He’d been waiting for the right moment to make the switch at SummerOS.

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Finding the Fast, Simple Way Forward with Shortcut

When that moment arrived, the transition was fast and effortless. Within hours, Alex had set up Shortcut, imported everything from Jira, and onboarded the entire team. By the next day, they were in their first sprint, quickly finding their rhythm in a tool built for teams that ship fast.

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“Shortcut’s simplicity is its biggest win,” says Alex. “We don’t have a product manager, so the team needs to be self-sufficient. Shortcut gives them the power to create their own tickets and keep track of work, without the heavy lifting.”

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The change was immediate. What used to be scattered across tools and slowed by clunky processes was now streamlined in one place. Iterations, Objectives, and Stories all lived in a single tool, with custom views and an intuitive interface giving the team complete clarity on what mattered most.

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“We needed a tool that wouldn’t add more work. It needed to be intuitive and fast. Shortcut made that happen.”

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The Impact: Increased Visibility and Faster Execution

Since adopting Shortcut, SummerOS has seen huge improvements in team autonomy and visibility. Built-in integrations with tools like GitHub and Slack keep work visible in real time, so nothing slips through the cracks and everyone stays in sync. 

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Alex highlights the key takeaway: “We’re a small team, but Shortcut gives us the structure we need to stay on track and grow. We’ve increased the granularity of our work, and we’re doing it faster and with more clarity than ever.”

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Looking Ahead: Moving Faster with Korey

As SummerOS continues to scale, Alex is eager to explore Korey, Shortcut’s new AI-powered Product Manager. “Korey could handle the overhead by cleaning up the backlog, creating tickets from messy Slack threads, and keeping everything organized,” Alex shares. “That is time we can give back to building the product.”

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Advice for Other Teams

As Alex reflects on the move to Shortcut, he offers a few lessons for teams considering a similar switch:

• Start simple: “Don’t overthink your workflow. Shortcut lets you adjust as you grow. It’s not a one-way door.”
• Keep Docs and Stories together: “Using Shortcut Docs keeps documentation close to the work, saving time and reducing confusion.”
• Pick a tool that works for you, not against you: “Complicated tools lead to complicated workflows. When a tool makes it hard to use, you avoid it, and that’s when you lose visibility. Shortcut makes it easy to stay in sync.”
• Act quickly when something isn’t working: “If a tool is slowing you down, make the change. Our team switched from Jira to Shortcut in a couple of hours.”

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Nearly two years later, SummerOS still runs everything on Shortcut and they have no plans to change.

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“When you’re a startup, you don’t have time to fight your tools,” Alex said. “Shortcut helps us focus on building the product, not managing the process.”

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Ready to see how Shortcut can help your team move faster? Start your free trial and see what your team can do.