The central issue with “simple” productivity tools is that everyone wants a different 10-40% of what Jira does. There’s a reason most of us end up begrudgingly giving money to Atlassian.
Yes, functional simplicity is tough.
Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
321–330 of 470 posts
Re: Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
#322Can you share pages using a public link and can you use your own domain for it?
Re: Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
#323One thing I've always wanted in a tool like this is the ability to map out probabilities, i.e., we do A, then B but after that we do either C,D or E. Each one on these has an associated probability (C: 0.4, D: 0.5, E: 0.1) and an associated estimate (C: 10 +- 5 normal, D: 12 +- 3 uniform, E: 3 +-1 normal). The UI would look like a graph and like ms project it could include resource levelling in order to show bottlene…
Interesting thought. One could do Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the probability distribution of time-to-finish. I considered something like this [0] to explain the empirical log-normal distribution of project completion times [1], although I hadn't thought about including sequencing & bottlenecks. Probabilistic programming [2] is the discipline concerned with solving this type of problem - some tooling might exist, although probably w/o a nice UI.
[0] https://heteroskedasticblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/04/softwar...
[1] https://erikbern.com/2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-l...
Re: Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
#324Re: Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
#325Does it have offline support? This is the one thing I'm missing the most about Notion, Miro, Google Calendar, and all of this - offline support. In German trains, I'm offline, on flights, I'm often offline; while traveling, I'm often offline. Offline capabilities are often neglected.
We built Linear( https://linear.app ) to be offline first from the beginning. It’s kind of hard to do later. It’s architected in a way that client syncs the data, all the actions happen locally and then delta packets are synced back to the server. This also makes the app really fast because the client doesn’t have to wait for the network to complete the action.
Tell TA he's a wizard but his dependency graph causes deadlocks
Re: Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
#326Can you share pages using a public link and can you use your own domain for it?
Yes, you can share a page with a public link. White labeling is not available yet.
Re: Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
#327Am I late to the party? www.focustask.app Unlike OP, this is meant as purely personal tool, kinda like Things. I made it for myself, and love using it.
It looks cool
Re: Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
#328This looks very cool, I will be signing up and testing it out! Quick question, how many hours per week would you say it took over the two years to reach this point? Full time or part time? Thanks.
Re: Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
#329Firstly, congratulations on your launch!
My personal opinion as a Product Manager is that there is no all-in-one tool, there never will be an all-in-one tool, and anyone promising an all-in-one tool has some significant blinders on around the job functions they have been exposed to.
Sales will use Salesforce. Engineering will use JIRA. And Product will use some generic roadmap-first tool like Asana, Trello, Miro, Monday, or MS Project. Product will beg everyone to use their tool, but no one will because it's for looking at work, not executing on it.
Product will not understand because we Product Managers don't actually DO things, we talk to people, organize ideas at a coarse level - and we have a simple tool that articulates the vision perfectly! Except it doesn't automatically integrate with the CI/CD pipeline, it doesn't automatically log the last touch with a high-priority prospect, it doesn't pass designs from the designer to the UX engineer. It doesn't actually DO anything. It becomes just another SaaS platform in our Okta stack that only the PMs look at - and it gets out of sync with the actual reality reflected in the other SaaS offerings.
And the reason it doesn't do those things is because the people who built it thought that THEY were the ones who could build the all-in-one project management tool and all those sales people, engineers, designers, lawyers, and marketing writers would log in to theirs. Insert relevant XKCD about standards here. The truth is no PM tool will ever be the system of record for the actual work, but everyone is afraid that the complexity of integrating with others will turn them into JIRA.
So we get these vaguely opinionated ways of moving around and arranging candy-colored cards, and those cards never quite show us the state of the project we are managing, so we have to bug people to "update their status in " before the weekly meeting. Which they don't want to do because it delivers no value to THEM.
Which is all a long-winded way of saying - please think about how a piece of work from each of those functions might be represented in your view, and how that integration would happen automatically.
Re: Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.
#330I would think about your positioning some. You’re marketing this as having “less complexity” which first of all, isn’t going to appeal to people unless they’ve already used the other tools. But, if they had tried Trello, that’s far from complex, as you say it doesn’t have the features you think are needed, so you are more complex than that. It might be that you’re excellent at UX but that needs some comparative examp…
DFM may be a nice lens to look at positioning this through IMO. It's thoughtfully designed around the larger workflow which more archaic (jab jab) tools don't understand or ignore. Honestly I love Trello but wouldn't give it the time of day in your positioning. Just emphasizing the depth of expertise and broad perspective on daily/weekly individual/team workflow that made your tool possible will, without saying it, b…
DFM? Google searches for it aren't turning up anything relevant.