Developer Glossary
Trello is a visual project management tool built around the kanban board concept, a simple but powerful system of cards organized into columns. Each card represents a task or item, and columns represent stages of a workflow (like "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done"). You drag cards between columns as work progresses. That is essentially the entire product, and that simplicity is Trello's greatest strength. While competitors have added dozens of views, features, and customization layers, Trello has remained focused on being the most intuitive and accessible way to organize work visually. For custom web application development, Trello is useful in two contexts. First, it is a great lightweight project management tool for smaller engagements where Jira would be overkill. Second, Trello's API and Power-Up ecosystem make it a frequent integration target, many businesses use Trello as a lightweight CRM, content calendar, or approval workflow, and custom applications often need to interact with that data.
Trello was created at Fog Creek Software, a New York City software company founded by Joel Spolsky, one of the most influential voices in software development. Spolsky was already famous in the developer community for his blog "Joel on Software," for co-creating Stack Overflow (the Q&A site that virtually every programmer uses), and for writing extensively about software management best practices. At Fog Creek, a team led by Michael Pryor built a prototype of a visual collaboration tool inspired by kanban boards. Spolsky unveiled Trello at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in September 2011, and it was one of the rare product launches that generated immediate, massive adoption. The product's genius was in its universality, it was not designed for any specific use case, which meant people used it for everything from wedding planning to software development to recipe collections. Trello was spun out of Fog Creek as its own company in 2014 and was acquired by Atlassian (the makers of Jira) in January 2017 for $425 million. The acquisition seemed paradoxical, Atlassian bought both the most complex project management tool (Jira) and the simplest one (Trello), but it gave Atlassian coverage across the entire spectrum of team needs.
Joel Spolsky later reflected that he sold Trello too early, given the explosive growth of the project management software market, the company might have been worth billions if it had remained independent.
Trello's design was directly influenced by an unexpected source: the Toyota Production System. The kanban methodology that Trello digitized was invented at Toyota in the late 1940s by Taiichi Ohno as a way to manage manufacturing inventory. Workers used physical cards (kanban literally means "signboard" in Japanese) attached to parts bins to signal when more parts were needed. Software teams adopted the concept in the 2000s using whiteboards and sticky notes, and Trello turned it into a digital product. Another surprising fact: at the time of Atlassian's $425 million acquisition, Trello had over 19 million registered users but was generating relatively modest revenue because the free tier was so capable that most users never needed to upgrade. Joel Spolsky later reflected that he sold Trello too early, given the explosive growth of the project management software market, the company might have been worth billions if it had remained independent. The acquisition also resulted in an odd corporate situation where Atlassian now owns both Jira and Trello, two products that directly compete with each other, and the company has struggled at times to clearly differentiate when customers should use which tool.
Visit: trello.com