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 (📥) or the native Slack save-for-later feature to save any message into your Trello Inbox
• Jira—where you can click a new native menu command to pull any issues from a project into your Inbox
• And Siri—where you can simply ask your iOS device to add something into Trello to get it into that same Inbox view

Android support is on hold for the moment because of Google’s awkward Assistant-Gemini transition and the current lack of support for third-party integrations with Gemini—but Kataria tells me the team is watching the situation closely and plans to add in support as soon as it becomes possible. And in the meantime, a button on the Trello Android widget can serve as an only slightly more complex way to achieve the same end result.

Atlassian plans to add support for some Microsoft-specific integrations next, but beyond that, it’s relying on the fact that almost every external service generates notifications of some sort—typically via either Slack or email—and so it can tap into those notifications easily via its existing integrations without requiring any additional connections or data access.

“We don’t need to build a native integration with every tool under the sun,” Kataria explains.

As part of its tasks-centric transition, the service is also adding in the ability to check off a card and mark it as done from any board view—something Kataria says has been the company’s longest standing feature request.

By default, when you mark a card as done, it stays in place and just gains a checkmark indication on its cover. But thanks to Trello’s powerful automation system—the feature formerly known as Butler, for any of my fellow Trello long-timers—you can take total control of that process and set the system up to work any way you like. You might create an automation rule that instantly archives any card when it’s marked as done, for instance, or that moves it to a special list where finished cards are stored. The power is entirely in your hands, which feels like a thoughtful blending of the traditional Trello philosophy and its newly reshaped purpose.

“The user is still very much in control,” Kataria says.

All of that aside, what makes the setup especially interesting is the way Trello is integrating AI into all of this in a similarly thoughtful and actually useful way.

Trello’s finer task touches

Rather than cramming in the standard and often silly “write/rewrite text for me” or “make a list for me”-style generative-AI options, Trello is opting to lean on AI solely to transform whatever you add into your Inbox into a simple, task-like summary—with a succinct title for the associated card, a single-paragraph overview of the info in its description field, and then the full text and a link back to the original item for further reference.

It works brilliantly well, in my experience, and makes me wish every app offered something similar. And, suffice it to say, I don’t at all find myself missing the option to have the service write stuff or attempt to organize stuff for me—and then, in all likelihood, having to waste my time redoing and fixing what it did. That seems to be exactly the experience the Trello team is aiming to create.

“The reason people use Trello is because it reflects their mind,” Kataria says. “We want to remain really true to that spirit—that Trello is about how people see the world, not about how they follow a certain workflow or process.”

(If you want, you can still add cards directly to a specific board like before, by the way—and as of this week, doing so will incorporate the same AI formatting magic present in the new Inbox approach.)

Ultimately, Inbox is just another list in Trello. But it lives in that special sidebar that makes it easy to access as a single starting point for any incoming items—until and unless you decide to sort and file them into a board.

Inbox and its AI elements also go hand in hand with another new task-oriented Trello addition known as Planner. Trello’s Planner is an integrated calendar that connects to Google Calendar (with support for Microsoft Outlook on the way soon) and lets you drag and drop tasks from your Inbox—or any Trello board—directly into that day-to-day view. That way, you can see all your tasks alongside your agenda and plan out your hours accordingly, with the full perspective of everything on your plate.

It’s a step forward from the tacked-on calendar elements Trello previously provided, and it ties back into the newfound goal of making Trello all about the individual rather than the team.

“All the previous calendar views are the legacy of trying to solve project management use cases,” Kataria says. “With the Planner, we’re really thinking about planning your day, planning your week, where you’re only looking at your calendar.”

The approach actually reminds me a lot of Akiflow, a calendar and tasks app I wrote about last fall and have been personally using ever since—only, for better or for worse, Akiflow is solely a calendar and tasks app. Trello, in contrast, has the advantage (or maybe distraction) of all the board elements and the broader organizational opportunities they offer.

Speaking of which, for now, at least, all of Trello’s “legacy” elements and potential use cases will continue to be supported. Kataria hinted that certain elements—like those team-centric “Timeline” and “Table” views—may be phased out eventually, over time (and will certainly be de-emphasized in the meantime).

But the general goal seems to be to