I fooled around with a few team task management apps in the past week, but before even going there I want to lay out what I think is the minimal viable product in this space. If a tool does not have these features — even if it has other neat bells and whistles — it just won’t make my cut.

I think about task management tools along two axes: the task model and the team model.

Let’s start with the task model, with features in no particular order:

• Intuitive presentation of tasks. I’ve become used to the three-pane task model found on Asana and many other tools, but I can easily shift to Kanban-type displays and folder hierarchies. But please have something that’s easy to use.
• End date. I have to be able to indicate a deadline.
• Assignment. Optional assignment to responsible individual.
• Subtasks. Really hard to live without once you’ve used them.
• Recurring tasks. Once you use them, you can’t live without them.
• Comment thread. In a shared context, you need a place to talk about the tasks. A single note or description field is not adequate.
• Contexts. Some metaphor to break work activities into contexts: spaces, projects, whatever.
• Filtering. Being able to filter tasks based on various sorts of key metadata: dates, status, attachments.
• Attachments. Associating files and URLs with tasks, preferably with Dropbox, Box, Evernote, and Google Drive connection.
• Archival of tasks. I want to get them off my screen but not delete them.

And the team model, again in no particular order:

• Context access. Need to be able to limit team access at the context level.
• Task-level sharing. I have found it invaluable to be able to assign a single tasks in a context to a guest, which is a user that does not have general access to the context. I refer to this as “tooing.”
• Email notifications. Not everyone goes to the tool every day, and so they need to be notified.
• Filtering tasks. Being able to see all tasked assigned to a particular user.
• Public, private, and secret contexts and tasks. Fine-grained visibility and access controls.

So what were the new tools that aroused this flare-up of the MVP issues?

Postpone

Postpone is a team task management app based around the concept of a zero task list. However, it allows you to cheat in a productive way by postponing tasks until a specific time, at which time the postponed task moves back on your task list.

All well and good. And some of the features seem cool, like using a Twitter-style mention (@stowe) in the task title to assign it to someone. However, the @mention capability is more generally these days being used in the market to alert people to the task, and it’s quicker to use an autocompletion approach to this. Otherwise, Postpone’s task’s have no attributes — no deadline, no comment thread, no subtasks — which makes the tool seem like a prototype, not a real app.

Sandglaz

I want to like Sandglaz, because it has some really innovative features. For example, it supports hashtags in titles, which allows for fast filtering:

And the clever arrangement it has for its grid display is pretty cool, although somewhat limited by preset notions. And in some ways the tool’s task model is advanced — like supporting recurring tasks — but in others it is painful. No archiving tasks, only deletion? I checked its help section, and it has rejected the idea of archiving tasks. No subtasks, no tooing, no comment threads, no no no.

Takeaways

My recommendation to anyone shopping around is to quickly test a prospective tool against these lists. If the tool fails, use a more well-established tool. The attraction of one or more killer features — like Sandglaz’s tags or Postpone’s postpone feature — can add real value, but only after the basics are filled in.