Eleven Views, Zero Decisions
A Notion database had 11 views, 14 properties, and 3 rollup formulas. It looked like project management. It documented decisions made in Slack.
11 views. 14 properties. 3 rollup formulas. The Notion database tracked tasks by quarter, by owner, by priority, by status, by department, by linked OKR, by estimated effort, and by a custom field someone had named blocker. The team called it project management. Setup had taken two weeks.
The real prioritization happened somewhere else. It happened in Slack. It happened in private DMs. It happened in the head of the senior PM who nominally owned the database. The database documented decisions made elsewhere. When that PM was out sick for a week, nothing in it moved. The database had never been prioritizing anything.
The pattern repeats. Tooling that looks like project management is often project management in costume. Teams build elaborate configurations because the configuration feels like management work. The real work is harder: deciding which projects matter, sequencing them, killing the ones that don't fit. The database becomes a way to look busy while ducking that. It's the same avoidance behind a meeting that never reaches a decision.
Tools can't prioritize. They display priorities a human already set. A database with three priority levels doesn't produce three priorities; it produces buckets a person has to fill. And if that person isn't authoritative, if the team reads the priorities as one PM's preferences instead of commitments, the database becomes a polite suggestion. The work that gets done is the work the team decides matters, whatever the database says.
What fixes tooling complexity is usually a person, not another tool. A team that needs project management needs a project manager with authority to sequence. Swapping Notion for Linear changes nothing. Hiring the manager does, and then handing them real authority rather than a task list. A present PM with a plain Trello board beats an absent PM with an elaborate Notion setup, every time.
Most companies under-invest in project management as a function and over-invest in the tooling. That's backwards. If your project tracking is more intricate than your actual prioritization process, the tool is doing work no tool can do.