Michael Pryor, Trello: How to build a mass market product
There is no doubt that you heard about Trello - after all, it already has more than 16 million users. How does it feel to develop, launch and promote such a massive product? How to prioritize product features with such a wide range of use cases? How to carry out monetization according to the principle of value for the consumer? Intercom talked about this and many other things with Trello Executive Director Michael Pryor. And we, the localization company Alconost , have transferred all this.
We publish the translation without cuts and changes, and if you don’t have time at all, here are five key conclusions:
1. Without a competent marketing strategy, even a good product, released at the right time, can fail.
')
2. The introduction of new abstract features in a horizontal product is costly, because you have to teach people how to use them.
3. Michael does not consider the templates the right way to familiarize new users with Trello. On the contrary, it supports the idea of ​​real usage scenarios proposed by the user community.
4. Promotion of a horizontal product is difficult, but there are certain scenarios of use with deferred effect, for example, the use of Trello by HR staff to adapt new employees. In this case, each new employee receives a free lesson on the use of the product.
5. It is important to get paid for your product, but fixed prices do not allow you to extract the maximum benefit. Your prices should reflect the benefits that users derive from your product.
And now more and from the very beginning.
Des Trainor: Michael, welcome to the show. Could you tell us about your career path? Fog Creek: known to all. Stack Overflow: known to all. Trello: known to all. You just give out hit after hit.
Michael Pryor: Well, you didn’t mention all the mistakes we have made over the years.
Des: All according to the laws of the genre.
Michael: Back in 2000, I and co-founder Joel Spolsky worked in New York in a startup called Juneau. It was a free email service that AOL would have to compete with at the time. At that time, a programmer in New York could work only in two places: in a bank or advertising agency. There were simply no ordinary software companies in the city.
That is why we decided to create such a company. At that time, no one had any product ideas. The company was supposed to be just a place where developers work, and we had a lot of opinions and thoughts on this matter. Joel has written a lot about this over the years on his website joelonsoftware .
Over the years we have tried many things on different projects. Of course, Stack Overflow and Trello appeared much later, after we had filled a lot of bumps and learned not to repeat our mistakes. Yes, the process was definitely long.
Des: From previous products you had FogBugz, Copilot and CityDesk. How did these products differ in scale from Trello and Stack Overflow?
Michael: Well, FogBugz is quite a large product. We sell it; we are still developing it. It was created when JIRA was not yet in sight, and for a long time they were going head to head. Thanks to certain steps that Atlassian has taken over all these years with regard to marketing and pricing, they managed to rise quite well, but we also created a good stable business based on FogBugz.
FogBugz is still one of the company's key projects.
Other products, such as CityDesk, just came out at the wrong time. If you recall the year 2000, then remember that being a blogger was not easy then. There were practically no blogs. You could install some scripts on the server, but for this you needed access to the command line, people just did not know what it was. We wrote an application that was supposed to be a convenient CMS for bloggers, so we planned to solve the problems of users. And then it turned out that all this is much more convenient and efficient to do with the help of SaaS.
Another good example is CoPilot. We made it to help ourselves install FogBugz on client computers. At a certain point, somewhere in the years 2006-2007, the installation process became really complicated. We kept saying to ourselves: “Eh, it would be nice to see what was on that computer.” Sharing the screen was then quite a challenge, but we solved it by creating CoPilot. It never turned into a big and serious product, because we tried to sell it to the wrong people. We offered it to customer support staff, not to the users themselves. The product was good, the time was right, but the positioning let us down.
When we did the Stack Overflow, the site itself with questions and answers, we said, “Listen, this is really cool, people like it. Or can we sell it to someone else? ”After all, this was what we had been doing 10 years before. And then we talked with several investors, and it turned out that the idea was so-so.
It’s as if Facebook said: “We did it in one university, so let's sell our software to other companies, let everyone use it.” At Stack Overflow, it was the users, the network of professionals, and not the software that was important. And - lo and behold! - in a couple of weeks there were already 50 clones.
Des: You mentioned that with CoPilot you did not hit the market. Did you take into account such moments when you developed Trello?
Michael: Of course. When we were making Trello, from the very beginning we decided to make a horizontal product with maximum market coverage. The idea was pretty risky. Such tools are really hard to do, but we set ourselves such a goal, and it was completely different from what we wanted to achieve with FogBugz.
Des: You recently spoke on the Hacker News pages on what Trello is in your mind. It seemed to me that you did not want to drive this definition into the framework of a project management tool. Can you explain? We had Jason Fried here recently, and he was talking about the same thing about Basecamp.
Michael: Many developers of task management products approach the process in terms of simply looking at workflows, defining concepts, building a data structure around this, and then a web application, and that's it — the people themselves fill it all with data. We will put them in the database, and then we will tell them what to do with this data.
Remember Asana, JIRA, even FogBugz or Salesforce. They all have this built-in grammar. For example, there are leads and customers. When you first start using such products, this grammar needs to be understood and accepted. In the case of Asana, these concepts are more general, at the level of tasks and milestones. This is one of the ways to solve a problem, and it suits people with very systemic, structured thinking.
In the case of Trello, we focused more on how we use Excel. When you open a new table, it is empty, right? You start to enter data, and you need to specify Excel, which data you enter - interest, amounts in a certain currency, formulas, relationships between cells, and so on. You enter data and create a model in parallel. Excel has no semantic model. You provide it yourself. You say: “This is a column. Here there will be a diagram, it will link these two variables. ”This is like a Lego constructor.
We in work on Trello were guided by the same principles. The best metaphor for Trello is stickers on the board. It is clear to everyone. Trello immediately impresses visibility. You do not need to learn new concepts for you.
It is also important to understand that the cards in Trello are cards, not tasks. Microsoft made a clone of Trello called Planner, and there they have tasks. This in itself is not a mistake, but they approach the process from the point of view of “I will now define the structure, and then ask people to fill it with data.” This approach works well for a very narrow audience, but if you want to provide the product with the greatest coverage, you need adapt to the methods of work familiar to people and enable them to use your product to rethink the structure of their tasks.
Des: When you make a horizontal product, you probably think something like “Or maybe someone will use it to plan a wedding or repair in the house?” What are some of the most unusual usage scenarios you've come across?
Michael: Yes, the wedding example is pretty funny, because when you look at competitors' products, there are always notes on this topic on the corporate blog. “Plan your wedding at JIRA.” All this is just an attempt to say that the product is intended for a very wide audience.
There was one case, a very long time ago, and he surprised us quite strongly. In Brazil, protests were held, and their members used Trello for internal coordination.
Or another example from the recent past: when there was a terrorist attack in Belgium, people used Trello to find survivors and victims. They collected information bit by bit from various news sources and stored it in our product in a convenient form. All that we could say at that moment: “Wow, and yet people really appreciated the convenience of the product and use it to coordinate such a huge number of people from different cities and countries.”
When I think of Trello, I think of him as a place where everyone thinks in the same categories. That is why you have that whiteboard with markers in your office. Everyone gathers, and you say: “In short, this is the current status of the project.” This is not my personal view on the status of the project. This is not your view on the status of the project. We all see the same thing. This is what distinguishes Trello from the mass of other similar tools. We do not focus on specific people, we focus on the whole team - well, as if you were all lost in the forest, you would like to have a map or a GPS navigator with you. You would look at it together, and everyone would understand where you are and where you need to go. This is how we see how users work with Trello.
Des: I like the maneuvering space that opens before you after you decide not to focus on any particular vertical. On the one hand, this leads to explosive growth, which you would never see if you called Trello a system for monitoring tasks and managing projects for startups.
On the other hand, how do you prioritize features? Do only what is useful for everyone? How do you resist the temptation to roll out a feature first of all for a large group of corporate users who promise to massively issue a platinum subscription at a triple rate as soon as this functionality becomes available?
Michael: Great question. We initially expected that many features that we would be asked for would be typically programmer - because it was the developers who were the core of our audience. It was Stack Overflow, it was Fog Creek Software. People who knew us would say: “Wow, great. Can you add all these Kanban chips, all these tracks, like in a pool, and more Gant charts? ”When you make a mass product, all this simply does not make sense. We did not develop a tool for Kanban. We made software development tools using flexible methodologies.
We knew from the very beginning that if there were any user requests for a new functionality, we would have to sit down and get to the bottom of their problem. What are they trying to solve by requesting a new feature from us?
For example, the user asks to add story points to the cards, and from the top he wants to see the amount of story points in order to be able to estimate the backlog size or the sprint size. The same request can also come from a sales professional who states it differently: “Yes, I used Trello to evaluate my pipeline, and I had a transaction value on each card. Therefore, I wanted the columns to show me the amount of all transactions. ”The essence of the feature is to add a number to the card, and to display the sum or average value on top of each column.
In the case of horizontal positioning, you need to understand the uses of the product. Here it is important to be able to carefully listen to the user and analyze the possibility of implementing such a functional before you start developing a new feature. Coming back to my words about concepts - when you add abstract concepts to a product, get ready for the fact that you have to sweat, because you have to thoroughly explain these concepts to users.
Take an example from Trello. We did a thing called Collections, and allowed users to combine their boards in the collections. This is an abstract concept. This is not a particular thing, this feature is still not even fully implemented, because you can not really see the collection yet. It does not represent any tangible, specific value for the user, like the other features in Trello. But it does allow us to group boards into some sets, and at the same time people need to realize this - more precisely, we have to train people in this.
Des: When a user first logs in and enters Trello, then, as in the case of Excel, he sees only a blank screen and empty lists. There is no card. How do you help them deal with the system?
Michael: Good question. We are currently working on this. It's all about who logged in to the system, right? If I show you an example of planning a wedding when you first start, and you have just celebrated the 20th anniversary of family life, then the example will prove to be clearly unsuccessful.
In this situation, it is difficult to select the desired example and use it for a specific category of users. We are currently working on an adaptation funnel, which will allow us to determine which examples are most relevant to the user, and show them at the very beginning of working with the system.
We are constantly asked: “Why do you not have ready-made templates?” Partly because it is quite difficult to get really useful information from a template. Yes, you can call the lists differently, but as soon as it comes to the cards and data, then the user must enter everything himself.
The interesting thing is that behind the boards are often stories. The network is full of articles on “I used Trello to make X.” The content of the articles usually comes down to something like “This is how I set everything up, and this is how it worked for me.” We began to understand that this is a very important point .
We also held a lot of events in which users told how they used Trello to solve problems in their companies. People like this format very much. They like to listen to real users who share real-world experiences using Trello to solve real-world problems.
In the future, I think we will find a way to talk about this experience right from the product. Instead of simply showing a list of selected boards, we’ll let the community talk about the best ways to use Trello.
Des: When you talked about different application scenarios for the product, did you consider different feature sets for different categories of users?
Michael: That has always been a problem too. If you offer the most horizontal product, how will you drive people into the framework of a rigid functional vertical?
Suppose they want to plan a wedding or create a board for developing software, to track the status of candidates in the HR department, or a calendar for the marketing department. For these special boards, we decided to add an extra layer, which we called Power-Ups (Enhancements). We have very advanced features in Trello, but they stand apart. They can be used on specific boards. Thus, if you first get into Trello, you do not need to delve into these additional details - you just learn the basic boards, cards and lists, and only then, if necessary, you can connect more advanced features of the product.
A good example would be an improved calendar. If you put deadlines on cards, you can see them in calendar mode. Or, for example, we have integration with Intercom. Those. Among these additional features are both integration with other products and internal improvements that make work more efficient.
Just recently, we made all these improvements completely free. Previously, you had to pay, and now you can freely include them on each of your boards. Moreover, if you are a developer, you can make your extensions and share them with the 16 million Trello audience. This is just a huge number of people. But if you need to activate more than a certain number of extensions, you can buy an upgrade to the commercial version of the product.
Continuation here
About the translator
The article is translated in Alconost.
Alconost is engaged in the localization of applications, games and websites in 60 languages. Language translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, 24/7 project managers, any formats of string resources.
We also make advertising and training videos - for websites selling, image, advertising, training, teasers, expliners, trailers for Google Play and the App Store.
Read more: https://alconost.com
We publish the translation without cuts and changes, and if you don’t have time at all, here are five key conclusions:
1. Without a competent marketing strategy, even a good product, released at the right time, can fail.
')
2. The introduction of new abstract features in a horizontal product is costly, because you have to teach people how to use them.
3. Michael does not consider the templates the right way to familiarize new users with Trello. On the contrary, it supports the idea of ​​real usage scenarios proposed by the user community.
4. Promotion of a horizontal product is difficult, but there are certain scenarios of use with deferred effect, for example, the use of Trello by HR staff to adapt new employees. In this case, each new employee receives a free lesson on the use of the product.
5. It is important to get paid for your product, but fixed prices do not allow you to extract the maximum benefit. Your prices should reflect the benefits that users derive from your product.
And now more and from the very beginning.
Des Trainor: Michael, welcome to the show. Could you tell us about your career path? Fog Creek: known to all. Stack Overflow: known to all. Trello: known to all. You just give out hit after hit.
Michael Pryor: Well, you didn’t mention all the mistakes we have made over the years.
Des: All according to the laws of the genre.
Michael: Back in 2000, I and co-founder Joel Spolsky worked in New York in a startup called Juneau. It was a free email service that AOL would have to compete with at the time. At that time, a programmer in New York could work only in two places: in a bank or advertising agency. There were simply no ordinary software companies in the city.
That is why we decided to create such a company. At that time, no one had any product ideas. The company was supposed to be just a place where developers work, and we had a lot of opinions and thoughts on this matter. Joel has written a lot about this over the years on his website joelonsoftware .
Over the years we have tried many things on different projects. Of course, Stack Overflow and Trello appeared much later, after we had filled a lot of bumps and learned not to repeat our mistakes. Yes, the process was definitely long.
Lessons learned from previous product launches
Des: From previous products you had FogBugz, Copilot and CityDesk. How did these products differ in scale from Trello and Stack Overflow?
Michael: Well, FogBugz is quite a large product. We sell it; we are still developing it. It was created when JIRA was not yet in sight, and for a long time they were going head to head. Thanks to certain steps that Atlassian has taken over all these years with regard to marketing and pricing, they managed to rise quite well, but we also created a good stable business based on FogBugz.
FogBugz is still one of the company's key projects.
Other products, such as CityDesk, just came out at the wrong time. If you recall the year 2000, then remember that being a blogger was not easy then. There were practically no blogs. You could install some scripts on the server, but for this you needed access to the command line, people just did not know what it was. We wrote an application that was supposed to be a convenient CMS for bloggers, so we planned to solve the problems of users. And then it turned out that all this is much more convenient and efficient to do with the help of SaaS.
Another good example is CoPilot. We made it to help ourselves install FogBugz on client computers. At a certain point, somewhere in the years 2006-2007, the installation process became really complicated. We kept saying to ourselves: “Eh, it would be nice to see what was on that computer.” Sharing the screen was then quite a challenge, but we solved it by creating CoPilot. It never turned into a big and serious product, because we tried to sell it to the wrong people. We offered it to customer support staff, not to the users themselves. The product was good, the time was right, but the positioning let us down.
When we did the Stack Overflow, the site itself with questions and answers, we said, “Listen, this is really cool, people like it. Or can we sell it to someone else? ”After all, this was what we had been doing 10 years before. And then we talked with several investors, and it turned out that the idea was so-so.
It’s as if Facebook said: “We did it in one university, so let's sell our software to other companies, let everyone use it.” At Stack Overflow, it was the users, the network of professionals, and not the software that was important. And - lo and behold! - in a couple of weeks there were already 50 clones.
Des: You mentioned that with CoPilot you did not hit the market. Did you take into account such moments when you developed Trello?
Michael: Of course. When we were making Trello, from the very beginning we decided to make a horizontal product with maximum market coverage. The idea was pretty risky. Such tools are really hard to do, but we set ourselves such a goal, and it was completely different from what we wanted to achieve with FogBugz.
Des: You recently spoke on the Hacker News pages on what Trello is in your mind. It seemed to me that you did not want to drive this definition into the framework of a project management tool. Can you explain? We had Jason Fried here recently, and he was talking about the same thing about Basecamp.
My answer to "What is Trello? I don't get it." pic.twitter.com/vUj37XwUlx
- Michael Pryor (@michaelpryor) January 22, 2016
Michael: Many developers of task management products approach the process in terms of simply looking at workflows, defining concepts, building a data structure around this, and then a web application, and that's it — the people themselves fill it all with data. We will put them in the database, and then we will tell them what to do with this data.
Remember Asana, JIRA, even FogBugz or Salesforce. They all have this built-in grammar. For example, there are leads and customers. When you first start using such products, this grammar needs to be understood and accepted. In the case of Asana, these concepts are more general, at the level of tasks and milestones. This is one of the ways to solve a problem, and it suits people with very systemic, structured thinking.
In the case of Trello, we focused more on how we use Excel. When you open a new table, it is empty, right? You start to enter data, and you need to specify Excel, which data you enter - interest, amounts in a certain currency, formulas, relationships between cells, and so on. You enter data and create a model in parallel. Excel has no semantic model. You provide it yourself. You say: “This is a column. Here there will be a diagram, it will link these two variables. ”This is like a Lego constructor.
We in work on Trello were guided by the same principles. The best metaphor for Trello is stickers on the board. It is clear to everyone. Trello immediately impresses visibility. You do not need to learn new concepts for you.
It is also important to understand that the cards in Trello are cards, not tasks. Microsoft made a clone of Trello called Planner, and there they have tasks. This in itself is not a mistake, but they approach the process from the point of view of “I will now define the structure, and then ask people to fill it with data.” This approach works well for a very narrow audience, but if you want to provide the product with the greatest coverage, you need adapt to the methods of work familiar to people and enable them to use your product to rethink the structure of their tasks.
Des: When you make a horizontal product, you probably think something like “Or maybe someone will use it to plan a wedding or repair in the house?” What are some of the most unusual usage scenarios you've come across?
Michael: Yes, the wedding example is pretty funny, because when you look at competitors' products, there are always notes on this topic on the corporate blog. “Plan your wedding at JIRA.” All this is just an attempt to say that the product is intended for a very wide audience.
There was one case, a very long time ago, and he surprised us quite strongly. In Brazil, protests were held, and their members used Trello for internal coordination.
Or another example from the recent past: when there was a terrorist attack in Belgium, people used Trello to find survivors and victims. They collected information bit by bit from various news sources and stored it in our product in a convenient form. All that we could say at that moment: “Wow, and yet people really appreciated the convenience of the product and use it to coordinate such a huge number of people from different cities and countries.”
When I think of Trello, I think of him as a place where everyone thinks in the same categories. That is why you have that whiteboard with markers in your office. Everyone gathers, and you say: “In short, this is the current status of the project.” This is not my personal view on the status of the project. This is not your view on the status of the project. We all see the same thing. This is what distinguishes Trello from the mass of other similar tools. We do not focus on specific people, we focus on the whole team - well, as if you were all lost in the forest, you would like to have a map or a GPS navigator with you. You would look at it together, and everyone would understand where you are and where you need to go. This is how we see how users work with Trello.
Once the product is for everyone, what are you developing?
Des: I like the maneuvering space that opens before you after you decide not to focus on any particular vertical. On the one hand, this leads to explosive growth, which you would never see if you called Trello a system for monitoring tasks and managing projects for startups.
On the other hand, how do you prioritize features? Do only what is useful for everyone? How do you resist the temptation to roll out a feature first of all for a large group of corporate users who promise to massively issue a platinum subscription at a triple rate as soon as this functionality becomes available?
Michael: Great question. We initially expected that many features that we would be asked for would be typically programmer - because it was the developers who were the core of our audience. It was Stack Overflow, it was Fog Creek Software. People who knew us would say: “Wow, great. Can you add all these Kanban chips, all these tracks, like in a pool, and more Gant charts? ”When you make a mass product, all this simply does not make sense. We did not develop a tool for Kanban. We made software development tools using flexible methodologies.
We knew from the very beginning that if there were any user requests for a new functionality, we would have to sit down and get to the bottom of their problem. What are they trying to solve by requesting a new feature from us?
For example, the user asks to add story points to the cards, and from the top he wants to see the amount of story points in order to be able to estimate the backlog size or the sprint size. The same request can also come from a sales professional who states it differently: “Yes, I used Trello to evaluate my pipeline, and I had a transaction value on each card. Therefore, I wanted the columns to show me the amount of all transactions. ”The essence of the feature is to add a number to the card, and to display the sum or average value on top of each column.
In the case of horizontal positioning, you need to understand the uses of the product. Here it is important to be able to carefully listen to the user and analyze the possibility of implementing such a functional before you start developing a new feature. Coming back to my words about concepts - when you add abstract concepts to a product, get ready for the fact that you have to sweat, because you have to thoroughly explain these concepts to users.
Take an example from Trello. We did a thing called Collections, and allowed users to combine their boards in the collections. This is an abstract concept. This is not a particular thing, this feature is still not even fully implemented, because you can not really see the collection yet. It does not represent any tangible, specific value for the user, like the other features in Trello. But it does allow us to group boards into some sets, and at the same time people need to realize this - more precisely, we have to train people in this.
Adaptation process for all users
Des: When a user first logs in and enters Trello, then, as in the case of Excel, he sees only a blank screen and empty lists. There is no card. How do you help them deal with the system?
Michael: Good question. We are currently working on this. It's all about who logged in to the system, right? If I show you an example of planning a wedding when you first start, and you have just celebrated the 20th anniversary of family life, then the example will prove to be clearly unsuccessful.
In this situation, it is difficult to select the desired example and use it for a specific category of users. We are currently working on an adaptation funnel, which will allow us to determine which examples are most relevant to the user, and show them at the very beginning of working with the system.
We are constantly asked: “Why do you not have ready-made templates?” Partly because it is quite difficult to get really useful information from a template. Yes, you can call the lists differently, but as soon as it comes to the cards and data, then the user must enter everything himself.
The interesting thing is that behind the boards are often stories. The network is full of articles on “I used Trello to make X.” The content of the articles usually comes down to something like “This is how I set everything up, and this is how it worked for me.” We began to understand that this is a very important point .
We also held a lot of events in which users told how they used Trello to solve problems in their companies. People like this format very much. They like to listen to real users who share real-world experiences using Trello to solve real-world problems.
In the future, I think we will find a way to talk about this experience right from the product. Instead of simply showing a list of selected boards, we’ll let the community talk about the best ways to use Trello.
Des: When you talked about different application scenarios for the product, did you consider different feature sets for different categories of users?
Michael: That has always been a problem too. If you offer the most horizontal product, how will you drive people into the framework of a rigid functional vertical?
Suppose they want to plan a wedding or create a board for developing software, to track the status of candidates in the HR department, or a calendar for the marketing department. For these special boards, we decided to add an extra layer, which we called Power-Ups (Enhancements). We have very advanced features in Trello, but they stand apart. They can be used on specific boards. Thus, if you first get into Trello, you do not need to delve into these additional details - you just learn the basic boards, cards and lists, and only then, if necessary, you can connect more advanced features of the product.
A good example would be an improved calendar. If you put deadlines on cards, you can see them in calendar mode. Or, for example, we have integration with Intercom. Those. Among these additional features are both integration with other products and internal improvements that make work more efficient.
Just recently, we made all these improvements completely free. Previously, you had to pay, and now you can freely include them on each of your boards. Moreover, if you are a developer, you can make your extensions and share them with the 16 million Trello audience. This is just a huge number of people. But if you need to activate more than a certain number of extensions, you can buy an upgrade to the commercial version of the product.
Continuation here
About the translator
The article is translated in Alconost.
Alconost is engaged in the localization of applications, games and websites in 60 languages. Language translators, linguistic testing, cloud platform with API, continuous localization, 24/7 project managers, any formats of string resources.
We also make advertising and training videos - for websites selling, image, advertising, training, teasers, expliners, trailers for Google Play and the App Store.
Read more: https://alconost.com
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/310656/
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