The Startups' Dilemma: Tracking the Past vs. Planning the Future

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For many product managers and engineering leads, time tracking never feels quite right. The tension usually comes from one core issue: most tools are great at documenting the past, but poor at helping you plan the future.

Standalone time trackers built for consultants, like Toggl or Harvest, do a solid job of measuring hours. The problem is that they live outside your real workflow. Jira remains your source of truth, yet developers are forced to jump between tools and log the same information twice. This constant context switching drains motivation and inevitably results in incomplete or unreliable data.

Jira’s built-in time tracking goes to the opposite extreme. It works, but only at a very basic level. You can record hours, but there’s little insight. Knowing that a task took four hours does not tell you whether your next sprint is already overloaded.

Some advanced Jira apps, such as ActivityTimeline, focus heavily on timesheets and billing. They are strong accounting tools, but product teams are not accounting departments. In many cases, these solutions overlook what matters most to delivery teams: understanding future capacity and making better planning decisions. For a product organization, time tracking should shape the roadmap, not just invoices.

A Practical Checklist for Choosing a Time Tool for Product Teams

Modern product teams need a solution that connects historical data with forward-looking planning. Use the following criteria to evaluate whether a tool truly supports agile work.

1. Does it Work with Sprints and Story Points?

Your team plans work in sprints and estimates effort using story points. If your time tracker only understands hours and calendar dates, you are constantly translating between systems, and that friction adds up.

ActivityTimeline is built around Jira’s agile structure. Tasks appear on the timeline automatically based on sprint start and end dates, so there’s no need to manually schedule issues one by one. If it’s part of the sprint, it’s already visible.

It also addresses the long-standing story points versus hours debate. ActivityTimeline can convert story point estimates into hours using a configurable ratio. You can define a global rule, such as one story point equals eight hours, or fine-tune it per project. This lets teams continue estimating in points while managers still plan capacity in hours, aligning expectations with reality.

2. Can You Compare Planned Work to Actual Effort?

A good retrospective goes beyond asking whether the sprint was completed. The real value comes from understanding how accurate your estimates were.

ActivityTimeline includes a dedicated Planned vs. Actual report designed specifically for this purpose. It compares what was originally planned with what actually happened, task by task.

At a glance, you can see:

• Scheduled time, based on original estimates, bookings, and placeholders

• Logged time, reflecting the real hours spent by the team

This comparison quickly reveals where estimates were too optimistic or too conservative. Over time, these insights help teams improve estimation accuracy and make sprint planning more predictable.

3. Can It Help You Plan the Next Sprint?

Basic time tracking tools only look backward. Product managers, however, must plan ahead. Before committing to a sprint, you need a clear view of actual team capacity.

The Planner view in ActivityTimeline is central to this. It displays each team member’s upcoming work alongside non-working time such as vacations, sick leave, and days off. These events are not just visual markers; they automatically reduce available capacity.

This means that when you plan the next sprint, you immediately know who is available and who is not. You avoid assigning critical tasks to someone who will be out of office and reduce the risk of missed sprint goals.

4. Does It Highlight Overload Before Burnout Happens?

Burnout rarely appears suddenly. It builds up when workloads are uneven, and without clear visibility, it’s easy to miss.

ActivityTimeline’s workload indicator provides real-time insight into how work is distributed. It calculates each person’s load based on remaining estimates and scheduled events, then displays it using a simple color system:

• Green indicates balanced workload

• Yellow shows unused capacity

• Red signals overload

This makes bottlenecks obvious. When someone is overloaded, managers can immediately rebalance work by dragging tasks to another team member or shifting them to a different day.

5. Is It Simple for Developers and Insightful for Managers?

A time tracking tool fails if developers find it annoying or managers find it shallow. The right solution must serve both groups without compromise.

ActivityTimeline separates these concerns through dedicated views:

• For developers, the personal workspace shows only their own tasks and schedule. Logging time and tracking progress is straightforward and distraction-free.

• For managers, the Planner and reporting modules provide a broader view of capacity, utilization, and progress across teams and projects.

This balance keeps administrative overhead low for developers while giving leaders the data they need to make informed decisions.

Final Thoughts

It’s time to stop thinking purely in terms of time tracking and start thinking in terms of time management. Logging hours alone does not improve delivery. What matters is how that information shapes future plans.

By choosing a tool that connects sprint planning, capacity visibility, and workload balance, teams move from reactive reporting to proactive execution. ActivityTimeline bridges historical data with future planning, all inside Jira, helping product teams plan smarter, reduce burnout, and deliver more predictably.