131–135 of 135 posts
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If you need more vertical stuff then check out Breeze ( http://letsbreeze.com ), it's Basecamp and Trello mashup. Plus it adds calendar, time tracking, budgeting and reporting.
And is hilariously expensive, with no free plan. More even than Basecamp.
I'm impressed Trello has managed to succeed in what many had written off as overcrowded space. I think the key to its success is the insight that Joel Spolsky explains in his post here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2012/01/06.html - that successful apps often provide a new kind of data structure, that makes them suitable for many purposes. (For Trello, that's a "list of lists".) Fog Creek Employees: can anyone…
I don't think the data structure was the innovation for Trello. There were lots of products out there that had the columns-of-cards structure. Was (and is) a feature of many agile project management products - following the cards-on-the-wall structure used offline by agile folk.
What Trello did - which was brilliant - was sell that as a solution to everybody. Not just the project management folk in dev companies, not just for dev folk, but for folk planning/organising anything. It's spotting that that data structure is generic.
I've looked at Trello several times, and it's always seemed like a great app to work with... but I never got around to actually using it. So, open question time: How do all you HN'ers use Trello? What kind of things do you manage with it? Bonus for telling us what you used before, and how Trello makes it easier. Super-duper bonus for anything to do with running software projects, and running businesses. Thanks!
Things I've been using it for:
* Tracking people through recruitment process
* Tracking people through usability testing screening / testing / followup process
* User stories / hypothesis through dev process
* Pretty much everything the company is doing (we have multiple backlogs like Learning, Marketing, Product Ideas, Potential clients, etc. that feed into a separate single kanban-style board that covers the next four or five weeks worth of work)
* Used it for open and closed card sorts for UX/IA work.
* Organising conferences
The thing I like about Trello is that it's pretty much process agnostic. There's very little there that's not related to organising the cards. Which works well for me since what I use by default is cards - or post-it notes - stuck to the wall.
I've previously played with pivitol, mingle, basecamp, etc. They were mostly trying to do too much for me and felt like I was trying to mangle my process to fit the tool. Trello lets me fit the tool to my process.
The places where I use Trello are where I've not got enough wall space for physical cards (e.g. there are about 200 odd cards on the company backlog board), when I'm working with people in multiple locations, and when I'm doing stuff when I'm on the road.
I still have a physical board. When we're in the office for extended periods we pretty much ignore Trello for the "real" board. If we're in/out we keep the physical/trello boards synced. If we're on the road we just use trello and sync on return.
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The iOS app still requires an internet connection to sync anything.
Well yeah, but if you've got an iPhone, chances are you have a cell connection. If he can't access the internet, even over the cell network, I'd be curious to know what kind of environment he's working in.
I've looked at Trello several times, and it's always seemed like a great app to work with... but I never got around to actually using it. So, open question time: How do all you HN'ers use Trello? What kind of things do you manage with it? Bonus for telling us what you used before, and how Trello makes it easier. Super-duper bonus for anything to do with running software projects, and running businesses. Thanks!
We also track story progress (analysis, development, testing, business approval, etc.) on a second board. Previously, we had used a spreadsheet. Trello's support for quickly copying/moving cards and notifying board members of changes are powerful.
For our stories, each card description is structured as "[story number] [story points] [story summary]". Would it be nice if Trello "natively" supported these attributes? Sure, but it doesn't hinder our use.
In my mind, a great sign of Trello's awesomeness is that our use of it has grown organically. While waiting for others in the company to take Rally/Mingle/etc. through the discussion, evaluation, install, etc. process, I just started a board on Trello one day and watched it work for us. :)