Discovery is work, so give it hours
Delivery has a tracker. Discovery has a document and a hope.
What the week actually looks like
Five customer interviews to run and synthesise, a spec that has been ninety percent done for two weeks, and a roadmap conversation on Thursday that will invalidate part of it. The engineering work is tracked precisely. Everything before the engineering work is tracked nowhere.
Where it goes wrong, and what answers it
The tracker only starts once the thinking is finished
Interviews, synthesis, writing the spec, the three conversations that change it. None of it is a ticket, all of it is the week.
In UnaTask: Put the discovery work on the same calendar as everything else. It is the only way it gets counted.
Interviews eat more than the hour they are booked for
A thirty minute call is thirty minutes of call and forty of writing it up, and only the first half is ever on a calendar.
In UnaTask: A notetaker handles the write up and produces the tasks, so the follow up is not a second unscheduled hour.
The spec is blocked on a decision nobody scheduled
It is waiting on a person, and waiting is invisible in every tool that shows status.
In UnaTask: Dependencies on a timeline, where waiting on somebody is a visible shape rather than a stalled card.
Half your collaborators are not in the engineering tool
Design, research, marketing and support all shape the product and none of them live in the tracker.
In UnaTask: One calendar everybody can read, that still links to the pull requests when the build starts.
What product teams usually weigh this against
Linear
It is the best delivery tracker there is and your engineers will not want to leave it, correctly.
It begins where discovery ends, and it has no calendar, so the half of product work that is not tickets is invisible in it.
Linear alternative for product teams
Jira
At scale it is the system of record, and the reporting is why it is bought.
It answers what shipped, never what a researcher’s Tuesday contains, and it needs administering.
Jira alternative for product teams
Notion
Specs, research notes and the roadmap in one place, and the writing is genuinely excellent.
The roadmap is a page. It has no hours in it and it never says that the quarter is already full.
Notion alternative for product teams
ClickUp
It can hold discovery and delivery in one place with the right custom fields, which is a real advantage.
Getting there is a configuration project, and the result still plans in dates rather than hours.
ClickUp alternative for product teams
Common questions
Can it sit alongside our tracker?
Yes. It imports GitHub Issues and links pull requests, so the build stays where it is and the planning happens here.
Does it do roadmaps?
It has a timeline with dependencies across projects. It is not a portfolio product for reporting up several levels, and if that is what you need we would say so.
Can research participants book time with us?
Yes, through a booking link that only offers hours you are willing to give.