Project management for small software teams that keep their tracker

Monday, 9:30. The lead has Linear open on the shared screen, eleven issues sitting In Progress across four client codebases and forty more queued behind them, and standup is going fine until someone asks whether anyone is free Thursday. The board does not have an answer, because nobody has put the week into it, only the tickets, so the lead just says what they remember and moves on. By Wednesday that answer has been overwritten twice by client email, and nobody wrote the new version down.

A studio week, Monday to Friday

Studios and dev shops run nominal two-week sprints, but day to day the sprint is more of a label than a driver, since the calendar week is what actually decides things: Monday you decide what ships by Friday, and client feedback reshuffles it by Wednesday. That is the shape project management for small software teams actually has to fit into: not a tidy backlog with a fixed cadence but two to four client projects running alongside your own product, and because client work is billable and the product usually is not, the product is what gets planned every Monday and dropped again by Wednesday. Code review is the daily bottleneck, and the bottleneck is usually the one senior who is also on a client call. Staging deploys on every merge, production goes out once or twice a week after sign-off, and most shops try to avoid pushing anything out late on a Friday, since nobody wants to be the one debugging it over the weekend.

The tracker holds what ships and why: acceptance criteria, PR links, CI status, estimates if you bother with them. What it cannot hold is who is on which client Monday to Friday, and whether the milestone on the 15th is still real. That layer lives in the lead's head and scattered across Slack threads, nowhere anyone could actually go look it up. Plan the week, not the backlog makes the wider case.

What project management for a small software team has to answer

ToDoing works off a simple model: each task sits with one person on one day, and the week, not the sprint, is the unit it plans around. The team Overview is the whole shop's week on a single grid, rows by person or rows by project, so you can see that Sam has four days on the retainer and one on the new build, that Priya is clear from Wednesday, and that the product has nobody on it again. Drag a task to another day or another person and it moves, updating for everyone within a second.

My Week is the same data as the Overview, just filtered to one developer's seat, so whatever the lead sets at standup is exactly what each dev sees when they open their own week afterwards, since both views read off the same underlying records instead of syncing separate copies.

Thursday, eaten by a hotfix

A retainer client reports something urgent, and it pulls the exact dev who was booked to start the milestone build. The board files one new issue, while the week grid shows two days gone from a build with a date on it. Anything unfinished rolls forward to today by itself each working day, so the plan keeps matching what actually happened instead of continuing to show Tuesday's tasks as if Tuesday had gone as planned. Anything you have not scheduled yet just sits in the Someday column until you give it an actual day.

Leave sits on the same grid, on the Pro plan, and it covers half days, balances, and public holidays by country and by region, with a wall chart for the whole team. Each person has a named approver, and approval is one step with no chain behind it. You see the Friday three people are booked off before you promise a client a Friday release. Or, if the shop already keeps leave somewhere else, ToDoing mirrors that calendar instead.

Dates the client will hold you to

Milestones sit on the same calendar as tasks and carry the project colour everywhere, so a UAT window starting the 8th, a launch on the 15th and a warranty period running to month end all show up as flags on the same grid. When the week in front of a milestone fills with somebody else's urgent work, the flag and the crowding sit in the same view, so you can see the slip taking shape days before the deadline arrives, instead of finding out when the client emails to ask. Each project also keeps its own timeline and a workplan with sections, as a list or a board, for the shape of the build itself.

Moving a flag only moves that one flag. ToDoing does not model task dependencies, so there is no chain of other dates that shifts automatically when you drag it.

The estimate someone wrote to win the deal

The SOW said 6 to 8 weeks. That number was written two months ago, before any of the actual work started, by whoever needed to win the bid rather than measure it precisely, and this week's plan is still judged against it. On the Enterprise plan, estimation gives you a median and a p80 per task type from your own completed history, so the next fixed bid comes off measured evidence, and an accuracy view shows where the estimates and the real effort diverge. You can print a quote from it for the client.

Tracking is the confirm-the-plan kind: tick a task done and it logs the time you planned, with one tap to adjust. You set the unit per project, day or hour, and a burn bar tracks it against the budget. Reports break down by person and by type, rates stay admin-only, and the lot exports to CSV. Since the whole thing runs off the plan you already made, nobody has to start a timer or sit down and fill in a timesheet.

What ToDoing will not do for your studio

It will not replace GitHub Issues, Linear or Jira, because replacing them was never the goal. There is no git integration, no issue sync, no pipeline status and no burndown chart anywhere in it, so your tracker keeps doing the job it already does.

The money side stays where it is too. ToDoing does not invoice, and it does not keep the kind of audit-grade timesheet trail you would need to defend an invoice if a client pushed back on one. It has nothing to say about SOWs, client portals or the on-call rota either. Rates sit on the project so a burn bar can cost the work, but nothing bills off them, so Harvest, Toggl and your accounting tool are still what handle the actual invoicing. There are no native apps either, since ToDoing runs in the browser and installs to your home screen, and between the two, planning the week and the people is as far as its scope goes.

Four questions studios ask

What is the best project management tool for a small software team?

The honest answer is two tools rather than one: a tracker for the work itself, issue by issue, and a planner for the week and the people. Tools that claim both usually do the second one badly, because a backlog and a calendar want different shapes. Pick the tracker your engineers will tolerate, then add something thin on top for the week itself, the part the tracker was never built to show you.

Is ToDoing good for a small software studio that already uses Linear?

Yes, and that is the best case for it, because Linear stays the system of record for tickets. ToDoing answers what Linear was never built to answer: who is on what this week, and whose days are still empty. Teams of 3 to 15 are the size it was designed around.

Can ToDoing replace our project management tool?

If that tool is Trello or a Notion board holding a loose backlog, probably. If it is Jira carrying workflows and acceptance criteria on every issue, no, and you should keep it. Worth reading next to the Asana, ClickUp and Notion comparisons, or Float and Resource Guru if scheduling is the real problem.

What does ToDoing cost for a five person agency?

At the time of writing, July 2026, Pro is $2 per person per month, or $20 per person per year, so five people is $10 a month or $100 a year. Enterprise is $6 per person per month, or $60 per person per year, and it adds estimation and tracking. Three people and three projects are free, and the free plan never asks for a card, and a 14-day trial is there too if you want to try Enterprise features before paying for them.

Your tracker will keep being the accurate record of the tickets and the code, and ToDoing was never trying to replace that. What it holds instead is the layer the tracker never touches: who actually has room this week and who is already stretched thin, the same thing the lead was guessing at back at Monday's standup.

ToDoing also works for accounting firms, architects, consulting firms, creative agencies, engineering consultancies, event planners, interior design studios, law firms, pr agencies, recruitment agencies, video production.