Product management for solo side projects?

Are you making so much progress on your side project that you need additional tools to help keep track of everything, or are you looking for tools instead of doing work?

I use the Roadmap page template in Notion. I basically use it like Trello. I create issues for each idea I have and occasionally prioritize them into the next few things to do.

Best I could do, learn drawing with pencil, buy good tablet, and draw sketches, and write infinite todo with images connected.

But May be just enough, to buy pencil and draw at some quiet place (best if you have large river or sea coast nearby, or possible to use some quiet park), and than just attach photos.

Pencils and paper are very reliable, and even don't need recharge, just avoid wet.

You know, ideas are not worth too much, when you have not resources (mostly money), to just hire some freelancer and implement them.

What really matter, how you good on create OKRs (for example, Measure What Matters by John Doerr), and measure them, and make decisions on them.

Sure, to make good OKR, you also need to do few iterations "create idea for OKR -> try OKR from idea -> return to begin", but as you could see, this includes not easy part of TRY, on which you will spend much more time than on "create idea for OKR", believe me.

I use my neovim plugin note.nvim[1] to brainstorm and plan features as well as track day-to-day stuff. It's one of the few projects of mine that I've spent more time using than building - by a good amount.

I have a top level ~/notes/projects/foo. When the project is small I just keep everything in a single file. Each feature gets its own item hierarchy and I use folds to manage which 'scope' I'm seeing. After I decide on what (not) to work on, I can mark that node as "won't do" or "pending". When I pick up a task for the day I can deep-link to where I initially brainstormed the feature.

[1]https://github.com/gsuuon/note.nvim

I built a really amazing test automation capability for my side project. So when I have near term ideas I write the tests first. Of course those tests will fail since the feature is absent, but it sets the priority of effort with a dedicated end state already defined.

On a solo project, I write a journal, and start finding patterns in it. For e.g. if some parts are front-end related. i add some emoji, or colored text for this and it becomes a "topic". Over time I add Lists for TODO and TODO-later, where I move these items between. The simple act of having colors and graphics helps me keep a high level overview.

For teams, I am experimenting with Github issues. I have added labels for topics and urgency. I chose github, because (i) as a developer I spend a lot of my time there. (ii) I find its editor "quiet". google docs etc take time to load, I want a place to quickly jot down an idea to get it out of my head (iii) It keeps the project management alongside the code.

Depending on the scale of your project, two excellent free options that I've used for smaller projects are:

* Trello - simple and effective for smaller projects

* Linear.app - more powerful and beautiful UX with similar capabilities to Jira (free for up to 250 issues)

A Readme.md file in the repository, which resides next to all the other abandoned side projects.

One level-up (hypothetically, never made it this far) would be Google Sheets to track features broken down stories/tasks, estimated effort, estimated value etc. in a single table.

At work we're using Jira and DevOps, and even there I prefer to keep track of things in a single Excel, despite the manual sync needed..

I have a simple project journal/log text file I add to at the end each time I work on the project. This allows me to easily get back to the context next time I decide to move the project further.

I usually keep a couple of ideas to do next, outlined at the end.

If I forget what I was doing previously or am stuck on ideas on what to do next, then I just skim back up the file.

This works for me, and it’s dead simple.

I like redmine for this. tried others but stuck with redmine due to many features +enhanced wiki via plugin added (self hosted) draw.io/diagrams.net via plugin source code repos smartphone apps exist, allthough I haven't found one that does everything I want from it, so use multiple different ones

A notebook. Comments in code. If I get far enough Trello ToDo/Doing/Done style kanban board.

I use those for architecture thoughts, process flow thoughts, db schema, product features etc..

I wouldn’t pay a cent for a product mgmt tool until I have an actual working product and users. Even then it’s not high on my list..

Tried Notion, Todoist, Trello, Obsidian with many plugins, plain-text files, hand-written notebook, Things 3 and more.

Ended up at using Lunatask for task tracking and Bear as my wiki. I mostly do work on Mac, to separate gaming life from hobbies, so it works well for me. And is stupid simple.

Github issues/projects or just check a text file into the repo.

I just put issues on a GitHub repo then solve them when I feel like.

I like Pivotal Tracker for solo projects. It is free for up to 5 collaborators, too. PivotalTracker.com

I think JetBrains Space is pretty good for everything.

you should use a single document or physical piece of paper. go build your product

todo.md

And to avoid accountability:

    echo 'todo.md' >> .gitignore

org mode in emacs