When does a project management tool become the bottleneck as we scale?

[EmmaET]

We’re hitting a real bottleneck with our current project management software as our team has grown from 10 to 50 people in the last year. The main issue is that our workflows are now too complex for its basic task tracking, and it’s slowing down every department. I’m curious if others have faced this specific scaling problem and how you evaluated when a platform itself becomes the constraint.

[KevinMP]

We grew from about 10 to 50 in a year and the tool started dragging its feet. We ran a two week pilot with two teams using a tightened template and a single decision gate. We tracked how long it took to onboard a new project and move it from kickoff to ready. Onboarding dropped from a day to roughly half a day, but handoffs and approvals still clogged the pipes. It told me the bottleneck wasn’t just the software.

[Gary62]

Could the real problem be how we define stages and who owns each handoff across teams rather than the software itself?

[OliverT]

We swapped vendors once, but training was thin and we kept two parallel ways of working for months, which created more friction than it solved.

[AbigailJ]

I keep wondering if we should strip back to a lean tracker for core teams and move heavy planning to a separate cadence. Maybe the answer isn’t bigger software, but clearer governance.