31 Days, 31 Products: Trello

Day 19: Trello

This post is part of a larger series where for 31 days I’m posting a story about a particular product or service I’ve come to enjoy.

Trello is a product I’ve been using for years. It’s an online software version of a Kanban board. Google explains:

A Kanban board is a work and workflow visualization tool that enables you to optimize the flow of your work. Physical Kanban boards, like the one pictured below, typically use sticky notes on a whiteboard to communicate status, progress, and issues.

Kanban boards are a great way to organize tasks that have to travel through a status flow. While a physical version of the board has its own merits in my work and collaborations it has been much more important to have these boards online, enter Trello.

You can start using Trello with very simple boards like this:

As you become more familar with the app you can then add media to cards, create checklists, add summaries, assign owners, and so on.

The first time I remember jumping in and really getting a lot out of Trello was back in 2010 when I was part of a startup. We used Trello to manage almost everything; sprints towards our product work, consulting efforts and even our sales pipeline. It worked great.

In more recent time I’ve seen the CocoaLove team use Trello. They tracked marketing efforts, speaker proposals, sales, sponsors and more. Having it all out on a virtual board, shared with the team and updated in real time — it gave a visual sense of completion and progress that was much appreciated.

For more info check out this walkthrough video or Trello’s own Getting Started Guide. Experimenting with Trello is extremely low risk. They have free accounts that let’s you really get to the know the product and then price tiers if you want to start some more sophisticated collaboration or integration. Trello is highly recommended.