4 signs your team has outgrown Trello and how to fix it

Published in

Azendoo Team

5 min readMar 8, 2018

Trello is a great tool. It’s possibly the best free, simple and visual way to get things off the ground for any new project of venture. But as your team your team grows, you start noticing the signs you’ve outgrown your current solution.

You need something to take you to the next level.

4 signs your team has outgrown Trello

There is a known tipping point for a team coordinating with a Kanban tool such as Trello. You will most likely experience it when one or more of these pain points hit your team:

Your team is growing to the point that you need to improve work division ;
Your teamwork backlog has become too big to plan in one single dimension ;
Everything seems like endless to-dos, with no clear direction, pacing or analytics ;
Your team discussions — a key component that gathers the context where most work starts — can’t happen in Trello.

Here’s how to scale to the next level

More than one board for any given task

As your team grows, work will spread across many projects.

You’ll try to organize tasks that span across multiple teams or project, and you’ll fail. Trello and most other apps force you into a single board. In the beginning this restriction is great for a small team with a single project, but think longer term, the idea is to grow and have multiple projects that can be managed simultaneously.

In Azendoo, a task can be linked to multiple contexts and boards. This means that the same task can evolve differently in multiple workflows simultaneously. We’ve made navigation a breeze and you can switch boards directly from any task. Any change, discussion, document or schedule update will automatically be updated in all boards in real-time.

More than one way to look at team tasks

There is a huge divide between task list users and board users. Some believe the most efficient way to work is to create lists of tasks and assign them. Others believe it’s more efficient to visualize and arrange tasks on a digital whiteboard.

So we decided to reunite them in Azendoo. And we’ve included a few nifty tricks:

You can switch between lists, boards or calendar view at any moment
Each teammate can look at the same work/project in their preferred view
You can see your personal boards and team boards in one single place

Your personal board linked to your team boards

Being efficiently organized as a group is only possible if you’ve made the same commitment to plan, execute and collaborate around your own work as a team.
Quite surprisingly, collaboration apps like Trello don’t let you see (or filter out) your tasks across team projects to organize them in your own personal board.

That’s a big issue because you have no way to adjust your work against that of your teammates. This becomes a big issue when you grow, as you have no way to adjust your personal workload to account for the team workload.

Azendoo was built from the ground up to help you set your priorities and plan across different axis (time, team, people, etc.).

Card are moved, tasks are finished

It might appear obvious, but Trello cards are moved from one stage to the next, never actually finished, even if you send them in the “done” column. It doesn’t really tell you what you did well as a team or where there might be opportunities to improve.

Tasks that can actually be marked as done provide a great insight into how you or your team is progressing towards your goals.

Because Azendoo was designed to help teams collaborate around work and get it done, we provide more analytics than just workflow progress. In Azendoo you can easily track progress, activity or time spent in our dashboards.

More than just cards and workflows

Basically, collaboration is built around 2 pillars: communicating and tracking work. A discussion leads to ideas and actions, a task needs communication (chat, voice, video, meeting) to be completed.

So why don’t Trello and other apps bundle these two pillars into one single app. If you are using Trello, you have most likely bundled it with an external team chat app.

And you’ve also activated A LOT of third party extensions so that you could, in theory, maximize the output from your Trello account by adding an endless amount of features, often ruining the user experience and simplicity.

Azendoo keeps an elegant UX, simple and coherent experience across team communication and work tracking, all in one place.

*Communicate effectively in threaded conversations and direct messages*

So, if you and your team have outgrown Trello, but don’t want to give up on a beautiful interface and team productivity….. you may have just found exactly what you were looking for.