I spent 6 years building my Kanban as I hated how managers run the boards

https://www.npmjs.com/package/ooko

by okovooo • 3 months ago

96 117 3 months ago

okovooo24• 3 months ago

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.

darreninthenet• 3 months ago

A decent tool could surely define multiple different views of the same information?

wpietri7• 3 months ago

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.

dankons• 3 months ago

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.

bonesss• 3 months ago

[Not affiliated:]

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.

globular-toast• 3 months ago

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.

okovooo24• 3 months ago

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

dvh2• 3 months ago

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.

alemwjsl• 3 months ago

It also looks like Jira.

SOLAR_FIELDS4• 3 months ago

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

KronisLV• 3 months ago

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.

post-it3• 3 months ago

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.

dzogchen• 3 months ago

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.

TipsForCanoes6• 3 months ago

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.

post-it3• 3 months ago

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.

polotics• 3 months ago

..instead of 2000 ?

dvh2• 3 months ago

I meant for this week

lawgimenez• 3 months ago

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.

eterm• 3 months ago

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?

okovooo24• 3 months ago

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.

TipsForCanoes6• 3 months ago

Can you show the capacity and flow management parts?

okovooo24• 3 months ago

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.

zeafoamrun• 3 months ago

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

AFF87• 3 months ago

"No sprints were completed in the making of this game." Loving this. And the fact your wife also sells socks as merch of the game!

ketzu• 3 months ago

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.

SOLAR_FIELDS4• 3 months ago

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.

wpietri7• 3 months ago

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.

vjvjvjvjghv• 3 months ago

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.

grvdrm2• 3 months ago

Not just boards. I’ll argue any deliverable.

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?

sidewndr463• 3 months ago

Sure, all the people who kind jobs that don't force them to use Atlassian products would just resign.

okovooo24• 3 months ago

Let me philosophize a bit: Stability gives you the opportunity to take the next step, diversity gives you the opportunity to choose a new direction.

Stevvo• 3 months ago

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.

okovooo24• 3 months ago

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

goopthink• 3 months ago

“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?

orphereus• 3 months ago

The amount of comments shilling LLMs on HN is skyrocketing. Could be a recession indicator?

stagezerowil• 3 months ago

I don't think people are "shilling" LLMs. They are new tools that are exciting.

pylotlight2• 3 months ago

Hey everyone, look at the luddite.

peacebeard• 3 months ago

They weren’t shilling at all, it was a passive statement of fact. In fact, they didn’t mention LLMs at all and a kanban board could be built in a weekend without one so it’s not even clear if your comment is on topic

maxloh• 3 months ago

That is a really limiting license.

Per the LICENSE file:

  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.

gwerbin• 3 months ago

It's source-available proprietary software that happens to be distributed through NPM.

oefrha• 3 months ago

It's not source available, there's only bundled minified code looking like https://unpkg.com/ooko@0.121.0/static/js/main..js

If this is source available then every website is source available.

okovooo24• 3 months ago

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.

inlustra• 3 months ago

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.

jaffa2• 3 months ago

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

okovooo24• 3 months ago

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

dizhn• 3 months ago

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?")

_the_inflator• 3 months ago

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.

pif• 3 months ago

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.

subwatch_dev• 3 months ago

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?

okovooo24• 3 months ago

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.

helloplanets2• 3 months ago

Six years? I think you're not being candid.

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.

okovooo24• 3 months ago

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.

helloplanets2• 3 months ago

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?

Can you see why I'd be concerned about that?

esperent2• 3 months ago

Is there a username and password for the demo?

okovooo24• 3 months ago

Yes, registration is required. This is both a demo and a working service that is used by a dozen teams.

esperent2• 3 months ago

So it's not a demo then.

It would help a lot of you added an actual demo. Or simply changed the wording to say "make a free account here to test it".

reactordev2• 3 months ago

Claude could zero-shot this.

_s_a_m_• 3 months ago

Channeling Stroustrup: there are two types of project management tools, the ones everyone complains about and the ones nobody uses.

IshKebab4• 3 months ago

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.

_false• 3 months ago

at least bugzilla is actively maintained. Abandonware over something Mozilla, Red Hat, Apache, GNOME, and KDE still run production workflows on isn't an obviously sane choice

jjmarr2• 3 months ago

He's right, though. C++ exists because it was compatible with C code. Not having to rewrite into Java was a major advantage and justifies most of the terrible design decisions made as a result.

ZpJuUuNaQ5• 3 months ago

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.

okovooo24• 3 months ago

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.

mjburgess• 3 months ago

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.

The cause is lack of self-awareness.

wpietri7• 3 months ago

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.

okovooo24• 3 months ago

ooko.pro It's not just a demo, it's a working service and a lot of people use it every day. The presence of registration is both a necessity and a kind of barrier from disinterested users.

wpietri7• 3 months ago

It's also a barrier to interested users. I'm one. I am currently using 3 kanban solutions for different needs. I'm always looking for better solutions, but I'm not going to invest much in something with no docs and one screenshot.

That said, your answer here tells me what I need to know about the product.

kojeovo• 3 months ago

looks like it can be vibe coded in 6 hours tbh

pylotlight2• 3 months ago

I was thinking same thing, very confused on how 'simple kanban 2000' takes 6 years?

dijit• 3 months ago

Simple things are usually hard to make in reality.

firemelt• 3 months ago

why?

ctmnt• 3 months ago

Man I miss Tracker.

okovooo24• 3 months ago

Yes

I spent 6 years building my Kanban as I hated how managers run the boards

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