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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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?")
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?
“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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
What does this do? Do i need it? What was it about the managers running the boards that was hated? Why does this solve that issue? So many questions
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.
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.
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
> 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.
The best Kanban board is a physical one. You are also not going to be able to put 200 items on it.
That’s a feature, not a bug.
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.
..instead of 2000 ?
It also looks like Jira.
That is a really limiting license.
Per the LICENSE file:
It's source-available proprietary software that happens to be distributed through NPM.
I keep stating proudly to any team mate and any manager that I've never ever needed a board to know what I had to work on.
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?")
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?
“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?
The amount of comments shilling LLMs on HN is skyrocketing. Could be a recession indicator?
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.
We all are or have been there.
I like the guy. It is funny.
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.
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.
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.
A decent tool could surely define multiple different views of the same information?
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
If this will solve the problem with boards, you need to be able to answer 2 questions:
1. What does this do that Trello doesn't?
2. What does Trello do that this doesn't?
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.
Can you show the capacity and flow management parts?