It’s 4:11 and I’ve practically cleared my responsibilities on my trello board. But God knows I’m not done, a clear Trello board means that you’re done with your team responsibility, and it would be a mistake to think one’s work is finished just because the tool you use to track tasks tells you so.
Card driven product design and development is like taking the role of a robot in a factory: I am given instructions and dependencies and with those I assemble a piece that another robot will use to put together a larger piece that will finally fit into the product.
The role of Trello in blank.page’s development has been thankfully minimal. We’ve only used it in this last pre-launch stage when we need to keep track of all bugs and kinks, and as a repository of ideas for future development. In the past our pace was just a dozen of hours per month at most, so email was sufficient.
Two weeks into it and I feel I spend half of my time answering comments on cards and moving them from column to column. It feels like I am working, but I am not. I am manipulating a model of a project and allowing others to know my progress, but for anyone who is not a project manager this is overhead, it is not work.
What would be a satisfactory solution to team communication then? I don’t know. My naïve hope was that post-release the pace slows down so that we can go back to email, but that’s aiming low. It would be aiming for a product that limps so that I don’t have to run to catch up with it.
Just don’t make me move cards, ugh.