A while back, I kept coming back to a simple question:
Why is it easier to track a pizza than a project?
Domino’s solved a surprisingly common communication problem years ago. When you order a pizza, you do not need access to the kitchen. You do not need to know who is stretching the dough, which oven it is in, or what internal system the restaurant uses to manage orders.
You just want to know where things stand.
Order received.
Preparing.
Baking.
Quality check.
Out for delivery.
That basic experience became the inspiration for a project I built called Is It Done Yet?
The idea was simple: take the clarity of a pizza tracker and apply it to almost anything.
A website redesign. A home renovation. A client project. A repair. A grant application. A custom order. A marketing campaign. A school project. A photography job. A one-off piece of work that somebody else is waiting to see finished.
If it moves through stages, it can probably be tracked.
The Problem Wasn’t Project Management
There are already plenty of good project-management platforms.
Monday, Asana, ClickUp, Trello, Jira, Basecamp, and others are built to help teams actually manage work. They are useful for assigning tasks, coordinating people, storing documents, tracking dependencies, leaving comments, and running complicated projects.
I was not interested in rebuilding any of that.
The problem I wanted to solve happens on the other side of the project.
The client who does not use Monday.
The customer waiting for a repair.
The family member wondering when something will be finished.
The stakeholder who does not need access to your internal workflow.
The person who keeps emailing:
“Any update?”
Most of those people do not want another account. They do not want another dashboard. They do not want to learn how your project-management software works.
They just want a clear answer.
What is done?
What is happening now?
What comes next?
That Became the Product
I built Is It Done Yet? as a simple visual project tracker.
You create a project, define the milestones yourself, and move it through those milestones as the work progresses.
For example, a website project might look like:
Project Received → Planning → Design → Development → Review → Launch
A contractor might use:
Estimate Approved → Materials Ordered → Scheduled → Work Underway → Inspection → Complete
A photographer could use:
Event Complete → Photos Imported → Editing → Final Review → Gallery Ready
The software does not decide what your process looks like.
You do.
That is important because the entire point is for the tool to work across different types of projects without forcing them into a predefined workflow.
Any Project, Any Timeline, Anyone
That phrase became the simplest way to describe what I wanted the tool to do.
Any project. Any timeline. Anyone.
A project can last three days or six months.
It can have four milestones or twenty.
It can be professional or personal.
The person viewing the tracker does not need an account.
They do not have to understand how the work is being managed behind the scenes.
They see something much simpler:
✓ Done
● Current
○ Next
That is the entire idea.
The Viewer Experience Comes First
One of the most important decisions I made was separating the experience of the person managing the tracker from the person viewing it.
The project owner needs controls.
The viewer does not.
Inside the management side, a user can create and reorder milestones, add descriptions, choose layouts, customize colors, add dates, manage sharing, and update progress.
The public-facing tracker strips all of that away.
The viewer gets the status.
That distinction is what makes the tool useful alongside something like Monday rather than competing directly with it.
A team could manage every internal detail of a project inside Monday and still use Is It Done Yet? as the simple public-facing status page for a client.
Built for One-Off Projects Too
There is another group I had in mind while building it: people who do not really use formal project-management software at all.
Not every project needs a workspace.
Sometimes you are just waiting for somebody to finish something.
Maybe a contractor is rebuilding your deck.
Maybe a freelancer is designing a logo.
Maybe someone is repairing a piece of equipment.
Maybe a volunteer group is organizing an event.
Maybe you are coordinating something within your family.
Setting up a full Monday board for that can be more effort than the project deserves.
A simple five-stage tracker may be enough.
That is where this tool makes the most sense.
Sharing Had to Be Simple
Once a tracker exists, it needs to be easy to put in front of somebody.
I built several ways to do that.
A tracker can be shared through a normal web link.
It can be public, unlisted, private, or password protected.
It can be embedded directly into another website.
It can be shared with a QR code.
It can also be exported as an image when a static snapshot makes more sense.
The live versions update as the project moves forward, so the owner changes the status in one place and the people viewing it see the latest information.
The goal is to reduce the need for manual status updates, not create another place that has to be maintained separately.
The Interface Grew, but the Idea Stayed Small
As I built the project, more functionality became necessary.
There are now multiple tracker layouts, responsive previews, custom themes, project dashboards, account management, realtime updates, password protection, embeddable versions, QR codes, exports, archive controls, and first-time-user tutorials.
Technically, it became a much more substantial application than the original idea suggested.
But I have tried to keep the product itself centered on one small question:
Can somebody look at this and immediately understand where the project stands?
That remains the test for every feature.
What I Learned Building It
One lesson from this project is that simple interfaces can require a surprising amount of complexity underneath them.
The person viewing the tracker should not have to think about authentication, database permissions, realtime updates, responsive layouts, access controls, or embed behavior.
Those things still have to work.
They just should not become the viewer’s problem.
I also came away with a stronger appreciation for designing around the actual information somebody needs rather than automatically giving them access to the system that contains that information.
Someone asking for a project update usually does not need your entire project-management environment.
They need an answer.
Is It Done Yet?
That is where the name came from.
It is the question everyone eventually asks.
Instead of answering it repeatedly through email, text messages, meetings, or another account invite, I wanted to make the answer visible.
Is It Done Yet? is free to use, and I built it as an experiment in making project communication simpler.
You can try it here: