“Shouldn’t we have kanban and Gantt charts, like Trello or Asana or Motion?” We got asked that twice in the same week, and the honest answer the first time was: not really, not everywhere. Plan already had something kanban-shaped (a real To Do / In Progress / Blocked / Done board), but nothing else in the module had any visual layer at all — Task was a plain checklist, Project was a card list with progress written out as “3 of 5 tasks done” instead of shown.
So we went through every app in the module and asked what view actually fits its own data, instead of bolting the same three widgets onto everything regardless of fit. Task’s due dates got a real calendar — day, week, month, year — built on the exact same grid Calendar itself uses, so it’s not a second calendar implementation living somewhere else in the codebase. Plan sessions got an Eisenhower 2x2 matrix for free: it turns out Plan already classifies every item by urgency and importance for every one of its seven planning methodologies, not just the sessions someone explicitly calls “Eisenhower Matrix” — the matrix view just had to ask for data that was already there. Project got an actual progress bar tied to how many of its linked tasks are really done, plus a Gantt-style timeline for any project with a real start and target date, milestones marked along it as diamonds you can click through to open. Facilitator and Obra — the two bespoke Finobra workflows in the module — got timelines too, since a session’s actual path from created to approved to published or launched is genuine elapsed time, not something we had to invent.
Kanban got a second look after that first pass, and the original “that’s a different UI architecture” answer turned out to be wrong — the same bridge that already let PIM’s output area run inline JavaScript for everything else handles native drag-and-drop just fine. Now Plan’s board and Project’s board are both actually draggable: pick up a card, drop it in a new column, and that item’s status changes immediately — no need to type a sentence and wait for the AI to parse it.
What we didn’t build is as deliberate as what we did. Task items and individual Plan items never get a Gantt bar, because neither one ever has a real span — just a single due date, no start and end to draw a bar between. A calendar or the matrix already shows that better than a zero-width Gantt bar pretending to be one would. The goal was never “match the competitor’s feature list item for item” — it’s giving each app the view its own data actually earns, and skipping the ones that don’t.