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Although I agree in principle, I don't quite agree in the specific case of Trello. I think that their intentionally constrained approach to adding features is l

Although I agree in principle, I don't quite agree in the specific case of Trello. I think that their intentionally constrained approach to adding features is losing them quite a lot more than 1% of users. Almost all orgs I know which were at first happy with Trello, eventually had to move to something more powerful. Jira used to be the default choice, but in the last year I see a lot of movement towards ClickUp, which I think has a good combination of simple defaults and powerful customization. As such, I'd suggest Trello try pandering a bit more to power users - if for no other reason, then because if they don't like your app, they'll advise their less tech savvy friends to stay off it too.

gonzo41 6y ago
It's funny that a sharable list is such a hotly contested piece of space in the software world. I admire Trello's desire to keep things simple. I think what you're overlooking is that software is eating the world and if people shy off Trello, who cares. They are not going to run out of customers. We haven't hit a plateau of software projects in the world. And people that trade productive effort against the project for power user fun are probably going to hit a point where the burden of their reporting needs on the project becomes visible to everyone doing the work. (If I sound jaded, blame jira). Usually power users and their dashboards feed back into projects arcane and fragile rules around how tickets are marked, categorized and written all for the better visibility. I think this is a project anti pattern, it's like the song that plays before the death march. Generally, I think managers are looking for a magic bullet for complex project management. They are thinking that a some uber reporting and dash board vomiting software package will save them. I know it won't. I have Visio, but I sure do use WebSequenceDiagrams a lot and enjoy the speed it delivers me with it's focus.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Generally, I think managers are looking for a magic bullet for complex project management. They are thinking that a some uber reporting and dash board vomiting software package will save them. I know it won't. Perhaps. But then I feel there's a big hole on the market, something desirable by both individual contributors and product managers. A lightweight ticketing/work planning system that supports certain (arguably fundamental) task management features like: - Infinite nesting (not just 1 or 2 levels). - Fast adding of tasks - Modelling tasks as DAGs, not trees. That is, allowing for proper dependency graph between the tasks. - Allowing entering both absolute and relative time estimates ("start: 2020-11-01, end: +5 days", and "start: N/A, end: +5 days", where "N/A" means "once all dependencies are complete"). - Turning said task DAG with estimates into a GANTT chart. - Turning said task DAG into a PERT chart and computing the critical path. Seriously, the last three are kind of fundamental if you want to do some kind of scheduling around planned work, and yet I haven't seen a single developer-oriented product that could do it. I'm not pulling this list out of my ass - this is what we came up with at my previous job, and we spent time looking for a solution implementing even a subset of this. But for some reason, it's become a religion in our industry that tasks shall form trees, of depth no larger than 2, and GANNT and PERT are for PHB MBAs and not for self-respecting developers. sigh. If I wasn't a busy parent with a job and a videogame to write, I'd probably write this myself.
  - danieltillett 6y ago
    Seems like one of the better ideas I have seen for a startup.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Wish I had time to do it. The fundamentals aren't really that hard - a dependency DAG of Tasks. Tasks store metadata, including incomplete/relative start/end estimates I mentioned. You could display it as a DAG, or in a traditional "tree structured task" form by just starting at a Task and walking in one direction to fill a tree, and in the other to fill "backlinks". Add a GANTT and PERT chart and that's it. The most difficult part I think would be to make entering graph nodes ergonomic. In my experience, these kinds of tools live and die by the speed at which you can enter, modify and move things around in them. If you have to click a lot and type data in a bunch of forms, developer won't be using it. Example: that time when I first compiled the list of desired features, we were trying out YouTrack from JetBrains. My co-worker liked it, but found entering subtasks annoying. I wrote a little script inside YouTrack that turned every Markdown checklist into new tickets, backlinked to the parent one. A total hack, but made a big qualitative difference in terms of working with the tool. The key two principles for me therefore are: - Fast to enter and manipulate data in it. Everything doable from keyboard, and little waiting for things to process (hello, Jira). - Embrace the fact that plans and work subdivisions keep changing all the time. Allow users to restructure their tasks, warn them when they affect other parts of the graph, and just persist the changelog so that a broken graph can be easily fixed. I have some more ideas in this space, but little time to deal with the surrounding work that's required to turn it into an application prototype.
      - girvo 6y ago
        I really like this idea. I’m going to take a crack at a simple PoC around the data flow and basic UI this long weekend. I’ll chuck it up on my GitHub; I really enjoy working with DAGs (I’m currently building a dynamic form system where groups of form fields are arranged as a DAG to allow for seriously powerful structured data collection and intra-group visibility/validation rules infinitely nested at work)
mhp 6y ago
We've got some stuff up our sleeves...
npunt 6y ago
Trello is of a certain vintage. It was a breath of fresh air when launched as it opened up new possibilities from the traditional office tools like docs & spreadsheets. But it's still a purpose-built tool that has a really tight coupling of interface-data, so it's not really a part of the next gen of tools like Airtable or Notion that are data-first and are way more flexible. I still love Trello for its fantastic info architecture, the card interface, and the data I have in it, but I barely use it anymore because it's not as good at organizing as a database, and not as good at scaling to docs and projects as a tool like Notion.

gonzo41 6y ago

It's funny that a sharable list is such a hotly contested piece of space in the software world. I admire Trello's desire to keep things simple. I think what you're overlooking is that software is eating the world and if people shy off Trello, who cares. They are not going to run out of customers. We haven't hit a plateau of software projects in the world. And people that trade productive effort against the project for power user fun are probably going to hit a point where the burden of their reporting needs on the project becomes visible to everyone doing the work. (If I sound jaded, blame jira). Usually power users and their dashboards feed back into projects arcane and fragile rules around how tickets are marked, categorized and written all for the better visibility. I think this is a project anti pattern, it's like the song that plays before the death march. Generally, I think managers are looking for a magic bullet for complex project management. They are thinking that a some uber reporting and dash board vomiting software package will save them. I know it won't. I have Visio, but I sure do use WebSequenceDiagrams a lot and enjoy the speed it delivers me with it's focus.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Generally, I think managers are looking for a magic bullet for complex project management. They are thinking that a some uber reporting and dash board vomiting software package will save them. I know it won't. Perhaps. But then I feel there's a big hole on the market, something desirable by both individual contributors and product managers. A lightweight ticketing/work planning system that supports certain (arguably fundamental) task management features like: - Infinite nesting (not just 1 or 2 levels). - Fast adding of tasks - Modelling tasks as DAGs, not trees. That is, allowing for proper dependency graph between the tasks. - Allowing entering both absolute and relative time estimates ("start: 2020-11-01, end: +5 days", and "start: N/A, end: +5 days", where "N/A" means "once all dependencies are complete"). - Turning said task DAG with estimates into a GANTT chart. - Turning said task DAG into a PERT chart and computing the critical path. Seriously, the last three are kind of fundamental if you want to do some kind of scheduling around planned work, and yet I haven't seen a single developer-oriented product that could do it. I'm not pulling this list out of my ass - this is what we came up with at my previous job, and we spent time looking for a solution implementing even a subset of this. But for some reason, it's become a religion in our industry that tasks shall form trees, of depth no larger than 2, and GANNT and PERT are for PHB MBAs and not for self-respecting developers. sigh. If I wasn't a busy parent with a job and a videogame to write, I'd probably write this myself.
- danieltillett 6y ago
  Seems like one of the better ideas I have seen for a startup.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Wish I had time to do it. The fundamentals aren't really that hard - a dependency DAG of Tasks. Tasks store metadata, including incomplete/relative start/end estimates I mentioned. You could display it as a DAG, or in a traditional "tree structured task" form by just starting at a Task and walking in one direction to fill a tree, and in the other to fill "backlinks". Add a GANTT and PERT chart and that's it. The most difficult part I think would be to make entering graph nodes ergonomic. In my experience, these kinds of tools live and die by the speed at which you can enter, modify and move things around in them. If you have to click a lot and type data in a bunch of forms, developer won't be using it. Example: that time when I first compiled the list of desired features, we were trying out YouTrack from JetBrains. My co-worker liked it, but found entering subtasks annoying. I wrote a little script inside YouTrack that turned every Markdown checklist into new tickets, backlinked to the parent one. A total hack, but made a big qualitative difference in terms of working with the tool. The key two principles for me therefore are: - Fast to enter and manipulate data in it. Everything doable from keyboard, and little waiting for things to process (hello, Jira). - Embrace the fact that plans and work subdivisions keep changing all the time. Allow users to restructure their tasks, warn them when they affect other parts of the graph, and just persist the changelog so that a broken graph can be easily fixed. I have some more ideas in this space, but little time to deal with the surrounding work that's required to turn it into an application prototype.
    - girvo 6y ago
      I really like this idea. I’m going to take a crack at a simple PoC around the data flow and basic UI this long weekend. I’ll chuck it up on my GitHub; I really enjoy working with DAGs (I’m currently building a dynamic form system where groups of form fields are arranged as a DAG to allow for seriously powerful structured data collection and intra-group visibility/validation rules infinitely nested at work)

mhp 6y ago

We've got some stuff up our sleeves...

npunt 6y ago

Trello is of a certain vintage. It was a breath of fresh air when launched as it opened up new possibilities from the traditional office tools like docs & spreadsheets. But it's still a purpose-built tool that has a really tight coupling of interface-data, so it's not really a part of the next gen of tools like Airtable or Notion that are data-first and are way more flexible. I still love Trello for its fantastic info architecture, the card interface, and the data I have in it, but I barely use it anymore because it's not as good at organizing as a database, and not as good at scaling to docs and projects as a tool like Notion.