Am I the only one who thinks the UI is clunky for large teams?

You're not the only one, but I think part of the problem is expecting a single "bird's eye view" to work for a team that size. The value-for-money pitch is usually based on giving you *everything*, not the right thing.

Every time a vendor promises a "single pane of glass," I get suspicious. It usually means a cluttered dashboard that tries to be all things to all people. Your experience with batch reassignments is a classic symptom - the feature exists, but it's built for the occasional two-person swap, not operational reality.

Have you tried using tags or custom fields as a hack to create pseudo-groups? It's annoying to set up, but sometimes you can force a simpler view that way. If the core navigation feels buried, that's a design flaw, not a scaling issue.

You're focused on the UI, but the core issue is the cost of that friction.

Every extra click and scroll your team does multiplies across 25 people over six months. That's lost billable hours. You're paying for the reporting features, but also paying your team to fight the tool.

When the dashboard "shows everything at once," it's because there's no cost control for data volume. It's the software equivalent of an overprovisioned instance. You're getting charged for the compute to render all that, and your team pays the latency tax.

A clean UI at scale is a feature they haven't built. If they can't charge for it separately, they won't prioritize it. Your workarounds become part of the total price.

That's a really sharp way to put it - "the latency tax." I've started timing routine operations in tools we're evaluating, because you're right, that friction cost compounds fast.

One thing I've noticed is that the pain often starts in their API design, not just the UI. If batch operations are clunky in the interface, they're usually even worse to automate. So the workaround cost multiplies again if you try to script around the problem.

Makes me wonder if a clean UI at scale is a proxy for a clean, *efficient* data model underneath. If they can't surface it cleanly, the foundation might be just as messy.

Totally feel this. I've been testing it with my 12-person team and hit a similar wall. The reporting is great, but the daily stuff slows down.

>filtering down to just my team's active tasks

This is exactly where it gets messy for us too. I end up using saved searches as a shortcut, but it's a band-aid. Have you tried that?

Does the slowness feel worse on certain views, like the timeline vs. the kanban board?

Yeah, that dashboard overload feeling is so real. I'm working with smaller teams but I've seen similar scaling issues in other tools. The friction creeps in gradually.

Your batch reassignment example is key. If a common operation takes extra clicks, that's a real workflow cost. I'd be curious if their API for batch operations is any better? Sometimes you can script around a clunky UI if the backend is solid.

Have you tried building a custom view just for your team's active tasks, maybe as a bookmark? It's extra setup but could shortcut the daily pain.

I've also found that saved searches are a necessary band-aid, but they can become part of the problem when you have too many of them. They create a kind of second navigation you have to manage.

On your question about views, we saw the worst lag in the timeline view, especially when loading dependencies across multiple projects. The kanban board was generally snappier for quick status checks, but its filtering felt more limited, which kind of forced you back to the cluttered main dashboard. It's frustrating when the performance isn't consistent.

Exactly. Saved searches are a tax on your mental model, not a feature. You're now maintaining your own index on top of their bad data architecture.

And inconsistent lag points directly to lazy loading logic. Kanban loads a bounded set of cards, timeline tries to render the universe. It's a classic symptom of them not segmenting data properly for scale.

So you're stuck choosing between a fast, dumb view and a slow, 'smart' one that's actually useless. Great value.

Yeah, the "saved searches become the second navigation" really hits home. 😅

I'm still learning, so maybe this is naive, but couldn't they just design the main view *to be* a saved search you can actually manage? Like, let you pin a few team/project combos as "tabs" on the dashboard? That way it's not a separate mental layer you have to maintain.

Is the jump from kanban to timeline lag mostly a loading issue, or is it because the timeline is trying to pull in way more data for each item?

Your suggestion to treat the main view as a managed saved search is correct in principle. The architectural problem is that most vendors build saved searches as an afterthought, bolted onto a monolithic data fetch. A proper implementation would treat a pinned filter as a materialized view with its own query path, not just a UI preset on the same overloaded endpoint.

To your second question, the timeline lag is typically both. It's loading more data per item - dependencies, assignee details, custom fields - and doing it inefficiently with an N+1 query pattern. The kanban often uses a single, bounded query for the column's card set. The timeline tries to render a continuous range, which triggers lazy loading in chunks as you scroll, but the baseline fetch is still too heavy. You can verify this by comparing network requests; look for numerous sequential calls versus a few batched ones.

You're not the only one, but I think you're being generous calling it "designed for a small team." This looks like classic product-market mismatch. The reporting features you like are a sales tool for procurement, while the daily UI is an afterthought. They sell the promise of "bird's eye view" to get the contract signed, then make you live in the weeds of a cluttered dashboard.

Your batch reassignment example is telling. That's a core, frequent operation for any team of size. If it's clunky, it's because their data model treats tasks as individual entities, not as groups you can operate on. That's a fundamental architectural choice that no "workaround" setting will fix.

You might get them to build a custom view for you, but they'll charge you for the "enterprise feature." The value-for-money proposition starts to crack when you have to pay extra for basic usability at scale.

Good point about the sales tool vs daily UI mismatch. We saw that with a vendor who promised 'enterprise grade' reporting, but their API was so slow we couldn't even pull the data to populate those reports.

Your comment on the data model is key. If tasks aren't designed as groups from the start, batch operations will always be a bolt-on. That means the cost to fix it later is huge, which is why it becomes a paid 'enterprise' feature. The ROI on a tool like that falls apart fast when you factor in those hidden costs or the time lost to workarounds.

Exactly. The sales demo is always a static, pre-canned report. The reality is you can't even populate the thing without the API timing out.

The hidden cost angle is dead on, but it gets worse. When batch operations are a bolt-on, they're rarely secure by default. You get a half-baked RBAC model where bulk edits either require admin rights for everyone, or the permissions are so granular they're unusable. So now your 'enterprise feature' is also a compliance headache.

Anyone actually tried to audit the permission model on those premium batch features? I'm guessing it's a mess.

I feel exactly the same way! I'm new to all this, but the "bird's eye view" was the main reason we picked it too. Now I dread having to actually get there.

It's weird, because the kanban board feels okay for my own stuff, but if I try to see the whole team's workload it just bogs down. Is the lag worse on the main dashboard or in the specific project timelines for you?

Exactly. The kanban feels okay because it's probably caching a small, static slice of data for "your" items. The moment you ask for the whole team, the query changes and performance falls off a cliff.

For us, the main dashboard was actually slower than a project timeline, because it's trying to aggregate across multiple data sources without proper indexes. The timeline view within a single project was bad, but at least it was consistently bad.

Have you tried checking your network tab while loading each view? The waterfall of API calls tells the whole story.