14 ms·

Trello co-founder Michael Pryor on pandering to power users

189 points by kiyanwang 6y ago

barlo 6y ago
> "Another downside," our source added, "is that some clients block Trello which can be really disappointing after you've just built a big board together." Why is Trello being blocked?
- slightwinder 6y ago
  Maybe security? Bigger Companies don't trust external tools much and prefer to hold their data inhouse. But this reads a bit out of context to me. There might be something more to it.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  Some industries have regulations that require specific controls, audit logs, and security for any of their data. When employees use uncontrolled 3rd-party tools, they’re inevitably putting some of that controlled data into uncontrolled systems. This can open the company up to massive fines or leave them vulnerable in the case of legal action, so they go ahead and block unapproved project management sites, communication tools, and so on. Never work in a heavily regulated industry if this type of thing bothers you, because it exists at every level of those companies.
  - mhp 6y ago
    The part that bothers me the most about this is that our app has all of the certifications and controls that they would need - they just don't know that. Soc2/3, ISOs, Fedramp, etc (trello.com/security). But as you point out, you have to get it approved and that requires navigating a lot of internal roadblocks.
    - xemdetia 6y ago
      I think you misunderstand the roadblock. Especially for any higher security like FedRAMP it is up to the FedRAMP certified holder to vet and have a very solid understanding of that remote service or system they are using at a moderate to deep level. Most sec people will do enough research to know if the service provider are at least an immediate no or not, but even if they are same-or-better FedRAMP level you still need to document them in your SSP (a system security plan for your whole org from HR to Engineering). This also doesn't prevent the situation that you then need to do a deep dive with this other organization to find out how FedRAMP their FedRAMP program like this, because more often than not organizations hide a lot of skeletons on what features/services are actually FedRAMP and what are features they intend to have FedRAMP 6-10 months from now. Then you have to keep on them forever, and stay apprised of features people would like you to use but aren't FedRAMP appropriate yet or do not have appropriate controls. I think you would be surprised how many SaaS providers really don't meet the muster under scrutiny, or your engineering teams are trying to use features that just haven't been brought into compliance yet. For example, the number of times I have had to use https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/services-in-scope/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/services-in-scope/ (click the FedRAMP tab) as a hammer is extremely high. Then you get on the phone with AWS and you find out that only a certain subset of the service that meets their FedRAMP do not provide adequate controls for your usage of the service. There's a lot of defer to vendor and defer to user games being played by both sides and you have to go line by line and figure out who is responsible for what. More often than not the service's people that are catering to the customer are not appropriately educated too, so there's layers of escalations by a security team just to get someone who can answer security questions accurately. So no, a security person can only see from most organizations that you tried to attest to some of these random certifications, but that doesn't mean I have an accurate map of how I'm supposed to meet my compliance goals with your stuff. (This is not aimed at any one provider in particular, just my personal feelings on where this 'internal roadblock' argument falls apart).
    - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
      It’s not just about having the right certifications and controls. Any approved app has to be worked into the system, included in audits, reviewed periodically, and so on. It becomes overhead for the teams involved in maintaining security and compliance. The cost of that overhead is likely several orders of magnitude higher than Trello’s relatively simple monthly fee. If the whole company goes in on Trello, that’s one thing, but jumping through the hoops to get and maintain approval for a small number of people just isn’t worth it. That’s why the behemoth, everything-to-everyone tools dominate at heavily regulated companies.
    - dQw4w9WgXcQ 6y ago
      Trello is fantastic on the personal end, would love to have an AWS GovCloud offering. So many projects tired of using over-complicated JIRA and Github/Gitlab Issues are not enough... Alas we are stuck using Wekan as a shoddy drop-in for now.
      - addicted 6y ago
        We were significantly more productive with Trello as our project management tool (and this was way before, when checklists were a major new feature) than anything since. We’ve tried all the major ones. Unfortunately Trello did not satisfy management because it didn’t easily give them metrics that serve little to no purpose other than changing the team’s incentives from encouraging a great product to meeting metric targets.
        mhp 6y ago
        We have some things coming out this year in this area but in the meantime, check this out: https://bluecatreports.com/ https://bluecatreports.com/
    - cameronh90 6y ago
      We have blocked Trello accounts in our org, mainly because SSO and enforced 2FA was locked behind Trello Enterprise. The department that wanted to use it couldn't get budget approval for that plan, which leaves no alternative but to block it. (And as I understand it, Trello Enterprise doesn't even get you SSO without paying additionally for Atlassian Access? The website seems to be inconsistent on this point.) We have teams that would definitely like to use Trello, but $4200/month as the minimum tier was too much.
      - mhp 6y ago
        It's the other way around. You only need to buy Atlassian Access to get the SSO + enforced 2FA for your Trello (and also any other Atlassian product) users. Trello Enterprise (optionally) would secure your content (i.e. attachment restrictions, power-up restrictions, token restrictions, audit logs, team management).
        cameronh90 6y ago
        That doesn't appear to be what the website says: https://trello.com/en-GB/enterprise https://trello.com/en-GB/enterprise "Exclusive Enterprise Features: [..] SAML SSO via Atlassian Access" Similarly, on the pricing page: https://trello.com/pricing https://trello.com/pricing - it lists "SAML SSO via Atlassian Access" only on the Enterprise column.
        mhp 6y ago
        I'm sorry it's confusing. It's trying to say that SAML SSO is provided via Atlassian Access - but you don't need to buy Enterprise to buy Atlassian Access - it's a totally separate product (and does not require Enterprise). We are in transition right now (formerly SSO was provided by Enterprise) and so our final pricing page isn't quite where it needs to be.
- lacker 6y ago
  My experience at large companies is that you have some team who is responsible for securely using third-party software. Making sure that it actually authenticates right so that only employees can see it, that sort of thing. This team doesn’t want to support literally every SaaS application in the world, so they try to choose one supported application per category. Pick either Dropbox or Box, don’t use both of them. Etc.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    But... "after you've just built a big board together." "together" meaning with the client... How did you do that if it was never approved in the first place? Or maybe they just realized they never should have done it? It was a pretty confusing and vague quote, at least to me.
- cameronh90 6y ago
  Speaking as someone involved in this, Shadow IT is a nightmare. Users will sign up for Dropbox accounts, share the credentials with others in the company, disable MFA and them load it full of confidential data. Users will do things like using personal email addresses for apps that become critical to business processes, then quit without transferring the account. Additionally as a European company, we are bound by the GDPR to know where confidential data is being stored and processed, to have assessed any third parties and put them in our data processing agreements. Consequently we end up in this situation of having to be the bad guys, blocking otherwise useful sites with proxies/CASBs to save users from doing dangerous things. Web app developers could do a lot to help security departments but I suspect they intentionally don't because they perceive that it would harm adoption.
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    Would this be entirely mitigated by SaaS companies offering 100%-on-prem versions? Or would there still be GDPR issues even then?
    - cameronh90 6y ago
      On-prem does tend to have fewer GDPR/security concerns, but a SaaS is fine provided it is adequately controlled, and usually quicker to set up and lower maintenance cost. Relatively simple things that SaaS companies could do to make our lives easier include: * Ability to "claim" email domains to corporate ownership - that is, if any user tries to register with one of our email domains, they are automatically added to the corporate account with appropriate sharing and security controls (to be fair to Trello, I believe they do this - as do Apple, Google, Microsoft and a few others) * Making OIDC/SAML/SSO a standard option rather than something you have to pay for the super-duper $15k+/month enterprise plan that you can only get after weeks of conversations with sales (if anyone from Twilio happens to read this...) * Ensuring there is "organisation" support - with security/billing admins that can manage the account, set mandatory 2FA. * Even just something in the sign up flows where it asks if they're setting up a business account, and if so, asks for their security/IT contact and pops them an email. Most users aren't being intentionally malicious, just they aren't aware we'd like to know (despite repeated communication that they tend to ignore!). Long term, I think we need better industry-wide solutions to Shadow IT that don't involve invasive proxies. I haven't fully thought through what that would look like, but something like a Do-Not-Track header, but to disable users setting up accounts. Or TXT records on DNS hosts which would cause any attempt to set up an account with that email to automatically fire off to an admin user for approval, etc... See how Google forces mandatory safe-search for schools: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/186669?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/186669?hl=en
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  > Why is Trello being blocked? Imagine a hospital or law firm putting sensitive data in Trello boards, for example. Or details about a new product.
danpalmer 6y ago
This is probably part of the reason why Apple's UX has been so good (historically, let's not get into a discussion about now) – they aren't pandering to power users mostly, they are designing very coherent experiences for most users. Power user features can reduce that coherence, making it more difficult for everyone else. The flip side to the argument here though is that you get tools without much depth, and for certain markets depth is important. For developer tools, depth is almost certainly the right trade-off compared to simplicity, for example. I think Trello is a great example of a project management tool taking the simplicity over depth approach. This is why my friends and family like it for personal things, and for small business problems, but it's also why I don't like it for work – because I work in a bigger team with more complex requirements and prefer something with more depth. I like Trello much more having come to this conclusion about who it's for.
- MiroF 6y ago
  They pandering to affluent professional-managerial class people, very much not the same as power users - although there is some overlap.
- yboris 6y ago
  Sorry for off-topic, but is anyone similarly aggravated by some of the MacOS behaviors? Switching between apps with `command` + `tab` will focus but not maximize a minimized application! When you have Zoom in full screen and switch back to it via keyboard shortcut it will not show the window! Every day I experience pain using MacOS and it baffles me this UX persists for years!
- adambatkin 6y ago
  Just keep in mind that early in a product's lifecycle, it is those Power Users that are the cheerleaders for your product (driving adoption), and sophisticated enough to offer (potentially) valuable feedback. For example: One could argue that Apple was brought back to life by a relatively small group of Power Users with specific requirements for their workloads (Graphic Design, Video Editing, desire for powerful Unix workstations and laptops, etc...) and Apple met those requirements in a way that no one else was able or willing to. Now that Apple's market share has increased - and more importantly, they have started to focus on computing-for-the-masses - you can clearly see why some Power Users are disappointed in this direction, and are feeling left out. Sure, Apple is wildly successful (in a way that they might not be if they spent more resources making that minority of Power Users happier) but it's obvious why those Power Users feel like Apple is leaving them in the dust (and Apple might not exist anymore today, had it not been for those Power Users).
InitialLastName 6y ago
Pandering to power users and then selling big to a company that does everything it can to undermine and overcharge power users sounds like pretty iconic late-stage tech capitalism to me.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
The comment about power users: > Pryor reckons one pain point is visibility into the increasingly busy Trello boards put together by customers, but the team is cautious about sacrificing usability on the altar of feature requests. > "Developers," he said, "add more stuff, add more stuff, add more stuff... and, essentially, you get this tool that does more things for those specific power users. But in the beginning, those people that were using it, you've now turned those people off, and they're not coming in anymore, because now the software is too complicated to use." I didn’t fully understand this as a developer, but it become crystal clear as a product manager. I personally love power tools with countless knobs to adjust, command line options to explore, complex features to learn, and other fun things that stimulate the mind of an engineer. But the number of your customers who want unbounded complexity is very, very low. Some of the most vocal customers might mislead you on this fact by demanding some specific feature for their workload and recruiting armies of commenters to back them up. Letting the loudest customers dictate your product roadmap will start to alienate the silent majority of your users. Offering plug-in functionality, a scripting system, or a documented API is a nice way to cater to power users without cluttering up the UX/UI. However, that brings up a real problem with the power users who think they know more than they do, who end up destroying their data through the API and trying to have customer support fix it or otherwise hold the company accountable. It doesn’t take long to realize that you’re simply better off letting the 1% of power users feeling disappointed while you focus on a product for the 99% of users who just want your core functionality.
- ksec 6y ago
  >I didn’t fully understand this as a developer, but it become crystal clear as a product manager. 20 years, I still dont understand how most developers dont understand. I guess that is the difference between a developer mindset and product manager mindset. And hence why lots of startups failed.
  - eggsnbacon1 6y ago
    In my experience, its usually project managers and sales doing feature driven development while developers beg them to stop. Devs have to deal with all the bugs and messy codebase
howmayiannoyyou 6y ago
Mature SAAS applications over focus currently on new releases, features and engineering. I say this because product development resources should be allocated to creating recipes, templates, documentation and communities enabling power and novice users to add complex functionality quickly.
- criddell 6y ago
  Will Trello ever get to the point where it's declared as complete and development switches to maintenance mode? It seems like this industry likes to develop products until they are bloated messes and then some lean competitor with a fresh look sets up shop and starts the cycle all over again.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bachmeier 6y ago
> With the "total addressable market of people using collaboration tools," having "skyrocketed," according to Pryor ("it just kind of exploded," he laughed), it's not surprising to see Microsoft (and others) looking to roll their tanks onto Trello's lawns. The availability and quality of collaboration tools have skyrocketed. What Microsoft really wants to do is find ways to force users to use their atrocious enterprise tools that are 20 years out of date in terms of user experience. (I've used Planner, it's free to me as part of Office 365, and I don't see how anyone can call it a Trello clone.)
getpost 6y ago
This is a perennial issue in software design and business, something I struggled with in the 1980s, and I don’t think it was a new problem then. Most users need only a few features and the UI can be made very simple and easy to learn. However, a small percentage of users need more powerful/hard to use features, and the needs of these users usually determine which product is purchased. Since it’s advantageous for everyone to use the same product, most corporate employees will be stuck with a hard to learn/use product. Vendors of low-end/easy to use products won’t be successful selling to the corporate market. What’s different now is that there is a large market for inexpensive easy to use phone apps selling to individuals. You can make a living selling to that market, but you will never be as big as a company that sells an expensive hard to use product to the corporate market.
runevault 6y ago
I sort of feel like the right way to go is build tools that can feed into each other in ways that let users who DO want to go crazy to build their own workflows, instead of creating a single tool that tries to do everything. Basically the Unix philosophy where you pipe everything into everything else.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  Or for another perspective, AppleScript, or Android's intents; it's not even that you need pipes, but you need applications that surface enough API for you to extend them. I mean, yes, pipes are a very good option, I just want to point out that the exact form is less important than having something you can hook into.
  - runevault 6y ago
    Fair. Pipes were just the easiest way to describe the IDEA.
preommr 6y ago
I mean... if you have to make the decision between a bloated ui and a simple one that does something well, then the latter would be the better choice. Especially in a market like this where power users could spin up their scripts that they can really customize. But it doesn't have to be either or. These are big enough companies that they should be able to afford the time and resources to design easy-to-use UI that also allows the features power users are looking for. I know some people will say it's not easy - but this is a hard problem because of management and time. If you do enough testing and iterations, you will end up with a good UI. It's just no a priority for a lot of companies.
- chrisbrauns 6y ago
  > These are big enough companies that they should be able to afford the time and resources to design easy-to-use UI that also allows the features power users are looking for This is a really compelling sentiment. Do you have any companies you think do this well?
- jonshariat 6y ago
  As a UX designer, I see this a lot. Design has come a long way in being valued but very few companies realize how absolutely critical UX is once you have a crowded market. In the early tech days "Just build it first and maintain momentum" was enough to win in market. Now, with the cost of running a business going lower and lower (lots of infrastructure is automated, business functions can be done by 1 person and software, etc), anyone can compete with you and if they have a better experience, users will go there instead. So many viable business are being built by companies that punch out a niche in a larger market and designing the perfect experience for that niche.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Complexity vs. ease of use (and of maintainability) is an inherent conflict. It may not be fully unresolvable. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
ticmasta 6y ago
How can Atlassian LOSE money on this level of revenues, in this market, with the combination of their tools and shifts in usage... after this long? They used to be a small, privately controlled company with focused yet ambitious goals and an audacious vision (Build a company that will last 100 years). Then ~10 years ago they took a butt load of money, pushed big towards US enterprise and acquired what appears (to me anyway) a random set of companies that looked good at a specific market/time period but have largely faded away? I find it quite mind boggling; there must be something going on beyond what I can see.
- originalvichy 6y ago
  They are taking hits and trying to pivot by forcing users to cloud as much as they can. They have first class tools for many parts of the dev lifecycle (their CI server is crappy) and soon they’ll make cloud saas versions of them cheaper so they can control your org’s dev cycle. It’s a slow strategy but i can’t see it not working
makecheck 6y ago
From a technical point of view, it is certainly cleaner to hide some advanced features (e.g. instead of cluttering up a GUI, perhaps they can only be enabled by lower-level commands). It may even be easier (as expanding a GUI requires more code, more thought for proper placement/layout etc.; and from a testing point of view it is easier to test lower-level commands than GUIs). On the other hand, you lose the marketing war. Articles are written “comparing” your software to competitors, and they completely miss that you have feature X because it wasn’t staring them in the face as a button or a checkbox. Or your software is considered “simplistic” and maybe not “worth” its price or effort, etc. when in reality it may be a powerhouse under the hood.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
Interesting. I would have thought the intersection between power users and paying users would be very high and they would be worth pandering too if their requirements where general enough to applicable to other power/paying users.
vlovich123 6y ago
I still am holding out hope for progressive complexity to be adopted by the UI & product worlds across the verticals, but anything meaningful here needs to be something engineering can solve across problem domains. I don't know if that's actually possible. The ideal system could support more power user use cases without increased technical maintenance burden/UI complexity & designer burden on a per-feature basis/& product clarity. That seems like a tall order. To me I think it depends what your power user cohort looks like. Are your power users also where you make your money? Are they an important cohort to learn from to innovate to stay ahead of competition? Are they organic advocates for the product spreading the word & building brand value for you? Which case kind of determines how I would adjust business strategy. If they're revenue drivers, then tailor the UI to them from the get-go. If new users are important to continue growing the power user revenue base, make the new -> expert conversion easy (separate sign-up flow, ways to identify how to get them access to the power tools they need without overwhelming them, etc). This doesn't even have to be UI changes. Could be training materials, courses, hands-on experiments, sandboxes etc to ramp up beginners to where they want to spend revenue. If they're providing market research to maintain your edge, then maybe some amount of progressive discovery instead (e.g. an advanced drop-down for a given screen to tune the knobs, API to automate, or whatever is relevant for your business). Maybe some good task-oriented documents to help new users ramp up to be power users. If they're advocates then do what you can to make them happy or excited. Some times holding off on a popular feature can build some excitement about the launch to increase the reach of the announcement to attract more customers. Avoid massive redesigns that break them or build a gradual transition plan (don't pull a Digg). Feature requests are important to listen to but don't necessarily need to be addressed to keep good will (like what Yelp did/does with incentives for power Yelp reviewers). For technical things, giving them a bit of outsized attention to solving bugs that are friction-causing might be warranted to maintain the good will.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  Thank you for writing, progressive complexity is a great term. For my project, a web-based forum, I categorize UI controls as beginner or advanced, and hide the letter behind a setting. New users see only the essentials, intermediate users see both extra controls and hints, and expert mode takes the hints away. I've had overwhelming success with this technique in user studies, both with beginners doing register-comment-vote, and advanced users tasked with "vote against my vote on this item". The best part is how easy it is to layer the UI like this with HTML and DOM. My concept works in 10-year-old browsers and I believe I can extend suport even further!
notSupplied 6y ago
Notion does a great job balancing the two. There is immense power hidden behind the slash commands. For everyone else, it's just a great note taking tool.
cercatrova 6y ago
On the opposite side, what about making tools that cater only to power users? Tools like Roam Research or Superhuman that are popping up in the productivity space for example. You could just deny customers who are more casual, as you're not going to convert them anyway unless they learn your tool.
earthboundkid 6y ago
Powerful. Flexible. Easy to use. Pick two.
jinushaun 6y ago
Comments like these explain why I stopped using a Trello a long time ago. It just doesn’t do enough to justify using it regularly because you find yourself running up against the same deficiencies time and time again.

189 points by kiyanwang 6y ago

> "Another downside," our source added, "is that some clients block Trello which can be really disappointing after you've just built a big board together." Why is Trello being blocked?

slightwinder 6y ago
Maybe security? Bigger Companies don't trust external tools much and prefer to hold their data inhouse. But this reads a bit out of context to me. There might be something more to it.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
Some industries have regulations that require specific controls, audit logs, and security for any of their data. When employees use uncontrolled 3rd-party tools, they’re inevitably putting some of that controlled data into uncontrolled systems. This can open the company up to massive fines or leave them vulnerable in the case of legal action, so they go ahead and block unapproved project management sites, communication tools, and so on. Never work in a heavily regulated industry if this type of thing bothers you, because it exists at every level of those companies.
- mhp 6y ago
  The part that bothers me the most about this is that our app has all of the certifications and controls that they would need - they just don't know that. Soc2/3, ISOs, Fedramp, etc (trello.com/security). But as you point out, you have to get it approved and that requires navigating a lot of internal roadblocks.
  - xemdetia 6y ago
    I think you misunderstand the roadblock. Especially for any higher security like FedRAMP it is up to the FedRAMP certified holder to vet and have a very solid understanding of that remote service or system they are using at a moderate to deep level. Most sec people will do enough research to know if the service provider are at least an immediate no or not, but even if they are same-or-better FedRAMP level you still need to document them in your SSP (a system security plan for your whole org from HR to Engineering). This also doesn't prevent the situation that you then need to do a deep dive with this other organization to find out how FedRAMP their FedRAMP program like this, because more often than not organizations hide a lot of skeletons on what features/services are actually FedRAMP and what are features they intend to have FedRAMP 6-10 months from now. Then you have to keep on them forever, and stay apprised of features people would like you to use but aren't FedRAMP appropriate yet or do not have appropriate controls. I think you would be surprised how many SaaS providers really don't meet the muster under scrutiny, or your engineering teams are trying to use features that just haven't been brought into compliance yet. For example, the number of times I have had to use https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/services-in-scope/ https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/services-in-scope/ (click the FedRAMP tab) as a hammer is extremely high. Then you get on the phone with AWS and you find out that only a certain subset of the service that meets their FedRAMP do not provide adequate controls for your usage of the service. There's a lot of defer to vendor and defer to user games being played by both sides and you have to go line by line and figure out who is responsible for what. More often than not the service's people that are catering to the customer are not appropriately educated too, so there's layers of escalations by a security team just to get someone who can answer security questions accurately. So no, a security person can only see from most organizations that you tried to attest to some of these random certifications, but that doesn't mean I have an accurate map of how I'm supposed to meet my compliance goals with your stuff. (This is not aimed at any one provider in particular, just my personal feelings on where this 'internal roadblock' argument falls apart).
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    It’s not just about having the right certifications and controls. Any approved app has to be worked into the system, included in audits, reviewed periodically, and so on. It becomes overhead for the teams involved in maintaining security and compliance. The cost of that overhead is likely several orders of magnitude higher than Trello’s relatively simple monthly fee. If the whole company goes in on Trello, that’s one thing, but jumping through the hoops to get and maintain approval for a small number of people just isn’t worth it. That’s why the behemoth, everything-to-everyone tools dominate at heavily regulated companies.
  - dQw4w9WgXcQ 6y ago
    Trello is fantastic on the personal end, would love to have an AWS GovCloud offering. So many projects tired of using over-complicated JIRA and Github/Gitlab Issues are not enough... Alas we are stuck using Wekan as a shoddy drop-in for now.
    - addicted 6y ago
      We were significantly more productive with Trello as our project management tool (and this was way before, when checklists were a major new feature) than anything since. We’ve tried all the major ones. Unfortunately Trello did not satisfy management because it didn’t easily give them metrics that serve little to no purpose other than changing the team’s incentives from encouraging a great product to meeting metric targets.
      - mhp 6y ago
        We have some things coming out this year in this area but in the meantime, check this out: https://bluecatreports.com/ https://bluecatreports.com/
  - cameronh90 6y ago
    We have blocked Trello accounts in our org, mainly because SSO and enforced 2FA was locked behind Trello Enterprise. The department that wanted to use it couldn't get budget approval for that plan, which leaves no alternative but to block it. (And as I understand it, Trello Enterprise doesn't even get you SSO without paying additionally for Atlassian Access? The website seems to be inconsistent on this point.) We have teams that would definitely like to use Trello, but $4200/month as the minimum tier was too much.
    - mhp 6y ago
      It's the other way around. You only need to buy Atlassian Access to get the SSO + enforced 2FA for your Trello (and also any other Atlassian product) users. Trello Enterprise (optionally) would secure your content (i.e. attachment restrictions, power-up restrictions, token restrictions, audit logs, team management).
      - cameronh90 6y ago
        That doesn't appear to be what the website says: https://trello.com/en-GB/enterprise https://trello.com/en-GB/enterprise "Exclusive Enterprise Features: [..] SAML SSO via Atlassian Access" Similarly, on the pricing page: https://trello.com/pricing https://trello.com/pricing - it lists "SAML SSO via Atlassian Access" only on the Enterprise column.
        mhp 6y ago
        I'm sorry it's confusing. It's trying to say that SAML SSO is provided via Atlassian Access - but you don't need to buy Enterprise to buy Atlassian Access - it's a totally separate product (and does not require Enterprise). We are in transition right now (formerly SSO was provided by Enterprise) and so our final pricing page isn't quite where it needs to be.
lacker 6y ago
My experience at large companies is that you have some team who is responsible for securely using third-party software. Making sure that it actually authenticates right so that only employees can see it, that sort of thing. This team doesn’t want to support literally every SaaS application in the world, so they try to choose one supported application per category. Pick either Dropbox or Box, don’t use both of them. Etc.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  But... "after you've just built a big board together." "together" meaning with the client... How did you do that if it was never approved in the first place? Or maybe they just realized they never should have done it? It was a pretty confusing and vague quote, at least to me.
cameronh90 6y ago
Speaking as someone involved in this, Shadow IT is a nightmare. Users will sign up for Dropbox accounts, share the credentials with others in the company, disable MFA and them load it full of confidential data. Users will do things like using personal email addresses for apps that become critical to business processes, then quit without transferring the account. Additionally as a European company, we are bound by the GDPR to know where confidential data is being stored and processed, to have assessed any third parties and put them in our data processing agreements. Consequently we end up in this situation of having to be the bad guys, blocking otherwise useful sites with proxies/CASBs to save users from doing dangerous things. Web app developers could do a lot to help security departments but I suspect they intentionally don't because they perceive that it would harm adoption.
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  Would this be entirely mitigated by SaaS companies offering 100%-on-prem versions? Or would there still be GDPR issues even then?
  - cameronh90 6y ago
    On-prem does tend to have fewer GDPR/security concerns, but a SaaS is fine provided it is adequately controlled, and usually quicker to set up and lower maintenance cost. Relatively simple things that SaaS companies could do to make our lives easier include: * Ability to "claim" email domains to corporate ownership - that is, if any user tries to register with one of our email domains, they are automatically added to the corporate account with appropriate sharing and security controls (to be fair to Trello, I believe they do this - as do Apple, Google, Microsoft and a few others) * Making OIDC/SAML/SSO a standard option rather than something you have to pay for the super-duper $15k+/month enterprise plan that you can only get after weeks of conversations with sales (if anyone from Twilio happens to read this...) * Ensuring there is "organisation" support - with security/billing admins that can manage the account, set mandatory 2FA. * Even just something in the sign up flows where it asks if they're setting up a business account, and if so, asks for their security/IT contact and pops them an email. Most users aren't being intentionally malicious, just they aren't aware we'd like to know (despite repeated communication that they tend to ignore!). Long term, I think we need better industry-wide solutions to Shadow IT that don't involve invasive proxies. I haven't fully thought through what that would look like, but something like a Do-Not-Track header, but to disable users setting up accounts. Or TXT records on DNS hosts which would cause any attempt to set up an account with that email to automatically fire off to an admin user for approval, etc... See how Google forces mandatory safe-search for schools: https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/186669?hl=en https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/186669?hl=en
ceejayoz 6y ago
> Why is Trello being blocked? Imagine a hospital or law firm putting sensitive data in Trello boards, for example. Or details about a new product.

danpalmer 6y ago

This is probably part of the reason why Apple's UX has been so good (historically, let's not get into a discussion about now) – they aren't pandering to power users mostly, they are designing very coherent experiences for most users. Power user features can reduce that coherence, making it more difficult for everyone else. The flip side to the argument here though is that you get tools without much depth, and for certain markets depth is important. For developer tools, depth is almost certainly the right trade-off compared to simplicity, for example. I think Trello is a great example of a project management tool taking the simplicity over depth approach. This is why my friends and family like it for personal things, and for small business problems, but it's also why I don't like it for work – because I work in a bigger team with more complex requirements and prefer something with more depth. I like Trello much more having come to this conclusion about who it's for.

MiroF 6y ago
They pandering to affluent professional-managerial class people, very much not the same as power users - although there is some overlap.
yboris 6y ago
Sorry for off-topic, but is anyone similarly aggravated by some of the MacOS behaviors? Switching between apps with `command` + `tab` will focus but not maximize a minimized application! When you have Zoom in full screen and switch back to it via keyboard shortcut it will not show the window! Every day I experience pain using MacOS and it baffles me this UX persists for years!
adambatkin 6y ago
Just keep in mind that early in a product's lifecycle, it is those Power Users that are the cheerleaders for your product (driving adoption), and sophisticated enough to offer (potentially) valuable feedback. For example: One could argue that Apple was brought back to life by a relatively small group of Power Users with specific requirements for their workloads (Graphic Design, Video Editing, desire for powerful Unix workstations and laptops, etc...) and Apple met those requirements in a way that no one else was able or willing to. Now that Apple's market share has increased - and more importantly, they have started to focus on computing-for-the-masses - you can clearly see why some Power Users are disappointed in this direction, and are feeling left out. Sure, Apple is wildly successful (in a way that they might not be if they spent more resources making that minority of Power Users happier) but it's obvious why those Power Users feel like Apple is leaving them in the dust (and Apple might not exist anymore today, had it not been for those Power Users).

InitialLastName 6y ago

Pandering to power users and then selling big to a company that does everything it can to undermine and overcharge power users sounds like pretty iconic late-stage tech capitalism to me.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

The comment about power users: > Pryor reckons one pain point is visibility into the increasingly busy Trello boards put together by customers, but the team is cautious about sacrificing usability on the altar of feature requests. > "Developers," he said, "add more stuff, add more stuff, add more stuff... and, essentially, you get this tool that does more things for those specific power users. But in the beginning, those people that were using it, you've now turned those people off, and they're not coming in anymore, because now the software is too complicated to use." I didn’t fully understand this as a developer, but it become crystal clear as a product manager. I personally love power tools with countless knobs to adjust, command line options to explore, complex features to learn, and other fun things that stimulate the mind of an engineer. But the number of your customers who want unbounded complexity is very, very low. Some of the most vocal customers might mislead you on this fact by demanding some specific feature for their workload and recruiting armies of commenters to back them up. Letting the loudest customers dictate your product roadmap will start to alienate the silent majority of your users. Offering plug-in functionality, a scripting system, or a documented API is a nice way to cater to power users without cluttering up the UX/UI. However, that brings up a real problem with the power users who think they know more than they do, who end up destroying their data through the API and trying to have customer support fix it or otherwise hold the company accountable. It doesn’t take long to realize that you’re simply better off letting the 1% of power users feeling disappointed while you focus on a product for the 99% of users who just want your core functionality.

ksec 6y ago
>I didn’t fully understand this as a developer, but it become crystal clear as a product manager. 20 years, I still dont understand how most developers dont understand. I guess that is the difference between a developer mindset and product manager mindset. And hence why lots of startups failed.
- eggsnbacon1 6y ago
  In my experience, its usually project managers and sales doing feature driven development while developers beg them to stop. Devs have to deal with all the bugs and messy codebase

howmayiannoyyou 6y ago

Mature SAAS applications over focus currently on new releases, features and engineering. I say this because product development resources should be allocated to creating recipes, templates, documentation and communities enabling power and novice users to add complex functionality quickly.

criddell 6y ago
Will Trello ever get to the point where it's declared as complete and development switches to maintenance mode? It seems like this industry likes to develop products until they are bloated messes and then some lean competitor with a fresh look sets up shop and starts the cycle all over again.

deleted 6y ago

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bachmeier 6y ago

> With the "total addressable market of people using collaboration tools," having "skyrocketed," according to Pryor ("it just kind of exploded," he laughed), it's not surprising to see Microsoft (and others) looking to roll their tanks onto Trello's lawns. The availability and quality of collaboration tools have skyrocketed. What Microsoft really wants to do is find ways to force users to use their atrocious enterprise tools that are 20 years out of date in terms of user experience. (I've used Planner, it's free to me as part of Office 365, and I don't see how anyone can call it a Trello clone.)

getpost 6y ago

This is a perennial issue in software design and business, something I struggled with in the 1980s, and I don’t think it was a new problem then. Most users need only a few features and the UI can be made very simple and easy to learn. However, a small percentage of users need more powerful/hard to use features, and the needs of these users usually determine which product is purchased. Since it’s advantageous for everyone to use the same product, most corporate employees will be stuck with a hard to learn/use product. Vendors of low-end/easy to use products won’t be successful selling to the corporate market. What’s different now is that there is a large market for inexpensive easy to use phone apps selling to individuals. You can make a living selling to that market, but you will never be as big as a company that sells an expensive hard to use product to the corporate market.

runevault 6y ago

I sort of feel like the right way to go is build tools that can feed into each other in ways that let users who DO want to go crazy to build their own workflows, instead of creating a single tool that tries to do everything. Basically the Unix philosophy where you pipe everything into everything else.

yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
Or for another perspective, AppleScript, or Android's intents; it's not even that you need pipes, but you need applications that surface enough API for you to extend them. I mean, yes, pipes are a very good option, I just want to point out that the exact form is less important than having something you can hook into.
- runevault 6y ago
  Fair. Pipes were just the easiest way to describe the IDEA.

preommr 6y ago

I mean... if you have to make the decision between a bloated ui and a simple one that does something well, then the latter would be the better choice. Especially in a market like this where power users could spin up their scripts that they can really customize. But it doesn't have to be either or. These are big enough companies that they should be able to afford the time and resources to design easy-to-use UI that also allows the features power users are looking for. I know some people will say it's not easy - but this is a hard problem because of management and time. If you do enough testing and iterations, you will end up with a good UI. It's just no a priority for a lot of companies.

chrisbrauns 6y ago
> These are big enough companies that they should be able to afford the time and resources to design easy-to-use UI that also allows the features power users are looking for This is a really compelling sentiment. Do you have any companies you think do this well?
jonshariat 6y ago
As a UX designer, I see this a lot. Design has come a long way in being valued but very few companies realize how absolutely critical UX is once you have a crowded market. In the early tech days "Just build it first and maintain momentum" was enough to win in market. Now, with the cost of running a business going lower and lower (lots of infrastructure is automated, business functions can be done by 1 person and software, etc), anyone can compete with you and if they have a better experience, users will go there instead. So many viable business are being built by companies that punch out a niche in a larger market and designing the perfect experience for that niche.

dredmorbius 6y ago

Complexity vs. ease of use (and of maintainability) is an inherent conflict. It may not be fully unresolvable. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyranny_of_the_minimum_viable_user/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

ticmasta 6y ago

How can Atlassian LOSE money on this level of revenues, in this market, with the combination of their tools and shifts in usage... after this long? They used to be a small, privately controlled company with focused yet ambitious goals and an audacious vision (Build a company that will last 100 years). Then ~10 years ago they took a butt load of money, pushed big towards US enterprise and acquired what appears (to me anyway) a random set of companies that looked good at a specific market/time period but have largely faded away? I find it quite mind boggling; there must be something going on beyond what I can see.

originalvichy 6y ago
They are taking hits and trying to pivot by forcing users to cloud as much as they can. They have first class tools for many parts of the dev lifecycle (their CI server is crappy) and soon they’ll make cloud saas versions of them cheaper so they can control your org’s dev cycle. It’s a slow strategy but i can’t see it not working

makecheck 6y ago

From a technical point of view, it is certainly cleaner to hide some advanced features (e.g. instead of cluttering up a GUI, perhaps they can only be enabled by lower-level commands). It may even be easier (as expanding a GUI requires more code, more thought for proper placement/layout etc.; and from a testing point of view it is easier to test lower-level commands than GUIs). On the other hand, you lose the marketing war. Articles are written “comparing” your software to competitors, and they completely miss that you have feature X because it wasn’t staring them in the face as a button or a checkbox. Or your software is considered “simplistic” and maybe not “worth” its price or effort, etc. when in reality it may be a powerhouse under the hood.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

Interesting. I would have thought the intersection between power users and paying users would be very high and they would be worth pandering too if their requirements where general enough to applicable to other power/paying users.

vlovich123 6y ago

I still am holding out hope for progressive complexity to be adopted by the UI & product worlds across the verticals, but anything meaningful here needs to be something engineering can solve across problem domains. I don't know if that's actually possible. The ideal system could support more power user use cases without increased technical maintenance burden/UI complexity & designer burden on a per-feature basis/& product clarity. That seems like a tall order. To me I think it depends what your power user cohort looks like. Are your power users also where you make your money? Are they an important cohort to learn from to innovate to stay ahead of competition? Are they organic advocates for the product spreading the word & building brand value for you? Which case kind of determines how I would adjust business strategy. If they're revenue drivers, then tailor the UI to them from the get-go. If new users are important to continue growing the power user revenue base, make the new -> expert conversion easy (separate sign-up flow, ways to identify how to get them access to the power tools they need without overwhelming them, etc). This doesn't even have to be UI changes. Could be training materials, courses, hands-on experiments, sandboxes etc to ramp up beginners to where they want to spend revenue. If they're providing market research to maintain your edge, then maybe some amount of progressive discovery instead (e.g. an advanced drop-down for a given screen to tune the knobs, API to automate, or whatever is relevant for your business). Maybe some good task-oriented documents to help new users ramp up to be power users. If they're advocates then do what you can to make them happy or excited. Some times holding off on a popular feature can build some excitement about the launch to increase the reach of the announcement to attract more customers. Avoid massive redesigns that break them or build a gradual transition plan (don't pull a Digg). Feature requests are important to listen to but don't necessarily need to be addressed to keep good will (like what Yelp did/does with incentives for power Yelp reviewers). For technical things, giving them a bit of outsized attention to solving bugs that are friction-causing might be warranted to maintain the good will.

forgotmypw17 6y ago
Thank you for writing, progressive complexity is a great term. For my project, a web-based forum, I categorize UI controls as beginner or advanced, and hide the letter behind a setting. New users see only the essentials, intermediate users see both extra controls and hints, and expert mode takes the hints away. I've had overwhelming success with this technique in user studies, both with beginners doing register-comment-vote, and advanced users tasked with "vote against my vote on this item". The best part is how easy it is to layer the UI like this with HTML and DOM. My concept works in 10-year-old browsers and I believe I can extend suport even further!

notSupplied 6y ago

Notion does a great job balancing the two. There is immense power hidden behind the slash commands. For everyone else, it's just a great note taking tool.

cercatrova 6y ago

On the opposite side, what about making tools that cater only to power users? Tools like Roam Research or Superhuman that are popping up in the productivity space for example. You could just deny customers who are more casual, as you're not going to convert them anyway unless they learn your tool.

earthboundkid 6y ago

Powerful. Flexible. Easy to use. Pick two.

jinushaun 6y ago

Comments like these explain why I stopped using a Trello a long time ago. It just doesn’t do enough to justify using it regularly because you find yourself running up against the same deficiencies time and time again.