Board, timeline, or spreadsheet? what does your team actually plan in?

I keep hearing two opposite opinions from teams:

"Gantt charts are outdated. Nobody plans six months ahead anymore. We just work from a board."

and

"We tried going board-only, and six weeks later nobody could say when anything would be done."

Both sound right to me, and that's what makes it interesting.

My theory is that the chart was never the problem. The problem was how charts were kept up to date. Someone built a beautiful timeline at kickoff, it was accurate for about a week, and after that nobody trusted it. Updating it meant dragging bars around by hand, so nobody did, and the chart quietly turned into a poster on the wall.

Boards took over because they're easy to keep current: move a card, done. But a board can't tell you that a task three weeks from now is going to be late because something today slipped. It doesn't know tasks depend on each other.

So I'm curious where people have actually ended up:

• Board only? How do you answer "when will it ship?"

• Timeline or Gantt? Who keeps it updated, and does the team actually look at it?

• Both? Is it a pain keeping them in sync?

• Something else entirely? Spreadsheets, Notion docs, gut feeling and a lot of Slack?

For context, we're building KaamGrid around the idea that a timeline only stays useful if it updates itself. Link tasks once, and when one slips, everything after it moves. The team works from a board or list, and the same plan shows as a timeline for whoever needs dates. But I'd honestly like to know whether that matches how people work or whether I'm solving a 2015 problem.

👉 What does your team use to answer "when will this be done?", and do you trust the answer?