Rough for Software Engineers
Jacob Duval
•
Aug 07, 2025
What problem does Rough solve?
The problem that Rough focuses on is alignment. Our goal is that you know what's going on across your product, without excessive meetings.
As an engineer, you've probably found yourself asking questions like
Why are we building X instead of Y?
Have any customers actually asked for this?
Didn't we discuss this 6 months ago?
Can we get some internal feedback before we start building this?
Is anyone using the feature I spent 2 months building?
Rough is designed to help you get answers to those questions. We are made specifically for companies where everyone has some interest in questions like these.
How does Rough solve alignment?
To be honest, we don't. Rough solves the technology side of the alignment problem. The rest of that problem is people, process, and culture. We help with that too, but we're not going to claim that our software is going to fix all these issues overnight.
At it's core, Rough is simple. We connect insights to work. We want people to understand the journey that a feature took before anyone started work on it. Sometimes features are built off the back of hundreds of customers calls; sometimes it's demands from investors; sometimes it's just the latest shower thought from the CEO. We're not here to judge how you make decisions, we're just here to show you what was involved in them.
As engineers, the workflow that Rough offers will feel very approachable. That's because Rough is built with a default-open philosophy. Everything is public by default. Think of it like github for product. You can't commit code to your github repo without other people being aware of it. We want that same feeling for feature planning.
What features does Rough have specifically?
The central hub of Rough is the insights feed. This is where we open up insights for everyone to discuss. If someone talks to a customer, and that call might be relevant to the product, it gets shared to Rough. Instead of a product manager or someone in leadership deciding something behind closed doors, those discussions are done in public with the context behind them clear to everyone.
The decision part of that process lives inside what we call a Pitch. This is a term we borrowed from Shape Up. A pitch is a structured document with a problem statement and a wireframe of what is being proposed.
We use vector embeddings to connect pitches and insights together, finding hidden links around the data. We use these embeddings to connect you and your insights to both customers and colleagues.
Another way we structure pitches is Lists. Everyone starts with one list by default, their Wishlist. The wishlist is how you can show the work you feel is most important to you. When you view a pitch, you can see who has this pitch on their wishlist, and at what position.
You can also Pin lists to the workspace. This lets everyone contribute to the list. Useful for things like quarterly planning, engineering specific projects, or wikis.
What integrations does Rough have?
We currently integrate with Github and Slack. If you use conventional commits, we will automatically link commits to the pitches they relate to. If you use slack, you can add the Rough addon and capture insights directly from Slack.
We're open to adding more integrations, so if you have a preference please get in touch.
Can I write my own integration for Rough?
Yes! We have an API. It's great.
How do I track bugs and tasks in Rough?
Rough is not a ticket tracker. There are so many awesome ticket trackers out there (we recommend Github Issues) and we don't think the world needs another one. We focus on all the decisions that get made before something breaks up into tasks on a ticket tracker.
There's a simple reason for that. Tickets are noisy. The activity surrounding tracking small tasks leads to information overload for the other teams. We've seen this time and time again with all-in-one apps like Monday.com or Clickup. The noisier a system is, the less people want to interact with it.
If we are going to help align teams, we need everyone engaged with what we do, and that means keeping tasks out of Rough.