How to Use Trello with Scrum with Abe Nadimi

Source: GeniusDen archive transcript checked against the recording. Administrative opening and closing material is omitted; the presentation wording is otherwise preserved with light readability edits.

Hi, my name is Abraham, and I'm here to give you a quick introduction to Trello. It's a great tool for you to visualize anything with anybody. I tell you what I use it for both personal things and also things related to my business. So, things and goals for today: we're going to cover the structure of Trello and talk about some key features of each of the different structure types. Then we'll get into the nuts and bolts on the boards and cards. That's kind of where all the action happens. I'll show you a few things you can do to really amp up the power of Trello for you. I'll share with you some tips that I've used or I've learned from using Trello for a couple of years now. And then for those that are here, I'll help you set up some of your own projects. For those that are seeing this later, please reach out to me.

My contact information will be at the end; let me know if there's anything I can do to help you out. So, here's the basic structure of Trello. You have these four different orders or levels of structure. So, your main, your biggest structure is a team, and this can be just you. So, this could be a major project, or it can be, of course, for an organization. Consultants can use this to segment the different businesses that they work with. So, your next level down is a board. So, your board is where you actually would run a specific part of a project or, let's say, the whole project, depending on the scope and depending on how Trello would work for you. Now, when I use the word project, I really mean anything that you need to organize.

A board can consist of an assortment of recipes, and then by list you would have breakfast items, lunch items, dinner items, and then the cards could be specific recipes. Or, in the case of a work project, let's say a board is a new initiative to launch a website. So, you'd say "new website initiative"; that would be the name of the board, and then you would have things, you know, in the different lists and cards. So, there's an assortment of different ways you can use this. What's most important is understanding the structure and how things play together, and then you can adjust Trello to whatever you want it to do. Here's a breakdown — excuse me — here's a breakdown of key functions by structure type.

And as you'll notice, the card has the most features or most functions assigned to it; again, that's really where you'll get into very specific details of whatever you're trying to accomplish, right? That's your most discrete unit. I kind of want you to notice a few things that are really important in the subscribe, public, and private view areas. You have a lot of discrete privacy settings that you can set in Trello, but it's important to note that, you know, as you set your privacy levels, you have the ability to add people to teams, or you have the ability to add people to a specific board. You can also make boards visible to the whole team or hidden. So that's very important as a small feature on privacy. And as far as subscription goes, or subscribing to the activity that's happening in Trello, you can get very specific.

You can say that you want to get notifications about all activity on a specific card or any activity in the list or board and so forth. So, you know, those kinds of things really allow you to tune Trello to work the way it would best work for you. Let's get in. So here's a picture of a board. You'll see this actual board here in a second when we actually go into Trello. So what you'll see here is you'll see this button here which will allow you to show all the different boards that you are a member of or have access to. This will show you the name of the board. This will show you the team that it's in and the privacy setting of this particular board. And what you'll see here is these are the four different lists that I've created. Again, these lists can be named anything and serve for any function. So if you notice here, this is kind of set up for Scrum, right?

So Scrum allows you to set up a backlog of all the different tasks that you have. And the to-do would be what you would be working on in one particular sprint, and what you're doing and what's considered done. And this is, again, a very basic setup. But I wanted you to see how a board looks like in Trello. This is a card. Very specific settings that you can do on cards. You'll notice I've highlighted two sections that are in red. These are kind of like the areas that you'll use most often. So on the top left, you'll see where it says card title. It also has the list that it's in. So this is in the backlog column. You can add a description. And on the far right side, you'll see the other red square and where you can add members to the particular card. You can add labels. So labels are kind of like tags. They provide you a visual reference. They'll be color-coded on the board.

You can add checklists to cards. You can assign a due date for the card, or you don't have to have a due date. And of course, you can add attachments. So, again, these are the main features or main functions on a specific card that you'll use most often. So here's the activity notification settings that you can set on any specific card, list, or board. I'll show where they're actually located, whether you're looking to subscribe on a card or looking to subscribe on a list or on a board. Very straightforward. So, again, remember: what happens here is you'll get notifications of activity that's happening depending on what you've actually requested and when you requested to get notifications. So here are some board settings. There are two different levels of board settings. I start off on the left side; when you click "Show Menu," this is what you'll see.

You'll see the list of members at the top. In this case, there are three members. You can also add members directly to the board here. You can do things like change the background color and other small features. This one right here is "More." When you click on "More," you'll get this board menu option on your far right. And this is the second level. So things that you'll see are you can have specific settings about boards. You can work with the labels as we discussed a second ago. The email-to-board settings are really great. This allows you to set up an email or forward an email to Trello, and it'll actually create a card for you on the board. This is where you can subscribe to this particular board and also link to the board, which is really useful if you're working with the team and you want to send them information about a specific board.

You can just send them the link and it'll take them right there. So the nice thing about the way Trello works is everything is not only visual, but super easy to use. So in this case, I'm showing how you move cards between lists. And in this case, you grab the card that's in backlog and you can slide it over to "To Do." This is instant. Anybody that's looking at this board will notice this at the same time, and it functions the same way on the mobile app. You can also move lists like this. So if I wanted to move the "To Do" list to the left of backlog, I can simply drag it over to the left and switch places. It's a very, very simple-to-use system. And again, it's really nice that it's instant to anybody that's also looking at the board. So these are some of the more advanced features. I kind of mentioned this one earlier. This is the email-to-board/card feature.

You can use this email address right here and set up how Trello functions so that when you send an email, it'll do what you ask it to. So in this case, you'll see an email address for the board here. And you'll see it. There's a setting here where you can say what list you want it to go on and what position. So you can say you want these new cards to be created at the top of the list or the bottom of the list. So this is fantastic. This is a really easy way. If you're wanting to migrate tasks from your email to Trello and you want to create them as a card, essentially, you can forward the information over. And you can change these settings at any time. And if you ever feel like that email address may be compromised or you don't want to continue allowing it to be used by other people, for example, you can generate a new email address.

Another great way to use Trello is when you connect it to other web apps. In this example, I will talk about Zapier, which is a great tool for connecting web apps that allow you to easily move your data and automate tedious tasks. So in this case, you can move, let's say, things that are happening in Gmail or in Pocket, which is a great tool for saving websites that you want to read later, and create Trello cards based on activity that's happening outside of Trello. And I'll show you an example of that here shortly. Here are some of the popular Zaps already set up for Trello. So you see there's an assortment of different companies that are already linked with Zapier and Trello. And you can even set things like a specific time of the day.

So let's say you want to have a card generated every Friday at a certain time because that's kind of a routine that you want to go through or you want your staff to go through. You can automatically generate these things and even assign them to a certain person, assign labels to them; a lot of things you can do in Zapier. Again, there's an example coming up. So these are some of the tips that I've learned throughout using Trello for all this time. One of them is that in Trello, they really prefer that you archive boards or lists and cards rather than deleting them. So there is a way to delete a card, but it's a little tricky. The way to get to it is you'd actually open the card, and you'll click a few things, and you'll finally get to where it gives you an option to delete. I'll show you that here shortly.

And be really careful about how you're setting up your team, board and list membership, and privacy settings because you may forget that you've set up a board that only has certain members. But if you've set it to be public, anybody else in your team is going to have access to see that board. So you can do things where you hide it and so the name of the board doesn't even exist. Let's say there's a surprise birthday party that you're wanting to set up for a family member. That would be a great instance where you'd want the privacy of the board and you don't necessarily have anybody who's part of that team to see that. You can also—excuse me—another recommendation is to keep your card titles concise. What I've noticed sometimes is when people are setting up cards in Trello that they'll use these really long kind of rambling statements as to what the card is supposed to mean.

Well, what happens is then your Trello board is just full of these like mini paragraphs everywhere, and I think that's visually difficult and taxing. And remember, since Trello is a visual tool, I think it's important to remember that making the board look pretty actually will have a function because those that are using Trello are probably going to be visual learners or have the visual appeal that's important for them. Another thing is assign a person to a card. So when you create a card, go ahead and assign somebody immediately to the card even if it's yourself. The reason is there's ways to filter cards that are only assigned to you, and if a card doesn't have anybody assigned to it but it's actually your task, you won't see it. And this is not something that can happen by default, but at the same time it's super easy to do.

There's even a keyboard shortcut to allow you to add a member to a card. Subscribe to boards or cards or lists whenever you want to see notification of activity. And if you're getting too many notifications that are not really relevant to you, maybe you need to adjust the subscription. Maybe you don't want to see the whole board but you really are interested in the list or even just a few specific cards. So really tuning that subscribe function is really useful. And here are two links that you can use. One's a keyboard shortcut list; I think it's really great while you're working on Trello. If you know some of the keyboard shortcuts, it speeds things up a lot. And I have a Trello 101 card that I've kind of typed up when I was working with a different team and I've shared that inside of the board that is set up for this particular class.

So those are some of the tips that I've learned and I try to practice, and some of that is just kind of based on the experience and using Trello. And here's my contact information. Reach out to me; you're welcome to text or email anytime you want. I'll be more than happy to help you with this. This is something that I've done for different organizations to help them organize and help them kind of get going, and I'd be more than happy to help you too. All right, so let's dive right into an actual Trello board and see what it looks like. Okay, so here's the board that you saw in the presentation. You'll notice that I created a list called References, so they include the Trello 101 card that I was describing a second ago, along with a link to the actual presentation that you can download and my contact information. So, in this particular setup I have five different Trello lists.

It's very easy to create another list. You just tap right there, type in whatever you want and hit return and save it. So I'm going to go ahead and show you. So I'm going to go in and save that, and I'll show you what I meant about deleting lists and archiving and things like that. You'll notice there is no delete option available for this list. The most I can do, or the best I can do, is archive it. Trello again really prefers that you archive items rather than delete them. So now archive that list and it's gone. But let's say I actually wanted to delete a card and I'll show you how to do that. So we'll go ahead and use the sample card that I've created. And to delete the card, you'll go down here where it says Share and more. You'll click on that and you finally go all the way to the bottom and you'll notice this little bitty hidden delete.

Go ahead and click Delete and it'll ask you to confirm whether you want to do it again. So again, it's very kind of a drawn-out process to delete cards. They really give you the ability to make it really hard for you to do so. Anyways, here's the card that you saw a second ago in the presentation. I've added a checklist to this card and I'll kind of walk you through the different features of the card, but also show you some keyboard shortcuts while we're at it. So let's go ahead and start with the title. So if you hit the letter T, that's a keyboard shortcut to edit the title. So simple. I'll go ahead and say card title number two here. I hit Tab and Enter and I'll save it. Let's say I want to edit the description. I'm going to hit the letter E and that allows me to edit the description.

Trello has an interesting way of formatting and they provide you a nice little help right there at the bottom of the description. So if you click on this little help menu, you'll see that if you wanted to, for example, add emphasis that you need to put things inside of the asterisk, or if you want to make lists, you need to use the dash sign. So kind of particular ways to format them, and we'll go ahead and do an example here. So let's say we want to use the list and so we're going to say item one and item two, but item three we want to have bold. So I'm going to hit the asterisk at the end and we're going to save it and see what it looks like. Oh, there's the emphasis. So instead of the bold—I'm sorry—it comes out in italics. Let's see if we can figure out how to bold. So the bold is the two asterisks. So we'll go back here and we'll make that for item number four, right?

So all right, there you go. So now you've seen the list. You see how we can format things to include things in italics or include things in bold. Adding members is super easy. You can use the member button right there or you can hit M on your keyboard. And so in this case, you can add any of the members that you've seen. So we'll go ahead and add myself to this board—this list—I'm sorry, to this card. I want to go ahead and assign a due date, and I'm going to show you what happens when you assign a due date. And of course, the day comes and then the day goes away, right? So we're going to go ahead and assign yesterday as the day. You'll notice that it shows up in red. And if I assign it for today and we're going to move the time up just a little bit, I believe it should— it doesn't turn yellow.

Okay, I think, for some reason, I thought it turned yellow, but in this case I'm not seeing that. But we'll go ahead and show you that if you want to get rid of the due date, you actually have to come in and hit Remove. You're not able to, you know, kind of like when the day comes and goes, there's not an easy way to just check a box or something and say it's done. You actually have to kind of go into the card and hit Remove, or a shortcut directly from the card is hitting the letter D and it pops up the due date menu option again and you can hit Remove. Okay. So we'll go back into the card. I'll show you this Attachment. It gives you a few options, as you notice. You could attach directly from your computer. You can attach a link. So let's say I want to link to a specific article or a website. So I'll just link to CNN here. Again, you can do Dropbox, Drive, and so forth.

So I'll go ahead and attach CNN here to this one. I've subscribed to the card, which is kind of not something you have to do if you're the only member of the card. But let's say there's multiple people that are assigned to this card and you're not necessarily one of them, but you want to see what's happening on the card. So this is a good manager-type function, right? You can subscribe to cards even if you're not a member of the card. Let's look at checklists. So I've already added two checklists. It's very simple to add. You click the Checklist button and it has you select the name and also "Copy items from." So if you want to duplicate a checklist that's already on your card, of course you can do that right here. Really easy. So here are my checklists. You can, of course, cross items out, and I'll show you the completion percentage.

So in this case of the two, I did one, so I'm 50% in adding items. So I'll just go ahead and add task three. And by hitting Enter, it immediately gets ready to take the next task. So very easy. Comments are great. This is a good section for you to communicate with other team members about a specific card. If you want to write any kind of notes, you can even call out a certain member by hitting the @ sign and then typing in their member name, and then they get a notification. And of course, the conversation makes more sense if there's a lot of different people on this card. So, of course, you can archive a card. If you're done with it, you can move the card or copy a card. Moving a card allows you to select a different board, the list, and the position that you want it to go to, or you can copy the card.

Copying the card makes sense if this is something that you're kind of repeatedly doing. Let's say you're setting up a routine for yourself and you want to set up one for Monday, one for Tuesday — you can copy the card, maybe change a few things, and it's ready to go. So super easy. And I'll go backward here. I'm going to go back to the board view and show you how you can do some of the functions directly from the card. So as I hover over the card, if I hit the letter M, it pulls up my ability to select members. So in this case, I'm going to take myself off of the member card, right? Again, selecting the letter D shows you your due date menu. If you want to create another card here, you can hover over the current card and hit the letter N. It'll present a place to put the title for the new card.

And so I'm going to say "Card title, number three." What I'm going to do here is go ahead and hit Shift‑Enter at the same time, and it'll actually open the card for me. Somehow I've got labels going on. Let's go ahead and take that label off, which we'll get to labels here in a second. So we'll do it again. So say "Card title, number three." I don't know why it's doing that. Ah, it must be something with the number sign and the three, because I've never seen that before. So it's pulling up that card. It's pulling up that label menu. Sorry, we'll do it one more time. So "Card title, four," Shift‑Enter pops the card right up. So you can, of course, go through some of the things we did earlier; hitting E immediately allows you to edit the description and go forward, right? So obviously I've got some cards to delete. So we'll go ahead and run through that really fast and clean up our board.

All right. So you saw labels a second ago and I like to kind of dive into that a little bit more. So what labels allow you to do is give a visual cue to your cards and also kind of function like tags do on an article that you would publish on a website, for example. So let's go ahead and look at cards. Right now all the cards are listed by color only and there's no names to them, right? So let's go ahead and do one. We'll say green is going to be something to do with money, right? And we'll say red is a bill, and yellow are going to be parking tickets, right? I don't know. Just make them up. Okay. So let's say this particular card is going to be assigned — it has to do with a bill and it's a parking ticket. Okay. And so you'll see now, when you look at the board, you'll see the yellow and you'll see the red.

So just by looking at the board, you'll have these kinds of visual cues, and it's really helpful. Trello used to have a limit on the number of labels, and they've just recently changed so we can include more. It's not something that I personally use very often, but I think there are a lot of different uses for them and individuals that would really kind of go crazy about that. So again, the keyboard shortcut L allows me to then go back and take off my labels. Actually, I just noticed this a while ago. I thought it was pretty interesting that they even have a colorblind mode option. I think it changes the kinds of colors that are available and also puts, as you can see, a visual cue on the color. So people are not just using colors as labels. Pretty cool. Okay. Let's see that we talk about moving cards.

I think we talked about it in our presentation, but again, here's the drag-and-drop option. It's super easy to drag and drop cards between boards. Now I'd like to show you some of the, some of the other interesting features of Trello, where its integration is tied into, let's say, Pocket or Gmail or whatnot. In this case, I'm going to show you one with Dropbox. And it's all going to be done through Zapier. So let's go ahead and hop over to Zapier. This is the Zapier dashboard. I've created a few different zaps. One of them is to create a Trello card from an item that I've decided to read at a future date. And that's what I use Pocket for. I've set it up to take a screenshot whenever I take a screenshot on my computer; it'll save to Dropbox. And what Zapier does is it looks for new files in my Dropbox in a specific folder and then creates Trello cards for those. Okay.

So that's how I had those kinds of things set up. So what I like to do is go ahead and create a few zaps. So we're going to hop over here to CNN for a second, and we're going to say that I want to come back to this website in the future. So now I've created an entry in Pocket. So Pocket is now loaded up with this website as something that I want to come to in the future. And what I'm waiting for, I'm waiting to see that show up here. But in the meantime, I'm going to show you how I actually created these little Zapier recipes — that's what they're called. And I also did a screenshot a second ago, and you'll see that also show up here in the reference column. So going to Zapier, we're going to look at this Pocket-to-Trello recipe that I've set up. So I'm going to click edit and kind of walk you through it. All right. Okay. So the trigger app is Pocket, right?

And the trigger is going to be any time a new item is added. So it links to my specific Pocket account. I've tested it right there and it works. And I can run a test to make sure it works, but I'm going to go ahead and skip that for now. And then I go right into Trello. So the action app, of course, is Trello. So we're going to select that and I wanted to create a new card. But you see there's a lot of different functions, right? You can create a whole new board. You can create a list, and so forth. It's on my account, which is already set up and linked. Now I've said that I want the card to be created on the board for our class, in the list called backlog. But of course, you can change the list at any time. Let's say I wanted to go to "to do" or whatnot. So let's say we'll go ahead and set up "to do"; actually backlog would make more sense, right?

So we don't know when we want to do it, but we know we want to do it. I have a name. So I went ahead and added the word "pocket" in front, but there are a whole list of different ways you can set up the names. And you can set label colors, who I want to assign it to — I want to assign it to myself — a due date, if you want to, and so forth. There's a lot of features you can go through. And it says I want it to attach the original URL for the article. There it is. I hit save, and I'm going to run a test, and it should create a test card for me. So there you go. So it used test data to create the card, and it happened instantly. So what you'll notice is that shortly there'll be another card created here from when I saved the one for CNN, and eventually you'll see one for the screenshot.

The Zapier account that I have set up runs about every 15 minutes or so, so hopefully we won't need to wait that long, but you'll see those here soon. So you really see some integration. And I'll show you the screenshot-to-Trello one and run through that with you. Okay. So we'll drop down here. We'll see what our trigger application is. Of course, it's Dropbox, and I want it to trigger any time there's a new file that shows up in the directory. So anytime I take a screenshot and that new file is there, I want it to go into this particular Dropbox account. You can attach multiple Dropbox accounts, so Zapier is really flexible like that. I said I wanted to look for files in this particular folder, so of course "Screenshots." All right. So we'll go ahead and do a test. It's looking for a file in that directory. Okay. Test was successful.

And I want to go ahead and show you how I set up the action. So my action application, of course, is Trello. I wanted to create a new card. As you can tell there's more options; you can create boards, lists, and so forth — a bunch of different options for you to use when linking to Trello. I wanted to use my Trello account, of course. And I want to set it up so that it places the card in our board, in the reference list. I have the name of the file as the name of the card. I've assigned myself as a member, and I told it to go ahead and attach the file. That makes sense in this case, right? We're taking screenshots that we want to store for the class, so of course they should show up with the card. And so that's it. And I'm going to run the test. All right. So now let's go look at Trello. So there we go.

So we have the Pocket card from going to CNN and saying that we want to come back and read this later, and now you see the card from the screenshots. All right. Well, we have covered, go back here. So we've covered Trello and discussed the different structural elements of Trello: how to set up a board, how to set up a card. I also kind of walked you through some of the, you know, more advanced features, in a sense where you're emailing to the board or you're using Zapier to automate your tasks. And I want to reemphasize the fact that Trello can be used, again, for a wide assortment of different types of projects and different types of things that need to be organized. You don't have to think of it as only a project management tool. At my house, we actually use it to help run our family meetings.

We involve our daughter, and so she can get, you know, kind of used to using the computer and doing something more than just playing games. We put in the things that we want to do: things that we want to go out to eat, or we want to play activities in the house, or things that we want to do out. Anyways, an assortment of different things are all managed inside of Trello. Now we also have boards that are just fun, right? Like things for recipes, you know, you can buy breakfast or buy dinner. So again, Trello can be as broad and used in an assortment of different ways. It's not just a project management tool. So again, here's my contact information. If there's anything that you need, please reach out. I'd be more than happy to see if I can help you and answer any questions. Thank you.