Why we're building Elsewhere

Why planning keeps breaking for product teams

We still plan as if our teams are fully available. Roadmaps, quarters and sprints are scoped against an ideal team on paper. In reality, people are on leave, split across projects, working different patterns, or in different time zones.

The tools we use were not built around that reality. So we plan with headcount, not with real capacity.

The pattern I kept seeing

I've worked in product for over 15 years. Startups. Bigger companies. Different industries, different stacks, different ways of working. The pattern was always the same.

We'd walk into sprint planning with the roadmap aligned, the backlog refined, estimates done. Everything looked in order. Then halfway through someone would mention that two developers were off next week. In one sentence, half of what we had just committed to stopped being real.

I saw that play out across many teams and many projects, long before I started building Elsewhere. Different names. Different deadlines. Same result. The plan looked fine. The capacity always told a different story.

Where the current stack breaks

It was never about not having enough tools. The problem was how they all fit together. Or rather, how they didn't.

HR systems know when people are on leave. They store policies. They handle approvals. They live in a different world. Useful for admin. Not very useful when you're planning work.

Tools like Jira, Linear and Notion are great for the work itself. Tickets. Projects. Specs. Docs. They tell you what needs to be done. They don't tell you who is actually around to do it.

So teams try to fill the gap. A spreadsheet here. An exported calendar there. A quick "who is off next week?" message in Slack. It works for a while. Then the team grows. Projects multiply. Things slip through.

We were planning the work and tracking the work. We were not planning the people doing the work.

What we believe about planning

Where Elsewhere fits

Elsewhere exists to fill that missing layer.

It is not an HR system. It does not try to replace Jira, Linear or Notion either. It sits in between. It is where you track who is working, who is off and how work patterns look across the team, with simple leave management built in.

In practice, that comes down to three things:

Instead of rebuilding this picture by hand, you open Elsewhere and it is just there. Availability, plans and risk in one place, ready for the next decision.

The future we are building towards

Roadmaps are not going away. Teams will always need to decide what to work on next and what fits into the quarter. What needs to change is how honest those plans are about capacity.

Teams are more fluid now. People move around. Work patterns change. More teams are part remote, part in person. Headcount on a slide says one thing. The real capacity behind the roadmap often says something else.

Elsewhere is built to sit in that gap. You open it before you lock a roadmap in place. You see who is working, who is off and how much the team can actually take on. Then you shape the plan around that instead of the other way round.

Over time, Elsewhere will go further. Better forecasts. Early warnings when the roadmap and capacity drift apart. Simple signals when you are trying to fit too much in, or when you could safely take on more. Any time you update the roadmap or sit down for planning, you start with a clear picture of what is realistic before you start making promises.

Closing

Imagine planning that feels calm and predictable.

Roadmaps, sprints and quarters line up with what the team can actually deliver. Everyone opens the same view already knowing who is around, what is realistic and where there is room to stretch. People feel more confident that a deadline will be met.

That is the future Elsewhere is working toward. A simple place you open before you plan. It shows who is working, who is off and how much the team can take on over the next days, weeks and months.

Over time, AI will sit in the background and help. It can spot patterns in how plans and capacity shift, flag risks earlier and suggest better ways to spread work across the team, so you are not relying on gut feel alone. Elsewhere might quietly tell you that if you approve two more projects for Q3, you will need another backend developer or push a key feature out by a month.

The result is quieter planning sessions, clearer trade offs and fewer surprises. Roadmaps that match reality. More time to focus on the product, not on rebuilding the same spreadsheet.

That sprint-planning moment where someone casually mentions two people are off next week is exactly what I wanted to fix. That is why we started building Elsewhere.