I always giggle when I look at the promo screenshot of fancy new to-do app that is supposed to solve the project management once and for all, and there are like 6 items on it instead of 200.
It’s simply very early on in the endless lifecycle of project management:
Simple kanban is great! It’s simple! Okay, new users, new feature requests. Wow now I’ve got a really robust product but still it only solves problems for maybe 30% of people. Let’s add more! Eventually we have converged to Jira and instead of doing a few things really well we now do everything poorly. At this point you’ve probably got enough cargo culted corporate bureaucrats using your product to survive for quite awhile as you ride the wave of revenue into the slow tide of mediocrity. Then the death and rebirth as the new starry eyed project management tool begins as YetAnotherTrelloClone
Tbf Jira is great, you just need a project manager with good opinions that sets it up and maintains it well. It turns out project management is a real skill and not a hat you put on the owner's less favourite sons.
Jira excels when there is a Jira governance committee comprised of people who actually understand data flow and are the only ones with admin privileges.
Too often some manager asks for (and is given) admin access and starts “improving” things.
Sure, anybody can create custom fields and screens and slap together a janky “workflow”, but well-oiled Jira Ops prevent an explosion of custom fields, they curate the create, browse and edit screens of each issue type to only show the fields that are important at that stage, use custom screens on workflow transitions along with validators and conditions to help ensure an issue is always in a reasonable state, etc. Then users don’t complain about the tooling.
But Jira governance takes time, effort, discussions with stakeholders, etc. And without it Jira gets a bad rap.
Jira's UX is crap. Try Linear.app, which is truly great software, equally appreciated by both software engineers and project/product managers using it.
Is this an ad? I've never heard of this and the website tries really hard to be an Apple product launch instead of showing what the tool looks like with 200 tasks on the board.
Not an ad at all. I've been using Linear for the past 4 years. Been using Jira, Trello, GitHub Issues, and other issue trackers before. Linear is simply incredibly better compared to Jira. I had tons of colleagues in my current team and former teams who were skeptical at first, tried it, and 2 weeks later wre saying they would never come back to Jira. I've seen many similar comments here on HN over the past few years.
People can sell me layers ontop of JIRA but you can't position yourself to replace it, too much already integrates with JIRA and if you're not a startup then its a political cliff edge to try to make a case to replace JIRA.
> Eventually we have converged to Jira and instead of doing a few things really well we now do everything poorly.
Is a system that does everything within its scope well not conceivable? If it is, does systems ending up like Jira come as a result of scope creep and gradual evolution (not designing the whole thing up front with its admittedly huge scope), not enough development effort or just wanting to ship things soon instead of spending 5 years making the damn thing be good? And then, how do we get there - a Jira killer, that’d be as good as Linux (or maybe BSD) is to OSes? It’s weird that project management has either small focused tools or big ones that are also bad in a variety of ways.
A system that does too much is complex almost by definition, with complexity you introduce conflicts between features that need to be resolved through design, designing for multiple interactions of conflicting features is neigh impossible.
The combinatorial of interactions between many features will inevitably create unresolvable edge-cases that need to be patched over, either hidden away or by tacking on more complexity so the user can control how these edge-cases should be solved for their own workflow.
There is no way to do such design upfront, you can only upfront what you can think and reason about. That's how all projects start, and their demise is exactly from realising "oh, we don't cover this flow, maybe we should have a feature for that". Taking all these learnings and applying to a new system that has more design upfront starts to verge on Second System problem.
Linux is also full of cruft, it's good enough but I don't think you should live with the impression that is a benchmark of software quality. It's still impressive but as any complex system it has many issues from legacy.
Emergency Room staff are perfectly capable of putting 200+ items on a physical board. Not writing tasks down because it's too time consuming doesn't result in a more manageable workload of tasks, it results in people trying to remember and forgetting.
One of the big benefits of a physical kanban board is that the limited space means people only write down the stuff they really care to keep track of. For me it has never resulted in people forgetting anything important. It means they don't write down the unimportant stuff.
It's possible that some people would write down a lot of trivia or fantasy features, especially to start. The best response to that is to let them write the cards and then sort them according to actual priorities. But I've never seen anybody persist in that behavior very long. If they do, I think it's a sign of organization problems that tools can at best mask, never fix.
I think this can also be true of virtual kanban boards (e.g., GitHub's kanban view) if you keep people focused on the kanban view. Then they learn to focus on what's being worked on and the near-term to-do list. You can have a backlog column and let people fill it up as much as they want, but as long as you groom the top 20 cards or so to be your actual current priorities, people eventually adapt.
The fundamental idea behind Kanban was WIP Constraint Management.
Unfortunately, so many people have been doing cargo-cult agile for so long that now the word "kanban" means 'task board with columns' to most people.
It should not be possible to put 200 items into a column on a Kanban board unless the team is actually shown to have the capacity to work on them without causing a bottleneck.
"WIP" does not work - it only seems that you are in control of the process. It may work for the same type of tasks (hammering a nail), but in my practice, where all tasks are different, it did not work anywhere.
It has worked fine for me on a variety of software projects for more than 20 years. Here's a project I documented back in 2004, where we used physical cards: https://williampietri.com/writing/2004/teamroom/
These days I'm on an all-remote team, and we use GitHub's kanban interface with WIP limits. That also works fine, and them main difference form how I worked back then is that we no longer do estimates.
I'm not sure what went wrong for you, but my strong suggestion is not to think of it as a task board. Think of it as a board that lists units of value. E.g., features delivered, research completed, messes cleaned up. We do sometimes make task breakdowns for cards, but that happens as we start work on the card, and it's just a checklist somewhere (for us currently, in the GitHub issue via Markdown checklists).
An important mindset shift for a lot of teams to use kanban boards well is to get away from siloing and toward collaboration. For my teams, cards were generally not individual achievements, but things we collaborated on.
I think it's also important for software teams to have a BLOCKED column between TODO and WORKING. The only cards that should count against your WIP limit are the ones that people are truly working on that day. If there's something you can't work on for some external reason, move it to BLOCKED. Then before a card is taken from TODO, try getting any BLOCKED item going first. It's also worth talking in your retrospectives about common reasons things end up blocked, and I like to set a pretty low limit for blocked cards to force discussion.
Happy to discuss further, but kanban approaches definitely work well for software.
I remembered one project I added over 20 items and then GitHub’s Kanban started freaking out. Never did I used it since. Trello was great but got heavier too with all those fancy stuffs and colors.
I’m still in the lookout for a great kanban software though.
I think not having much documentation is fine, but please make the demo something where people can use it without logging in. E.g., they can click a button and just start messing with a demo project. Then you regularly reap the demo projects that haven't been used in the last 48 hours.
“I spent 6 years building my Kanban as I hated how managers run the boards”… only to discover that problem was the managers and workflows designed for their legibility (not engineers), not the technology or software itself, and that the tech itself could be rebuilt in a weekend nowadays?
In a team I worked, we had full control over how we wanted to use the board. But the senior people just refused to engage with it, as anything they did on the board would make them accountable.
My lesson: Boards can be awful and useless even without managers running them! :)
I've been using a simple, standalone kanban to manage my own tasks, though.
This is such an important lesson. To me so many things from the "agile" toolkit appear to fail in ways where people tend to blame the tools, but instead are exposing people/process problems. The intent was that organizations use the pain points to improve process and solve problems. But in my experience a lot of organizations would rather remain dysfunctional than work effectively, and so will then shift to tools that don't expose the problems.
I just require PR's to have tickets attached or it fails CI and otherwise use LLM's to write analytics to track what people are doing these days. Asking devs to hold themselves accountable is an exercise in futility in my experience. In a world where you can do that, why even bother with tickets outside of planning the work done? Might as well just transcribe your standup and turn it into tickets that way too.
1. "Hated how managers run boards", but there is absolutely no explanation on what this system does differently. How does it differ from the myriad of existing solutions?
2. Documentation is practically non-existent.
3. The code isn't event open-source, and the license prohibits modification and distribution. Come on, this is essentially a TODO app.
4. Demo requires a user to create a real account and use an email address...
5. Telegram channel appears to have some demo videos, but all posts are in Russian. Why?
I would say this is some sort of joke if I weren't familiar with this kind of mindset, but I don't understand what causes this.
Inability to see that the perceived difficulty in using a system is due to your own mismatched mental-model/needs/scenario -- so inventing one which is overfit to your own needs/model at this specific moment, which fails to generalise and is eventually adapted overtime to more scenarios and becomes frustrating again.
I do the service alone in my free time. Documentation is my weak side, it takes time, desire and understanding of what should be there. I am from Russia and most of the users of the service are from Russia. This is the first time that so many non-Russian speaking users have signed up for ooko. Telegram has translation functionality, if anything.
I like the guy’s stubbornness. We all have been there.
I understand his account as releasing daily frustration in a constructive way. We all hate/love Jira, Excel whatever but the alternatives are worse and instead of one bad solution 20 different perfect apps to use as a substitute won’t cut it.
Usually, everything is set up "for the manager"—the way they prefer to view the project. As a result, a tool that is supposed to help the team becomes a burden. When you work across multiple teams, the constant filtering and scrolling turn into a nightmare. You waste your energy fighting the interface before you even start working.
I believe that one glance at the board should be enough to instantly see where we are, who is overloaded, and what is stuck.
That’s why I’m building ooko. To finally make the board a tool for the entire team.
It could in theory, but purchasing decisions for tools like these are generally made by managers or executives, so they end up being optimized for what those people want. Or, more accurately, what they think they want.
Made me think of a non-tech manager I had once who when we presented the newly installed bug tracker (of which we had none prior) that said . "This is great. You don't expect ME to use it right?")
I looked at some off the shelf task tracking and kanban packages and they didn't do quite what I wanted so I just vibe coded one up. We use it at home now.
My wife even made a special hidden mode for her game https://www.kanbanchaos.com so it can act as a frontend for our actual task tracker. Full taskception
Modification Ban: The User has no right to change, modify, decompile, disassemble or create derivative works based on the Program.
Distribution Ban: The User has no right to distribute the Program without the prior written permission of the Licensor.
I can't afford a free license. I have no sponsors and have been unemployed for a year. It's rare for a free-source project to succeed, so I decided not to use a free license initially.
I find this response a little odd. Absolutely respect the work you’ve put in, but explaining that it doesn’t have a free license because you’ve been unemployed is just bad marketing.
“It doesn’t have a free license because I believe in the product and think it stands out enough to warrant people paying for it” is probably the route you want to go.
If you really did spend 6 years building this, then it's an excellent example of why you should be vibe coding instead; I don't see anything here that could not be made in 6 minutes instead of 6 years.
Why is the landing page 100% gated behind a sign up form? Why is this on NPM to begin with? All around weird.
Could be a trojan horse. Just a heads up to anyone about to download this.
This does not help: "Task management service based on the Kanban methodology. Helps decompose the task pipeline and speeds up all stages of your work" Sounds 100% generated by AI tbh.
I do it alone in my free time. NPM is the easiest way to publish an application. You can install the app locally at your place. And there is also a TG channel, there are posts on the functionality for review.
I'm supposed to just blindly boot it up on my computer, with the license explicitly banning decompiling and disassembling the code, so it could sensibly reviewed?
Six years of sticking with one product is the hardest part of solo building. Most of us (myself included) struggle with the opposite problem — shipping too many things and not going deep enough on any of them.
The convergence-to-Jira pattern mentioned in another comment is real, but I think the answer isn't "don't add features" — it's "add features for a narrower audience." A Kanban for 3-person dev teams will always beat a Kanban for everyone.
Curious about your distribution strategy. After 6 years, what's actually working for getting users — SEO, word of mouth, communities?
Simple kanban is great! It’s simple! Okay, new users, new feature requests. Wow now I’ve got a really robust product but still it only solves problems for maybe 30% of people. Let’s add more! Eventually we have converged to Jira and instead of doing a few things really well we now do everything poorly. At this point you’ve probably got enough cargo culted corporate bureaucrats using your product to survive for quite awhile as you ride the wave of revenue into the slow tide of mediocrity. Then the death and rebirth as the new starry eyed project management tool begins as YetAnotherTrelloClone
Too often some manager asks for (and is given) admin access and starts “improving” things.
Sure, anybody can create custom fields and screens and slap together a janky “workflow”, but well-oiled Jira Ops prevent an explosion of custom fields, they curate the create, browse and edit screens of each issue type to only show the fields that are important at that stage, use custom screens on workflow transitions along with validators and conditions to help ensure an issue is always in a reasonable state, etc. Then users don’t complain about the tooling.
But Jira governance takes time, effort, discussions with stakeholders, etc. And without it Jira gets a bad rap.
Is a system that does everything within its scope well not conceivable? If it is, does systems ending up like Jira come as a result of scope creep and gradual evolution (not designing the whole thing up front with its admittedly huge scope), not enough development effort or just wanting to ship things soon instead of spending 5 years making the damn thing be good? And then, how do we get there - a Jira killer, that’d be as good as Linux (or maybe BSD) is to OSes? It’s weird that project management has either small focused tools or big ones that are also bad in a variety of ways.
The combinatorial of interactions between many features will inevitably create unresolvable edge-cases that need to be patched over, either hidden away or by tacking on more complexity so the user can control how these edge-cases should be solved for their own workflow.
There is no way to do such design upfront, you can only upfront what you can think and reason about. That's how all projects start, and their demise is exactly from realising "oh, we don't cover this flow, maybe we should have a feature for that". Taking all these learnings and applying to a new system that has more design upfront starts to verge on Second System problem.
Linux is also full of cruft, it's good enough but I don't think you should live with the impression that is a benchmark of software quality. It's still impressive but as any complex system it has many issues from legacy.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
One of the big benefits of a physical kanban board is that the limited space means people only write down the stuff they really care to keep track of. For me it has never resulted in people forgetting anything important. It means they don't write down the unimportant stuff.
It's possible that some people would write down a lot of trivia or fantasy features, especially to start. The best response to that is to let them write the cards and then sort them according to actual priorities. But I've never seen anybody persist in that behavior very long. If they do, I think it's a sign of organization problems that tools can at best mask, never fix.
I think this can also be true of virtual kanban boards (e.g., GitHub's kanban view) if you keep people focused on the kanban view. Then they learn to focus on what's being worked on and the near-term to-do list. You can have a backlog column and let people fill it up as much as they want, but as long as you groom the top 20 cards or so to be your actual current priorities, people eventually adapt.
Unfortunately, so many people have been doing cargo-cult agile for so long that now the word "kanban" means 'task board with columns' to most people.
It should not be possible to put 200 items into a column on a Kanban board unless the team is actually shown to have the capacity to work on them without causing a bottleneck.
These days I'm on an all-remote team, and we use GitHub's kanban interface with WIP limits. That also works fine, and them main difference form how I worked back then is that we no longer do estimates.
I'm not sure what went wrong for you, but my strong suggestion is not to think of it as a task board. Think of it as a board that lists units of value. E.g., features delivered, research completed, messes cleaned up. We do sometimes make task breakdowns for cards, but that happens as we start work on the card, and it's just a checklist somewhere (for us currently, in the GitHub issue via Markdown checklists).
An important mindset shift for a lot of teams to use kanban boards well is to get away from siloing and toward collaboration. For my teams, cards were generally not individual achievements, but things we collaborated on.
I think it's also important for software teams to have a BLOCKED column between TODO and WORKING. The only cards that should count against your WIP limit are the ones that people are truly working on that day. If there's something you can't work on for some external reason, move it to BLOCKED. Then before a card is taken from TODO, try getting any BLOCKED item going first. It's also worth talking in your retrospectives about common reasons things end up blocked, and I like to set a pretty low limit for blocked cards to force discussion.
Happy to discuss further, but kanban approaches definitely work well for software.
I’m still in the lookout for a great kanban software though.
My lesson: Boards can be awful and useless even without managers running them! :)
I've been using a simple, standalone kanban to manage my own tasks, though.
I would say this is some sort of joke if I weren't familiar with this kind of mindset, but I don't understand what causes this.
The cause is lack of self-awareness.
I understand his account as releasing daily frustration in a constructive way. We all hate/love Jira, Excel whatever but the alternatives are worse and instead of one bad solution 20 different perfect apps to use as a substitute won’t cut it.
We all are or have been there.
I like the guy. It is funny.
1. What does this do that Trello doesn't?
2. What does Trello do that this doesn't?
My wife even made a special hidden mode for her game https://www.kanbanchaos.com so it can act as a frontend for our actual task tracker. Full taskception
Per the LICENSE file:
If this is source available then every website is source available.
“It doesn’t have a free license because I believe in the product and think it stands out enough to warrant people paying for it” is probably the route you want to go.
You find honesty a little odd?
That's quite odd.
Why is the landing page 100% gated behind a sign up form? Why is this on NPM to begin with? All around weird.
Could be a trojan horse. Just a heads up to anyone about to download this.
This does not help: "Task management service based on the Kanban methodology. Helps decompose the task pipeline and speeds up all stages of your work" Sounds 100% generated by AI tbh.
Can you see why I'd be concerned about that?
The convergence-to-Jira pattern mentioned in another comment is real, but I think the answer isn't "don't add features" — it's "add features for a narrower audience." A Kanban for 3-person dev teams will always beat a Kanban for everyone.
Curious about your distribution strategy. After 6 years, what's actually working for getting users — SEO, word of mouth, communities?