Trello enterprise customer partnership program
In 2020, I was design lead on Trello’s Enterprise product team. We had a longstanding collaborative relationship with many customers, which helped increase our understanding and prioritization of pain points. My product partner and I wanted to establish a long-term effort to create tighter feedback loops as we executed and iterated on our roadmap.
📰 See Lucky Number 13: New Features to Trello Enterprise.
To do this, we chose six Enterprise customers who collectively represented a holistic view of our customer base and partnered with them for a year. We called the program “Make 6 customers ecstatic about Trello.”
Approach
Our goal with this research partnership was to gain a more extensive understanding of enterprise administrators’ behavior and mindset, and quickly get feedback when we ship features.
Recruitment criteria included:
Ample opportunity for expansion
Feeling real pain today
Wide spectrum of size and spend
Willingness to engage with us
Using core Trello enterprise functionality
Once we recruited customers, we established a regular cadence of interaction via biweekly surveys and monthly interviews.
We recorded feedback from customer touchpoints in a color-coded spreadsheet so we could easily track sentiment over time. This simple method immediately tells a compelling story by seeing which topics trend to red or green by the end of the engagement.
This screenshot uses lorem ipsum to protect customer information.
Insights and a deeper dive into the admin psyche
Towards the end of the engagement, themes started to emerge regarding what enterprise admins needed from an enterprise project management solution. In a “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs” type visualization, I illustrated the priority of these needs and shared them alongside my research report.
My final report lived in a comprehensive Confluence document that I presented at a Trello town hall meeting and socialized throughout Atlassian. It included the highs and lows of the year, supported by customer quotes and videos.
Impact
Carrying out a long-term research initiative like this strongly deepened our relationship with key customers, and also introduced team members to the value of getting facetime with customers.
“Trello and other solutions that we have to enable collaboration have been, you know, just absolute business lifesavers... We’ve seen a ton of growth in Trello Enterprise and being able to adopt what I look at as true Enterprise grade administrative controls that are obviously way different than your normal consumer base.”
This was a new way of working for most teams at Atlassian, and over the next year, multiple other teams within the organization carried out similar initiatives based on our success.
The insights from this research helped guide and prioritize my team’s roadmap for the next fiscal year.
A few years later when I transitioned to product management, I got the opportunity to give a talk at an internal product craft conference about my experience leading this initiative so that I could encourage other product managers to collaborate with designers for similar efforts.
This slide from my presentation accompanied my discussion around establishing continuous long-term feedback loops with a smaller cohort of customers, as compared with the more common one-time feedback loop with a larger cohort.