(2025-02-25) Inside Trellos Reinvention As A Personal Tasks App

Inside Trello's reinvention as a personal tasks app. What exactly is Trello? Despite counting myself as a heavy-duty power user of the product for well over a decade now, it’s a question I’ve long struggled to answer.*

Part of what makes the app so powerful is its versatility. With a flexible series of boards, columns, and cards acting as its core interface, you can shape it into serving practically any purpose imaginable for yourself or your company.

It seems, though, that that very same versatility may have morphed into a challenge for the product. This week, Atlassian—the business-tech behemoth that bought Trello for $425 million in 2017 and brought it into its sprawling software empire—is announcing Trello’s biggest pivot to date. It’s essentially a total reinvention, despite the fact that on the surface, not all that much actually seems to be changing.

As of this spring, Trello will no longer be a “project management tool”—or whatever else you want to call it. It’ll be a personal to-do list app, presented as being the best all-around hub for juggling all of your important to-do items, no matter where they may originate. Notably, too, it’ll now be aimed at individual users, not teams, which marks a pretty big shift from its original focus.