Six months with one project tool: what worked and what we quietly ditched

During last year, our team of four people tried out different project management tools. From Trello to Notion, from a spreadsheet to Notion again. Each time it seemed like the right step forward for at least two weeks.

The solution came through a boring principle: we used Linear for engineering-related work and kept all other stuff, such as meeting notes and customer feedback, in one common Notion page. No overlap was tolerated. If a task was placed in Linear, no one copied it elsewhere.

After six months, the surprise came from what we have stopped using: custom fields, status automation, and weekly dashboard that no one looked at. We had only three statuses: todo, doing, done. Cycle times didn’t worsen, and stand-ups became shorter.

Our lesson was that the tool is less important than having agreement about where each type of data should reside. Most of the confusion we had was due to this lack of agreement rather than missing functionality.

For small teams that have been through this cycle: what is the one rule that put an end to the constant tool hopping? And has anyone switched from the simpler approach to a more complex one and been happy about it?