Why Your Manager's Favorite Tool Hates Your Focus

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Your manager loves the planning tool. Color-coded timelines, swimlane diagrams, progress percentages, and exportable PDFs for the Monday slide deck. The tool sells itself on visibility.

You hate it. Every task requires six fields. Every update pings three people. Every status change triggers a notification chain that interrupts your actual work. The tool wasn’t built for you.

Built for Watchers, Not Workers

Enterprise planning software follows the money. Procurement decisions happen at the manager level, so features cater to manager needs: dashboards, reports, audit trails, permission hierarchies.

The people doing the work get whatever UX is left over.

This creates a fundamental tension. The tool’s job is to make work visible to observers. Your job is to finish work. These goals conflict more than vendors admit.

Every field you fill in serves reporting, not execution. Every mandatory status update interrupts your flow to feed a dashboard you’ll never check. The tool treats your attention as a resource to be harvested, not protected.

The Hidden Tax on Makers

I’ve watched developers spend 20% of their week maintaining tools instead of shipping code. Not writing documentation - that’s useful. Maintaining the artifact layer: updating tickets, logging time, moving cards, attending syncs to explain what the cards already show.

This overhead compounds. Interruptions don’t just cost the minutes spent on them. They cost the 23 minutes it takes to recover focus. A developer who gets pinged six times a day loses hours to context switching before counting the pings themselves.

Tools built for oversight extract this tax constantly. They’re designed to pull information from makers and push it to watchers. The makers pay; the watchers benefit.

What Maker-First Tools Look Like

Kanman takes the opposite approach. There’s nothing to export for a slide deck because the work itself is the status update. No dashboards, no charts, no progress percentages.

You see your projects. You drag them to reprioritize. You mark tasks done. That’s it.

This isn’t a limitation - it’s a design choice. Features that only help observers don’t ship. Every interaction asks one question: does this help someone finish work?

The result is a tool that stays silent until you need it. No notifications unless you want them. No gamification pressuring you to perform. No surveillance features tracking your activity.

When Oversight Tools Make Sense

Before going further - enterprise planning tools aren’t inherently broken.

A 500-person engineering org with distributed teams across time zones, multiple product lines, and complex dependencies genuinely needs coordination infrastructure. At that scale, knowing who’s working on what prevents duplicate effort, unblocks dependencies, and keeps projects from colliding.

The problem isn’t the tools. It’s applying enterprise-scale solutions to problems that don’t require them.

Many organizations buy themselves time for scale by adopting heavyweight processes early. They assume growth will justify the overhead. Instead, they end up with process landscapes that become burdens - tracking rituals that consume more energy than they save.

As many processes as needed. As few as possible. All the time.

The Real Cost of “Visibility”

Most visibility features go far beyond coordination. They create accountability theater - proof that people are busy, not proof that they’re effective.

A burndown chart showing velocity doesn’t tell you if the team is building the right thing. A time-logged ticket doesn’t reveal whether the estimate was reasonable. A status field marked “in progress” for three weeks might mean the work is hard, or it might mean the person is blocked and afraid to say so.

Real coordination comes from conversation, not dashboards. The dashboard just gives managers something to screenshot.

Choosing Tools That Side With You

Before adopting any work tool, ask who it was designed for. Look at the pricing page. Look at the feature list. Look at the onboarding flow.

Does it start with your work, or with administrative setup? Does it celebrate what you shipped, or what you logged? Does it stay quiet, or does it nag?

Tools that respect your focus share common traits: minimal surfaces, optional notifications, no gamification, no surveillance. They treat you as the expert on your own work.

Your manager’s favorite tool might be great for managers. That doesn’t make it great for you.

Author

Marco Kerwitz

Founder of kanman.de