DEV Community: Michelle Walstra

How our design team uses Trello to streamline productivity

Michelle Walstra — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 14:11:51 +0000

If you’re a UX designer for a small agency, you are used to wearing many hats. You work across multiple projects and assume various roles, which makes the job very exciting but also super stressful. The more balls in the air, the easier it is to drop one.

I work for a small consulting agency and we use Trello to manage all our tasks. Why do we do this? Because Trello is easy-to-use and crazy powerful; there is a plethora of integrations available to help streamline your workflow.

We have a Trello mission board per product team and on that board we keep all the cards we are working on in the current sprint. As a designer working on multiple teams, things got complicated fast. As someone who is always looking for ways to streamline processes, I knew I had to find a way to minimize the noise and maximize the work done.

So I created one board…the board to rule them all! 💪

This new master board would provide an overview of all the tasks the design team (3 of us) had to work on across products, and would also include a way for us to manage those pesky “5-minute” tasks that come in via email.

Here is my how-to guide to creating a design team Trello board:

(Please note that I will be referring to members of the design team as unicorns *🦄)*

1. Create Custom Fields

The name may mislead you into thinking this is a native Trello feature, but Custom Fields is actually a Trello Power-Up. It allows you to add dropdown menus, checkboxes and additional fields to your cards.

As a company, we use Custom Fields on our cards across projects to add data like size estimates, product owner and project area. For my new master board, I wanted a custom *from *field to tell me which board a card has come from.

2. Setup Butler Rules

Butler is a powerhouse of automation. In their own words, they “supercharge your Trello workflow”. The best part about using Butler is that it’s super easy-to-use - you don’t need any || or &&’s.

Here are a few rules I setup:

When a unicorn is added to a Trello card, copy that card onto our master board and connect the cards.
When a card is moved into list X, move the connected card into list Y (or X if your boards all have the same lists/lanes)
Add the custom* from* field, mentioned above, to each new card and populate the value with the corresponding board name.

Example of Butler rule combining bullet point 1 & 3

Another cool feature of Butler is that you can create Card buttons that do specific tasks. For e.g. I created a button called ‘Done’ that would move a card to the ‘Done’ column (it’s very complicated, I don’t expect everyone to understand)

3. Connect your Email

It doesn’t matter how well you train your clients, you are bound to receive a few emails requesting changes (i.e. work to be done). In order to keep track of ALL our work, we needed the ability to forward emails to our new Trello board as cards.

Trello has a built-in email to board feature, did you know that? 🔥

You can find it here: Menu → More → Email-to-Board Settings

Trello’s Email to Board feature

This allows us to forward in emails to the board as cards in a specific list. Super useful! But wait, there’s more…

There is a new Trello Power-Up on the scene called SendBoard that not only connects an email to a board, but gives you the ability to reply to emails in Trello as well. Win-win! 🚀

You set up a custom board address, similar to Trello’s feature, but the cool part is that you can connect your own custom email-address so when you reply the client will have no idea that you sent the email from within Trello.

4. Utilize the power of the Trello network

There are so many great Trello Power-Ups out there to enhance productivity and streamline your workflow. Every team has varying requirements and uses different tools but it’s worth investigating if an app your team uses can be incorporated into Trello, for e.g. we use Github’s Trello integration to link PR’s and branches directly to a card and we use Harvest to track our time, without having to leave Trello.

Here’s a list of some free ones to get you started.

We’re almost there…

Using the above Power-Ups and integrations have substantially increased our team’s productivity but there are still improvements to be made on this solution.

I would love to be able to auto-send an email to clients once a card moves to list X.

I would also like a feature similar to Trello’s ‘Connect cards’ but one that actually linked one card across boards, instead of copying and attaching the related card.

Have any other tips on how to streamline processes with Trello? Did I miss a great Power-Up? Let me know in the comments… 😃

Bye and thanks for reading!

The Magic Formula for Productivity

Michelle Walstra — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 11:30:37 +0000

If you’re a designer or a developer for a consulting agency, you will know the pain of constantly context switching between projects, clients and admin. Work is being done, but amidst all the emails, Slack messages and Quip conversations it’s difficult to focus and be productive.

Our small web development agency felt this pain and decided to do something about it. As a team, we used Trello for organising and collaborating on all kinds of projects. But Trello didn’t provide a way for us to communicate with people outside of our team.

So we used a stand-alone helpdesk solution to receive and reply to client emails. This meant that team members were continuously context switching, making mistakes and wasting time and money. Why couldn’t we keep everything in Trello — a powerful tool we loved using?

Thus, SendBoard was born. 🎉

Our mission is to help teams get more done by allowing them to send, receive and collaborate on email without having to leave Trello — everything is in one place.

Teams get to leverage the power of Trello (Power-Ups, automation & collaboration) and clients get faster turn-around times. It’s a win-win 🏆

Since our team has been using SendBoard, our average response times have dropped substantially and the amount of work (cards in the Trello world) we get through has increased drastically.

So there is a magic formula for productivity, at least for small teams…

Trello + SendBoard

Give it a try and let us know how it works for you and your team! 🙌
On a related note, SendBoard went live on Product Hunt today, so please show us some love to help us spread the word. ❤️👍

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/sendboard-for-trello

Thanks for reading - have a super day!

How a positioning workshop saved our product

Michelle Walstra — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 20:17:41 +0000

We had a big vision for our product, it was going to be amazing. Then it launched, and it wasn’t. There were huge on-boarding problems and we couldn’t understand why.

I came across ‘Obviously Awesome’ by April Dunford and it changed my world. It was so clear that we had a positioning problem, or as she puts it ‘we fell into the trap of thinking there was a default context around our offering. I would recommend any product owners and marketers read this book.

So I set up a positioning workshop with our two directors and a member from each team (design, dev, marketing). There were five of us.

Using her book and an awesome template from Slides Carnival, I created a Google Slides presentation to explain what positioning was, why it was important and the exercises we were going to work through to fix it. You can view my template here.

We are a somewhat distributed team, with 2 out of 5 of us in the meeting working remotely. I knew, as the facilitator of the workshop, that I needed to harness the power of some awesome tool to make a remote workshop run smoothy. So I used Miro (Previously RealTime Board), a trusted tool in our company.

Based on the 10-step process from Dunford’s book, I set up a Miro template that I could use for all future positioning workshops. I also learnt a thing or two from Miro’s Distributed Summit recently about how to use Miro effectively within a distributed team.

Miro - Before the Workshop

One example is that instead of users having to create sticky notes from the sidebar every time they had an idea, I created a large pile of single-colour sticky notes and assigned each pile to a person, which saved time and helped identify each member.

The workshop consisted of me switching between my presentation and Miro, when collaborative work was required. We would then discuss the ideas put forward, so that everyone was aware of what was written. We also used Miro’s voting functionality to prioritise certain ideas over others.

Miro - After the Workshop

The beauty of Miro is that you can see others taking action, and the freeform layout allows people to have fun.
Now, all that’s left is for us to collate everything our team came up with during our workshop and share our positioning with the world through updated marketing strategies and re-aligned messaging.

Perhaps the title of this article was a bit misleading as our product isn’t saved yet, BUT we have high hopes that a re-positioning or deliberate positioning of our product will destine it for greatness.

Obligatory cat gif to thank you for reading.

If you liked this, please give it a clap over at Medium:

DEV Community: Michelle Walstra

How our design team uses Trello to streamline productivity

1. Create Custom Fields

2. Setup Butler Rules

3. Connect your Email

4. Utilize the power of the Trello network

We’re almost there…

The Magic Formula for Productivity

How a positioning workshop saved our product

How a positioning workshop saved our product | by Michelle Walstra | Medium

Michelle Walstra ・ Oct 29, 2019 ・ 3 min read
Medium

DEV Community: Michelle Walstra

How our design team uses Trello to streamline productivity

1. Create Custom Fields

2. Setup Butler Rules

3. Connect your Email

4. Utilize the power of the Trello network

We’re almost there…

The Magic Formula for Productivity

How a positioning workshop saved our product

How a positioning workshop saved our product | by Michelle Walstra | Medium

Michelle Walstra ・ Oct 29, 2019 ・ 3 min read Medium

Michelle Walstra ・ Oct 29, 2019 ・ 3 min read
Medium