As a fast-growing team of over 100 distributed employees supporting 18 million users worldwide, we’ve been thinking a lot about how to scale successfully as a company. And we focus a lot on great collaboration, teamwork, creativity, and a collective energy to achieve something that’s bigger than ourselves.
Large-scale growth is also about the little things: The day-to-day workflows and tools we have to serve Trello users as best we can. Trello itself plays a large part in our growth, but each team within the company also relies on a few field-specific software solutions to scale efforts and deliver results.
So, tl;dr, there’s a lotta growth and we have to move fast to keep up. That’s where a solid lineup of team-oriented tech tools comes in.
For context, all of these SaaS services have been carefully evaluated before being integrated into our teams. We highly recommend that anyone considering a new product or service for their company do the same. This list is also far from comprehensive—there are many more tools we use and love (you know who you are!) that we’ll cover another time.
SaaS Tools We’re Using To Scale Teams At Trello
Trello As a Team Scales With: Slack + Trello
The launch of the Trello app for Slack was a game changer this year. Being able to use Trello within our Slack team has been a serious productivity power move for all of us. We waste less time spent switching between apps thanks to all the ways we can access the Trello-verse through Slack channels.
What exactly do we love about it so much? We can create cards out of great blog ideas that are dropped in our #content channel, for example. New initiatives revealed in our #announcements channels can be subscribed in one click using Slack’s interactive message buttons. There’s so much more—all of which can be found in this list of the 15 ways to master the Trello app for Slack.
Marketing Team Scales With: Hubspot
The addition of Hubspot to the Marketing team’s tech stack this year gave us a new understanding of what information about Trello our users want and need.
“With Hubspot, we’re able to get a lot more visibility into where users are in their customer journey. It’s really valuable to be able to segment users based on their intent as well as give them opportunities to learn more about Trello with opt-in content opportunities.”
– Stella Garber, VP of Marketing
Uniting our marketing efforts from social, email, blogging, and events under tracked campaigns has allowed us to get a real sense of the total impact of these efforts as a whole. We want to delight users with our marketing channels across the board, and Hubspot has given us the insight we need to focus our efforts on a common goal.
People Team Scales With: Greenhouse
Seeing as the Trello employee count has grown by 70% this year, our People Team has been pretty busy. Enter Greenhouse: a specialized applicant tracking system that helps us source, interview, hire, and onboard new “Trellists.”
“It streamlines and simplifies processes that would be multi-step workflows in other tools. As an example, in my dashboard each day, I have a “Needs Decision” section under My Tasks, allowing me to quickly get a full view of all candidates whose process needs my attention and input. With Greenhouse, we now have a tool that saves us significant amounts of time and will scale easily with us as we continue to grow the team.”
– Lydia M., Recruiter
While it has similarities to other project management apps, all of its features are created with the workflow of the recruiter in mind, and that’s why it has helped our People team scale so quickly.
Sales Team Scales With: InsightSquared
As of 2016, some 74% of Fortune 500 companies use Trello in one or another. Cue our very busy (and productive) sales team who work with companies and organizations looking to enhance their use of Trello with Power-Ups and other features. A tool that has helped Sales work with more precision is InsightSquared.
“One of the challenges with scaling the Sales Team has been making sure that we keep a high level of visibility into our metrics without having a dedicated resource who just thinks about reporting all day long. InsightSquared allowed us to have that with a very low barrier of entry and customization. It’s become a tool that the entire Sales Team references on a regular basis, and a tool that I use for both strategic planning as well as day to day maintenance.”
– Kristen Habacht, VP of Sales
Applying data to sales efforts in all stages of the pipeline, from forecasting to reporting, helps centralize and focus the team’s pursuit of new opportunities.
Support Team Scales With: Respond By Buffer
Supporting our 18 million users in the best way possible is one of the pillars of Trello as a company. Respond by Buffer has given our Support Team a fast, streamlined way to handle the growing volume of social customer requests.
“Respond by Buffer has enabled us to pick up the pace with which we handle social support. Not only are agents able to archive tweets that have already been dealt with, thus making a cleaner, less overwhelming interface, but they are also able to assign out tweets to people who may be better able to answer the question. This has led to our customers getting more rapid responses to their social media inquiries, and more confidence and speed for the support agents on duty for social.”
– Mercer Smith-Looper, Manager of Customer Support
Respond By Buffer is used jointly between Community and Support to direct tweets from our different accounts to the right person. “Also, in the event of something catastrophic, multiple users can be in there at once,” notes Mercer. The collaborative nature of the tool gives us peace of mind that someone is always available to help.
Community Team Scales With: Sprout Social
With a global audience of more than 200,000 people across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, having a tool that helps us effectively manage our social listening is imperative. This is how our Community Team came to Sprout Social.
“Sprout Social helps us maintain efficiency while also personalizing touchpoints with people through its History lookup, as well as Notes that are only visible to the team internally. It adds additional color to conversations we’ve had in the past, ensures that no detail is overlooked and that we maintain these relationships that we very much value as we scale.”
– Erica Moss, Community Manager
Despite our growing audience on social media, we want each interaction with our users to feel personal and genuine. Come say hi!
Design Team Scales With: Zoom
Having over 60% of all Trello employees working remotely means that digital tools that help us connect authentically and easily are paramount. Our Design team in particular spans across multiple countries and timezones, so they find the reliability of video conferencing service Zoom to be particularly useful for their productivity as a team.
“As a distributed design team, Zoom allows us to foster collaborative creativity inside the team and across the company without being physically co-located. We use Zoom’s robust video conferencing every day to connect socially, explore product needs, discuss design, share diverging perspectives, layer ideas on ideas and generally encourage each other’s creativity.”
– Chris Kimbell, Design Lead
In fact, Trellists across the company rely on Zoom to run meetings, including our monthly company-wide Town Hall that keeps us all connected.
Take Inventory Of Your Toolbox
There are a number of key attributes that a piece of software should have for it to become a part of a company’s workflow: It should be easy for employees to adopt in their day-to-day, it should fully answer or support a team need, and it should be a reliable product that grows with its users. These elements and more are reasons why we take our time when assessing and implementing new tech at Trello.
Trello itself is often put to the same tests by companies looking for a collaboration tool to get their teams organized and focused on the same projects and goals. In fact, we encourage it! Book a demo with our team to ask your toughest questions and see how Trello stacks up for your team.