I've spent the last decade drowning in project management tools.
Jira. Linear. Asana. Notion. ClickUp. Monday. I tried them all. Built systems in them. Customized them. Fought with them.
And I realized something: the problem wasn't that these tools lacked features. They lacked opinions.
They gave you an empty box and said "figure it out." Infinite flexibility sounds great until you're three months in, still tweaking your workflow, and nobody on the team knows what the hell is going on.
So when I started building Bonjour, I made a different choice. I started with philosophy first.
The Three Things I Actually Believe
Before I wrote a single line of code, I sat down and asked myself: what do I actually believe about how small teams work?
Not what Agile says. Not what the productivity gurus preach. What have I learned from actually shipping products with small teams?
Three beliefs emerged:
1. Work comes in three flavors: now, soon, and later
Not everything is urgent. Not everything needs to be on your radar today.
When I looked at how I actually worked, I realized I was constantly sorting work into three mental buckets:
Today - The handful of things that genuinely matter right now. The work that moves us forward this week.
Soon - Important stuff that's coming, but not urgent. Things I'm thinking about, planning, or will tackle when the time is right.
Later - The ideas, maybes, and somedays. Things I don't want to forget, but don't need to stress about yet.
Every tool I tried gave me one infinite list. And infinite lists just grow forever. They create anxiety, not clarity.
I wanted three finite buckets. Constrained. Clear. Manageable.
2. Context matters more than tasks
Tasks are easy to write. "Fix the login bug." "Design the onboarding." "Update pricing."
But tasks without context are useless. Three months from now, when someone asks "why did we build it this way?" you're screwed. The decision is buried in a Slack thread. Or a meeting nobody documented. Or it just lives in someone's head.
I've lost count of how many times I've asked "why did we decide this?" and gotten blank stares.
Every piece of work needs to exist in a story. Not a Jira epic. A literal story. A shared timeline where decisions, discussions, updates, and tasks all live together.
Where context isn't scattered. Where you can see not just what got done, but why.
3. Teams need shared visibility without constant meetings
I'm so tired of meetings.
Daily standups where everyone recites what they did yesterday. Status meetings where we update a board we could have updated async. Planning sessions that drag on for two hours.
But complete async chaos is just as bad. When there's no structure, nobody knows what anyone else is doing. Work gets duplicated. Priorities diverge. People feel disconnected.
I wanted something in between. A shared feed where everyone sees what's happening, but you work on your own time.
No meeting pressure. No inbox anxiety. Just: here's what happened. Here's what's next. Here's why it matters.
Turning Beliefs Into Features
Once I had these three beliefs locked in, the features started to make sense.
The three buckets (Today, Soon, Later) weren't just organization. They were a stance: work should feel finite, not infinite. You should see what matters without drowning in backlog anxiety.
The feed became our answer to context. Every update, every decision, every thought lives in a shared stream. You see what's happening. You understand why. You stay in sync without meetings.
Notes alongside tasks because work isn't just checking boxes. It's thinking, deciding, discussing. Notes capture all of that, right where the work lives.
History that tells a story emerged naturally from the feed. Because when everything lives in one timeline, you don't just have a record of what got done. You have the story of your work.
The Feature I Almost Added (And Didn't)
Early on, I debated: should Bonjour have subtasks?
Every PM tool has subtasks. It felt like table stakes. People would expect it.
But subtasks violated my philosophy. They encourage breaking work down into smaller and smaller pieces. More nesting. More complexity. More mental overhead.
If something's too big to be a task, it's a project. Handle it differently. Don't just nest it infinitely.
I didn't add subtasks. And honestly, it was one of the best decisions I made.
Philosophy as a Filter
Having clear beliefs gave me a filter for every feature request:
"Should we add custom fields?" → No. Infinite flexibility leads to infinite complexity.
"Should we add story points?" → No. We're not optimizing for metrics. We're optimizing for clarity.
"Should we add a Gantt chart?" → Hell no. That's the opposite of what we're trying to do.
Every feature idea got run through my core beliefs. If it aligned, I considered it. If it violated my philosophy, I said no, even if competitors had it.
The Risk of Being Opinionated
Here's the uncomfortable part: not everyone will agree with my philosophy.
Some teams need custom fields. Some teams love story points. Some teams want infinite nesting and complex workflows.
And that's fine. Bonjour isn't for them.
I'm not trying to build a tool for everyone. I'm building a tool for teams like mine. Small teams drowning in complexity, craving simplicity, tired of tools that feel like work.
If you want infinite flexibility, use Notion. If you want enterprise grade workflows, use Jira. If you want opinionated simplicity that just works, try Bonjour.
What We Ended Up With
From those three core beliefs, Bonjour emerged:
- Three buckets (Today, Soon, Later) instead of endless lists
- A shared feed where all context lives together
- Notes and tasks side by side because work is thinking, not just doing
- History that tells your story not just a changelog
- AI that understands your context because it lives in the feed with you
Every feature traces back to philosophy. And that philosophy came from a decade of frustration with tools that had no point of view.
Does It Actually Work?
I've been using Bonjour to build Bonjour for the past year.
And honestly? It's the first PM tool I've used that doesn't feel like work.
I open it in the morning. I see what matters today. I see what the team is working on. I see the context of why we're doing what we're doing.
I don't spend time grooming backlogs. I don't have status meetings. I don't lose context in scattered tools.
I just work. And that's exactly what I wanted.
If that sounds good to you, give Bonjour a try. It might not be for everyone. But for teams like us, it just might be exactly what you need.