Real World Trello Boards

Now that you know how to view your cards, it’s time to bring them all together with practical use cases. In this chapter, we’ll go through Trello board templates that demonstrate common uses of Trello.

This chapter will explore boards that show common applications of Trello’s features. By following these templates, you’ll be able to visualize how you might use Trello and even get a head start on setting up your workflows.

This chapter will help you organize your tasks and track progress with ease. So, let’s dive in and discover how you can make the most out of Trello for your projects.

After this chapter, you’ll be able to do the following:

• Manage your team (or personal goals) in a sprint on Trello
• Coordinate all the moving parts for an upcoming project
• Improve your meetings with effective Trello boards
• Define the direction of your company with a product roadmap board

Let’s...

Understanding Trello templates

To explore Trello templates, head to trello.com/templates. Once you’re there, you can browse through a bunch of prebuilt Trello boards that you can copy and customize yourself. Here’s a screenshot that gives you an idea of what the Trello template gallery looks like:

Figure 5.1 – Trello template gallery

To find the Trello board template you need, you can select a category from the options listed on the left-hand side of the template gallery. This will filter the templates and show only the ones that match your chosen category.

Alternatively, you can use the search box in the top-right corner of the page to look for a specific keyword or term. This will bring up all the templates that match your search term.

Once you’ve found a template you’re interested in, click on it to view more details. You’ll be able to preview the template, read a brief description, and see how many people...

Using Trello for Kanban and Agile workflow management

Trello is best known for its Kanban-style board. Kanban is a visual workflow and scheduling system that’s used as a lean management system and is often used in Agile software development. However, many teams across various industries have adopted this process as a way to increase productivity and streamline workflows. At its core, Kanban involves breaking down work into manageable tasks and visualizing the flow of work through a board, which can help teams identify bottlenecks, prioritize tasks, and make more informed decisions about how to allocate resources.

In this section, we’ll explore how to implement a Kanban-style board in Trello to help streamline your team’s workflow and improve productivity.

These types of boards are used to help teams visualize their workflow and identify opportunities for improvement. These boards categorize tasks into columns, allowing you to easily track your progress and...

Cross-team project management

In some cases, you might find yourself needing to work with multiple teams to make a specific project happen. For example, let’s say you’re about to launch a new product in your company. There are multiple stakeholders, and your team will be dependent on other teams to complete everything. It’s like you’re choreographing a big dance!

In this case, it might not make sense to have lists for each stage. Instead, you could create a list for each of the departments or teams that are involved in the project. Check out this template: trello.com/b/hyBcI9lX/pm72-single-project-board.

Let’s look at this template and learn how to effectively coordinate with other teams to move a project forward:

Figure 5.8 – Project management template board structure

Board structure

In this template, the first list is a resource or details list. This is used to collect all the links and related information...

Meeting planner

It’s likely that when you attend meetings, you take notes on a Google document, your phone, or a physical notepad. However, have you ever considered using Trello for this purpose? While Trello is primarily known as a task management tool, it can also be a powerful tool for keeping track of meeting agendas, notes, and action items. In this section, we’ll explore how you can use Trello to streamline your meeting notes and keep everyone on the same page.

Take a look at this Weekly Team Meetings template from the Trello template gallery (trello.com/templates/team-management/weekly-team-meetings-GDz7Wd53):

Figure 5.11 – Weekly Team Meetings template board structure

Board structure

In this board, each list represents an instance of a meeting. This makes it easy to find notes and action items from previous meetings so that anything that’s discussed isn’t forgotten in a hidden document somewhere.

The...

Product roadmap

Many teams also use Trello for sharing their product roadmap. You can think of this as having a public to-do list. Although it might feel intimidating to share your team’s tasks and objectives with the world, many companies are doing this to help their users gain confidence in the direction of the product and understand a company’s priorities. Follow along with the Product Roadmap Template: trello.com/templates/product-management/product-roadmap-template-%7C-trello-FrbAJsbH. It can be seen in the following screenshot:

Figure 5.14 – Product Roadmap Template board structure

Board structure

The lists in this board show the steps a feature goes through from being an idea to what is being worked on. Users (or other stakeholders, such as teammates in a company) can submit ideas for features, request bug fixes, or ask something else of the team. Think of the Ideas list as a wishlist. Anything can go on that list, but it...

Creating your own Trello template

As you customize these templates and build boards, you might want to share them with the world and create your own Trello templates! Any be copied, so you might make a board a template when you want to be explicit this board is meant to be copied and customized. Template boards have a banner across the top, letting viewers know it’s a template, and they also have a bold button so that users can quickly copy the template, without having to hunt through the board menu to find the copy action

Figure 5.17 – Banner on template boards

Fortunately, it’s super easy to make a board a template.

Once you’ve created your amazing board to share, click the ellipses in the top-right corner of the board to open the menu. Click More and then choose the Make template action:

Figure 5.18 – Make template

This tells you a little more about what making a template entails. It...

Summary

In this chapter, we explored four common use cases of Trello and looked at template boards to help you get started. You don’t even have to build anything from scratch! At this point, you should be comfortable with searching for templates in Trello’s template gallery so that you can get inspiration about various ways to use Trello and use formats that have proven to be effective for teams.

Of course, you can still customize all of these templates so that they’re your own and improve them as you go. You know the rules, so now, you know how to break them! Speaking of rules, it’s time that we start learning how to create automation rules in Trello to make our new workflows more efficient. This is what we’ll do in the next chapter.