Sprint planning

Sprint planning for design teams, without the project-management theatre.

A sprint planner for a design team is a tool that shows who's working on what over a fixed period, accounts for time off, and gets out of the way once the plan is on paper. It does not need stand-ups, story points, burndown charts, or a Jira board. All Do is a free, web-based planner built for design and product teams of up to about ten people, with swimlanes per teammate, drag-and-drop tasks, PTO that automatically splits across deadlines, and realtime sync.

What sprint planning actually means for a design team

Engineering's sprint is about commitment: a fixed scope, story points, a burndown chart that goes to zero by Friday. Design's sprint, if it exists, is about something else entirely. The scope is fluid by the third day. The team's job is to discover what the right answer is, and the planner can't pretend that discovery is a backlog of tickets.

What design teams actually need from a planner:

• Visible bandwidth — who has room for what over the next four to eight weeks, on one screen.
• Honest deadlines — when Maya is at a conference, the task she's leading shouldn't quietly slide past its due date as if she's at her desk.
• Almost no ceremony — no point poker, no daily stand-ups dressed up as software features, no opinionated workflow.
• A view your director can read — the planner has to be presentable to non-technical stakeholders without a 20-minute orientation.

Why the standard PM tools don't fit a design team

Jira

Jira is engineering software with a project-management UI bolted on. The taxonomy (epics, stories, sub-tasks, components) has to be learned before anything useful happens. The visual representation of "who's working on what next week" is a board that doesn't sort by person, or a Gantt that costs extra and looks like a 2007 export from MS Project. Designers bounce.

Linear

Better than Jira. Faster, keyboard-driven, opinionated. But Linear is still task-centric — issues with cycles. For a design lead asking "do we have anyone free in week 3?" the answer takes filters. The right answer should be a glance.

Notion / spreadsheets

Notion is the most common landing spot for design teams that gave up on Jira. It's flexible enough to build a swimlane database with formulas for PTO. It's also fragile — one teammate changes the schema and the formulas break, capacity goes blank, no one notices for two weeks. The investment to maintain it is real.

Toggl Plan / Float

The closest fit for what design teams actually want — a swimlane Gantt with people on the Y axis and time on the X. The catch is pricing: both are paid per-seat, and Float specifically targets agencies that already have a head of operations to onboard the team. A small in-house design team mostly wants to try the planner before deciding it's worth a sales call.

What a sprint planner for design has to do (the short list)

• Show every teammate's bandwidth over the chosen period on one screen.
• Reshape automatically when a task moves, gets longer, or runs into PTO.
• Be drag-and-drop for the people who'll use it daily.
• Be free or trivial-to-start for a small team — no card, no demo call.
• Be shareable read-only with stakeholders.
• Not require a project manager to operate.

How All Do solves it

All Do is built as one screen: a Gantt timeline with one swimlane per teammate, switchable between day, week, month, quarter and year. Tasks are drag-and-drop bars on that swimlane. When you drop a task on a different person, it reassigns. When you stretch the end of a bar, the duration changes — and if PTO is in the way, the bar splits so the working days outside the PTO add up correctly.

Concretely:

• Swimlanes — one row per teammate. Add a person in one click.
• PTO that splits tasks — record someone's holiday once and every task that crosses it auto-shortens or extends.
• Capacity bands — a small green / amber / red strip under each week shows over-allocation at a glance, so you spot trouble before it ships.
• Memos — sticky-note bars that float above the swimlanes for cross-team context (releases, brand reviews, milestones).
• Vaults — share the whole board with the team by email, or a read-only link to your director.
• Realtime sync — every edit propagates immediately; no save button.
• Free — sign in with Google, no credit card, no upgrade path nag.

When All Do is the wrong tool

To save you the trial:

• You want the full engineering ceremony — Jira or Linear, not All Do.
• Your team is 30+ people across multiple groups — All Do's per-person swimlane stops scaling around ten.
• You need custom fields, workflows, automations, or invoicing — that's enterprise PM territory.
• You need time tracking — All Do plans capacity, it does not log time.

How to get started in 60 seconds

Open alldo.app, sign in with Google, and you'll land directly inside a sample board with three teammates, six tasks across all three statuses (todo, doing, done), and two PTO ranges. You can drag a task, move a person, delete the sample, create your own — whatever clicks first. There's no tour to dismiss and no setup wizard.

Frequently asked questions