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.
Plugging the same linear.app mentioned in a different comment -- switched a couple years ago (small team, fed up with general slowness and jank of Jira) and don't want to look back.
I have used JetBrains YouTrack in a number of scenarios for that specific ability, multiple simultaneous views/boards for various stakeholders and production pipelines (multi-org and multi-project).
I’d give it an independent recommendation in general, too, as the scripting/querying/commands make many tasks simple. You can tell it was built by programmers for programming project management, in the good way.
I got really frustrated with Jira in my company. Getting rid of it completely would have been too lofty a goal, so I looked into how they were using it. Turns out they were mostly just using it wrong. You can have multiple "views" of the same info. I ended up fixing the boards and it mostly works now. It's still crap for various reasons and massively bloated, of course.
Let's say. But is it good for the team? At a daily meeting, the manager shows the screen of his board and I don't understand where my tasks are on it. I've made personal filters for myself, but it's always difficult to navigate quickly in a meeting when it comes to my field of work
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.
Trello does not work in Russia. You cannot install it on your server in the company's closed loop. There is no task number, there are no subtasks, you cannot see the progress of subtasks on the parent's board. There is no analytics. There is no page where you can view all the tasks that can be taken on. The service does not claim the laurels of solving all problems, but it is unique in its own way.
The limit can be specified per board (process). This is my vision of an electronic kanban board. Perhaps in the future I will add an indication to the columns, but now I want to check my guesses.
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
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.
That’s one thing I hate at my company . Many teams run Jira with backlogs, burndowns and whatever. In theory all the info is right there. But the big guys can’t be bothered to use Jira so somebody has to spend hours and hours prepping PowerPoint slides with the info that’s in Jira.
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.
Using vibe coding, you will not be able to do such a service in such a short time. In addition to the goal of researching my kanban vision, I also experimented with an architecture that allowed me to achieve the required productivity and ease of development. AI is not that cool yet
“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?
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.
Your comment was the first, but it's the hardest to answer.
I started doing this project when a new manager joined the team. And his first decision was to change the processes by rebuilding the kanban board. The team as a whole was initially satisfied with the board, which had been built for a long time with the previous two managers. Everyone began to propose their requirements for the kanban board, but the new manager did not hesitate to do as he saw fit. And in the future, this story was repeated with new managers.
If you take into account all the wishes, then the board becomes very large, both in width and in height. That's why I don't criticize new managers. In many ways, this is a consequence of the tracker's functionality.
Different types of work have different stages. For example, a developer needs a "code review" column, someone needs an additional "approval" column, etc. My idea was to give each type of work its own board. And on the task card, display which subtasks are currently being worked on. As a result, we would have unloaded the main kanban board, and the kanban boards for work tasks would have become more flexible.
It also provides new opportunities for analytics. Or here is the flexibility in creating tasks, for example, add an "analytics" task at the testing stage. For me, ooko is an experiment with a hierarchy of tasks, so what the pros or cons are remains to be seen. Something like that
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 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.
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?
It takes most of the time to decide what to do next. I don't have so much energy and desire to do anything to try to do everything. The main way of promotion is advertising in search results. For me, it is the most effective and affordable in terms of quality for new users.
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.
Yeah that's one of those quotes that has done more harm than good. It's roughly equivalent to the fallacy of the grey - some things are crap so everything is equally crap.
In reality nobody (sane) would claim that Bugzilla is better than Phabricator for example. Some project management tools are better than others.
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.
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.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 60.4 ms ] threadI have used JetBrains YouTrack in a number of scenarios for that specific ability, multiple simultaneous views/boards for various stakeholders and production pipelines (multi-org and multi-project).
I’d give it an independent recommendation in general, too, as the scripting/querying/commands make many tasks simple. You can tell it was built by programmers for programming project management, in the good way.
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
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.
Part of what makes corp life so inefficient is that lack of unified approach.
Working with a company where many of C-suite folks operate in normal corp world: Office 365. Slides, spreadsheets, the currency of business.
Meanwhile the product team operates in JIRA and in Confluence. They communicate with each other in their respective preferred formats.
But imagine if CEO said something like: any deliverable of A,B,C types has to be Confluence. No exceptions. 3 strikes until you get a penalty.
Would that help?
Per the LICENSE file:
I started doing this project when a new manager joined the team. And his first decision was to change the processes by rebuilding the kanban board. The team as a whole was initially satisfied with the board, which had been built for a long time with the previous two managers. Everyone began to propose their requirements for the kanban board, but the new manager did not hesitate to do as he saw fit. And in the future, this story was repeated with new managers.
If you take into account all the wishes, then the board becomes very large, both in width and in height. That's why I don't criticize new managers. In many ways, this is a consequence of the tracker's functionality.
Different types of work have different stages. For example, a developer needs a "code review" column, someone needs an additional "approval" column, etc. My idea was to give each type of work its own board. And on the task card, display which subtasks are currently being worked on. As a result, we would have unloaded the main kanban board, and the kanban boards for work tasks would have become more flexible.
It also provides new opportunities for analytics. Or here is the flexibility in creating tasks, for example, add an "analytics" task at the testing stage. For me, ooko is an experiment with a hierarchy of tasks, so what the pros or cons are remains to be seen. Something like that
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.
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?
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.
In reality nobody (sane) would claim that Bugzilla is better than Phabricator for example. Some project management tools are better than others.
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.