When the Tools Start Using You.

When the Tools Take More Than They Give: The Parasitic Nature of B2B SaaS

There’s a quiet tax you pay when you adopt a B2B SaaS tool like JIRA. It doesn’t show up in your budget sheet or your burndown chart—but it’s there. It hides in your velocity, your morale, your creativity. The longer you use it, the more it takes.

At first, it feels helpful. A way to track tasks, assign work, and show progress. But then something shifts. You’re no longer updating tickets because it helps you—you’re updating them so someone else can read them. So the dashboard looks green. So the sprint board moves. So the process is “followed.”

Let’s ask a simple question:

How often do you actually check a code commit against the JIRA ticket it references?

Almost never. And yet every commit must include a ticket ID. It’s ceremony without substance. A ritual we perform for the software gods.

From Productivity Tool to Parasite

B2B SaaS tools are supposed to help you ship faster. But many of them, especially in project management, operate like productivity landlords. They lease you structure, but demand a rent: your attention.

JIRA doesn’t help you write better code. It helps someone else feel like the code is being written.

Over time, your team starts spending more time maintaining the tool than the product. You’re writing updates for tickets instead of writing software. You’re grooming the backlog like it’s a bonsai tree, instead of solving real problems. The tool feeds on this labor. And like any good parasite, it convinces the host that this is just the cost of doing business.

The Myth of Traceability

Traceability sounds great on a slide deck. Every feature, every bug, every regression linked to a ticket. Theoretically perfect. Practically useless.

Because in real teams, work doesn’t happen in tickets—it happens in conversations, in ideas, in bursts of inspiration, in decisions made during debugging sessions at 11 PM. Tickets try to capture that in static boxes. But what you get is a poor facsimile, a record that looks precise but says very little.

Direction Over Documentation

We obsess over tracking, because we’re afraid of losing control. But software isn’t a factory floor—it’s exploration. And you can’t map a forest with spreadsheets.

What if instead of obsessing over where each tree is, we talked more about which direction the team is heading? What if we treated tools like JIRA as optional scaffolding, not the foundation?

Parasite or Partner?

Not all tools are parasites. But you should ask yourself regularly:

Does this tool amplify my team’s thinking, or replace it?

Does it give us leverage, or just extract structure?

JIRA is not evil. Neither is Asana, Linear, ClickUp, or Monday.com. But they are businesses. And their business is making your process their product. The more embedded they are, the more they benefit. Whether you ship faster or not.

So be careful what you invite in. Some tools don’t want to help you work.

They want to own how you work.