📉 📬 Making a Trello Activity Digest: MVP

At Persona, we use Trello extensively to organise and plan our days and sprints to build awesome recruitment products. But, as I covered in my previous post, as great as Trello is, we struggle to get it work for our daily stand-ups for retrospectively looking at the previous day. So I decided to tackle this issue!

Defining the MVP

When thinking about MVPs in the past, admittedly I’ve struggled with that M of minimum; by thinking that viable is the minimum that is acceptable. I believe that is a flaw of my perfectionist attitude and approach. I have been working on overriding that mindset, trying to remember:

“Excellence does not require perfection” — Henry James

(or was it “Excellence does not need perfection”? or “Perfection is not a requirement for excellence”?… Just kidding!).

To be minimum and viable, the following was needed:

• Being able to see a list of notable “events” that happened that day (cards moved, checklist items completed, comments made).

And that’s it!

Building the MVP

The first thing that came to my mind is the activities section of the Trello web app. It gives a running commentary of what is happening on the board.

Activities on our Trello board

We don’t normally pay attention to the activities section on Trello however. So ideally, I wanted that to be at the forefront of people’s minds at the start of the day to drive our daily stand-ups.

Working with the Trello API

Trello offers quite a detailed API with plenty of actions and read endpoints for different objects in Trello.

Trello’s API documentation

The endpoint for the activities on Trello board was easy to interact with; it also provided the ability to filter the activities. The activities I needed were:

• Commenting on a card
• Creating a card
• Moving a card between lists
• Deleting a card
• Completing a checklist item on a card

The information for this is gathered through a simple GET request:

https://api.trello.com/1/boards/<board_id>/actions?filter=commentCard,createCard,updateCard,deleteCard,updateCheckItemStateOnCard&key=<api_key>&token=<token>

Step up Zapier

Zapier is a tool that allows users to create workflows called “zaps” that connect web applications through mechanisms like webhooks, and transfer data between them.

Someone who I had previously worked with was a big advocate of tools like Zapier, and he had managed to create some pretty cool and advanced things with it. So I tried the same.

I wanted to get the process the data from the API call to Trello, then send an email to the team with a list of all the activities from the previous day, every morning at 9am.

Zapier provides some useful built-in functions. I used the Schedule, Code, and Email functions to complete this task. For the Schedule function, I simply wanted the Zap to execute on weekdays at 0900. Then the code function would execute some javascript that calls the Trello API then processes the response into sentences and HTML.

Some code for executing Javascript in a Zap

The Code step pipes the output into an Email step that simply allows me to define the HTML and recipients of the email.

Here’s what it looks like:

We do more than those tasks in the email (I promise!), I just had to remove some sensitive info :)

Everyone in the office loved it! and we’ve found it to be useful to form conversations in the morning in the stand-ups, so that everyone else knows what progress was made and those comments on cards don’t get ignored!

If you would like the source code for the Code step on Zapier or want any help setting it up, you can tweet me at @ddaalee or message me through my website and I will happy to help!