Increasing user collaboration on Trello
In 2021, Trello was contending with a decline in MAU (monthly active user) growth. One of our biggest indicators of whether or not a user would become MAU was if they collaborated with other users. Through usage metrics and qualitative feedback, we found that our users experienced a lot of friction in the collaborative experience in Trello, specifically in sharing a board with other users.
My role as a product manager was to lead the team towards a milestone-based solution that would get users collaborating in Trello through seamless sharing and permissions experiences.
This initiative ended in an increase in board sharing and invite acceptance rates.
Digging deep and gaining alignment
As with any new initiative, my team couldn’t move forward without gaining a shared understanding of the problem space, and defining and prioritizing the problems we were going to address.
When planning our kickoff, I made sure to include all cross-functional collaborators with whom we might have dependencies, like mobile and support. I used both qualitative and quantitative insights to tell the story of the problem space and our approach to finding a solution.
Kickoff snapshot
Pop quiz
Real customer issues
Mission and OKRs
Not reinventing the wheel
We knew we needed to address pain points with the board sharing experience, and it quickly became clear that there were experience standards we could (and should) adhere to. I paired with our product designer to compare Trello’s board sharing experience with that of other Atlassian products, as well as the sharing experiences of other work management products.
The product designer on my team, with whom I closely collaborated, went through multiple iterations of a newly redesigned share modal based on current pattern standards and the patterns in other Atlassian products. We did some basic usability testing with our users to validate designs.
We maintained the same general overall pattern, but explored different interactions, content structures, and features.
Our final experience sat at the intersection of what tested best with customers, what fit within technical constraints we faced, and which steps were necessary as a first milestone for our overall sharing and permissions-related program.
Rollout based on learning, experience, and quality
Release planning and execution was a truly collaborative effort between product, design, and engineering.
I advocated for a 2-week internal release before shipping to users in production so we (Trello power users!) could:
Kick the tires on the new board sharing experience and raise any usability or experience quality issues.
Iteratively ship features as they were ready so we could test them as soon as possible without being 100% finished.
The internal release went well and the team was able to react to a few minor bugs and usability tweaks.
We executed a rolling production release, monitoring signals for incidents or negative user sentiment.
Impact
Increase in direct board shares
Increase in invite acceptance rates
Increase in shares via link
For customer sentiment, we monitored our support queue, Atlassian Community forums, and social media. We didn’t have incoming posts or tickets related to the change, and we had a customer post a YouTube video demonstrating the new share experience soon after we released it.