Inside Trello’s reinvention as a personal tasks app

Riddle me this: What exactly is Trello?

Despite counting myself as a heavy-duty power user of the product for well over a decade now, it’s a question I’ve long struggled to answer. Technically, Trello has always seemed to fall into that group of apps folks like to frame as “project management tools”—products like Asana, ClickUp, and Notion that do a pinch of everything and are as much note makers, info savers, and life managers as they are project organizers.

But Trello in particular has always been a bit of a chameleon. Personally, I’ve used it for everything from storing story ideas to mapping out my weekly newsletters and even organizing my home workouts. Part of what makes the app so powerful is its versatility. With a flexible series of boards, columns, and cards acting as its core interface, you can shape it into serving practically any purpose imaginable for yourself or your company.

It seems, though, that that very same versatility may have morphed into a challenge for the product. This week, Atlassian—the business-tech behemoth that bought Trello for $425 million in 2017 and brought it into its sprawling software empire—is announcing Trello’s biggest pivot to date. It’s essentially a total reinvention, despite the fact that on the surface, not all that much actually seems to be changing.

So, here it is: As of this spring, Trello will no longer be a “project management tool”—or whatever else you want to call it. It’ll be a personal tasks app, presented as being the best all-around hub for juggling all of your important to-do items, no matter where they may originate. Notably, too, it’ll now be aimed at individual users, not teams, which marks a pretty big shift from its original focus.

But in an appropriately Trello-y twist, the service’s trademark versatility isn’t going anywhere—for the most part. And in spite of the official new framing and all the added elements that come with it, it’s still up to you to decide how you want to use Trello and what you want it to be.

Outside of a small subset of early beta testers, most Trello users will see its new touches sometime in April. That’s when Trello’s next era will truly begin.

The Trello tale—from inception to reinvention

I’ve been spending much of this month living with the still-under-wraps new version of Trello, and I’ll share some detailed thoughts and impressions about what it’s all about in a moment. First, though, before we can wrap our heads around Trello’s present and its future, we need to take a swift trip back to its past.

Trello first entered the world as a concept nearly 14 years ago, in September of 2011—the brainchild of Michael Pryor and Joel Spolsky. (Pryor stuck around to lead its development post-Atlassian-acquisition until mid-2022.)

From the get-go, the pair described the app as “a totally horizontal product”—meaning, in the words of co-founder Spolsky at the time, “it can be used by people from all walks of life”:

Some people saw Trello and said, “Oh, it’s Kanban boards. For developing software the agile way.” Yeah, it’s that, but it’s also for planning a wedding, for making a list of potential vacation spots to share with your family, for keeping track of applicants to open job positions, and for a billion other things. In fact, Trello is for anything where you want to maintain a list of lists with a group of people.

That versatility and the tough-to-pin-down quality that comes with it was a key part of Trello’s foundation, in other words. It may have initially been inspired by the engineer-adored idea of Post-It Notes arranged into columns on a whiteboard, but it was always meant to be everything to everyone, without any guardrails or specific definitions for exactly how it should be used.

Over time, that underlying elasticity never wavered. But Trello began to be positioned as more of a team-oriented tool—that whole “project management” thing. In the context of its ultimate home within Atlassian, a company known for collaboration software, that focus made sense—even if Trello did always overlap somewhat awkwardly with the organization’s homegrown Jira offering.

By 2021, Atlassian had introduced a whole series of new views that promised to transform the Trello experience and make it even more well-suited for multiuer productivity. You could switch away from the standard Trello boards and view your data instead in a spreadsheet-like “Team Table View,” for instance, or flip over to a “Timeline View” that put all your info into a year-long spectrum. You could even opt for a location-centric “Map View” built specifically with sales and service teams in mind.

And that’s exactly where Gaurav Kataria, Atlassian’s head of product for Trello since 2020 and a former Google Cloud executive, sees the service as starting to lose its way.

“Typically, everything tries to become the one tool to manage everything, like one tool to rule them all—and typically, they tend come to become more complex,” Kataria says. “It has happened to every tool in the industry, Trello included.”

Kataria and his team decided it was time to step back and really think about what made Trello special, why people appreciated it, and where it should fit into our personal productivity puzzles.

Meet the Trello task transformation

Officially, today’s Trello announcement is about a fresh set of features coming into the service—features that aim to make it easier to capture and organize all types of task-oriented info.

But beyond the surface, the announcement is really more about redefining what Trello is for and how Atlassian, at least, wants it to be seen—even if you still have the power to shape it into something broader.

“We are taking a step back and staying that rather than trying to be that one tool, which is the project management tool for the whole team that can handle all levels of complexity and dependency and reporting, how about we focus on making the individual user more productive,” Kataria says. “Rather than being everything for everyone, let’s be really useful to the one user that’s using the product.”

The team behind Trello determined that the best way to do that was to shed Trello’s murky “project management” moniker and frame the app as an all-purpose to-do hub that pulls in info from all sorts of other services and makes it exceptionally easy to organize. (The service will still offer its same generous free plan, which includes unlimited cards and up to 10 boards for individual users—along with its existing premium and enterprise-level plans for companies that want to provide the service to larger groups of workers.)

The centerpiece of that strategy is a new Inbox feature that exists as a sidebar to the left of every Trello board you’re viewing. The idea is that it’s a landing pad of sorts for any type of task you’re thinking about—a place for all that stuff to show up in Trello without any real effort and then be ready for you to drag wherever you see fit.

“Today, if suddenly, a new idea pops into your head, you might have to first decide which board it goes into, which list it goes into, and does it go into the middle of the list or the top of the list—so there’s a little cognitive burden that you have to go through before you add something to Trello,” Kataria says. “We want to remove that cognitive burden.”

To that end, Inbox offers four integrations to start:

• Email—where you can forward any message to a special address to have it instantly added into your Inbox
• Slack—where you can use the inbox emoji reaction (