Ask HN: Why do all project management tools suck?

The short answer is probably because it's a people thing. Or that people don't use them as they're intended. Or you don't understand agile (side note - the agile way is the stupidest thing invented since waterfall).

But, entertain me for a second. The tools can do a better job. It doesn't matter the tool - JIRA, Clubhouse, Linear, etc - they're all the same with different UIs.

Here are my 3 pet peeves and biggest frustrations that no tool has yet solved. What are yours?

1. Planning is hard. These tools throw a big backlog at you and grooming/planning is incredibly frustrating. They don't give me a good look into my team, their availabilities, or their capacity. It is also really hard to plan and estimate a sprint when you're just staring at a long list of tasks that are prioritized low/medium/high.

2. Once a sprint gets going, there are no guardrails, and no easy way to assess the "health of a sprint". Consider JIRA's Active Sprint view. If you have 6 people on your team, that's a freaking overwhelming board. You really have to hate your life to work with it. It takes way too many gymnastics to assess how we're doing, what's falling behind, and how much more we can actually get done. I'm surprised none of them have a "resource view". I have to filter person by person to get a better look into a team member's tasks.

3. No way for higher ups to get an insight into what's shipping and when. I've grown tired of answering the same question a hundred times - "when is X going to be ready?".

Lastly, as a developer or team member, it sucks to deal with a complex interface just to move your task from ToDo => In Progress.

Curious what others think.