Startup, Scaleup, Screwup.

8Streams of Silver

Visualize your work with Kanban Boards and optimize the workflow with Work in Progress Limits.

 

I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. There were 23 Trello boards on my screen, full of planned work and work in progress, and they were multiplying like rabbits. We had a Recruitment Funnel, an investor funnel, a customer funnel, team offsite topics, team ideas, customer requests, bug fixes, a Content Calendar, and much more, all of them organized as idea boards and task boards in Trello. On our Daily Cafe the day before, one of my team members had suggested that we could make it our North Star Metric to have 100 Trello boards by the end of the year. Everyone had laughed, in a slightly pained way.

For your information, Trello is a simple but powerful online tool that helps you manage your work using the concepts of boards, cards, and columns. It is so effective at being both basic and easy to use that people use it for anything, from the collection of baby gifts to the planning of funerals. Trello satisfies the principle of visualizing your work. You can better manage what you do if you can see what you do.

I opened the Feature Ideas board (one of several that we had) and saw dozens of story cards across many columns. I thought to myself how amazing it was that we put so much work into a product and then still did not have something that worked well. I didn’t even ...