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Comment by rkrzr | Hacker News Reader

Trello has apparently about 19 million users. And I would bet that the majority of them are not the typical target audience of Atlassian products (i.e. software development teams).

So I wonder if they are mostly aquiring the user base here in order to expand their potential market?

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Just to add my 2 cents, I've worked with a dev team that used Trello for project coordination.

I'm part of one of those.

Trello is hugely popular amongst software developers, but I think the point being made is that it's also popular outside that niche. At work it came in through the back door being used for software planning, but quickly became the preferred tool for managing any sort of project. There's a similar story with me showing it to my wife, who just finished managing her PhD in history with it.

I'm a data scientist and I've been using it as an informal Kanban board because JIRA is way too complicated-looking for me want to even try to learn. Trello is about as dead-simple as it can get. There's already too much in my brain.

Bingo... that's the whole idea here. Small teams within larger companies and small companies can use Trello. When they grow up (or need to interact with the rest of the company) they use JIRA. In fact I would expect JIRA integrations that make it trivial to convert a Trello card to a JIRA task, probably with an option to automatically convert a checklist into subtasks.

This acquisition makes total sense; Trello and JIRA target mostly non-overlapping market segments and there are some easy low-hanging integration fruits to be picked. I'll also bet Trello becomes a deal-sweetener going forward. License JIRA and for +15% you also get Trello for your whole company.

Very well said, the larger the company, the less flexibility it has in choosing the right software for the entire company. Smaller teams can move quicker, faster, and tend to find their own solutions within larger corporations.

At least one high-profile project is using it:

https://trello.com/b/gHooNW9I/ue4-roadmap

I know a lot of smaller dev teams use it for lowercase-a agile projects and I currently use it for all my personal projects. It's basically the antithesis of heavyweight tools like Jira.

I worked for a game studio several years ago and we used Trello to report on what we worked on that day to our Programming Manager.

Please give us more info than that.

What was your experience like?

That is true - a lot of software developers use a variety of tools so they can do more advanced things like track burn rates, project velocity, and such more quantitatively. Trello, on the other hand, is so easy that I've seen it used for everything from managing speaking arrangements to writing books. It has more of a mass appeal.

I doubt they can. I work in public digitization from an it-architecture and programming background, and because municipaliies work closely together on a national plan I interact with quite a few teams.

I've yet to see a project manager or anyone outside hardcore development get anything positive out of at Asian products.

Their tools typically complicates everything to the point of slowing production by as much as 150% compared to projects where management is done with post it's on a board and physical meetings... I know because we did the business case, which today means we're actively avoiding companies that want to tunnel projects into things like JIRA.

I get that atlassian produce excellent tools for tracking development time so companies can bill me more precisely. Unfortunately the side effect is that everything gets produced slower, more expensively and ends up confusing the shit out of our project managers.

Yeah, that's exactly what they say in the article. Their goal is to get to 100MM MAUs, which they can really only do by expanding to non-tech industries, and Trello is extremely popular amongst marketing and finance professionals.

I'm sure plenty of hipchat users (most?) aren't dev teams either.

My company uses JIRA and Trello depending on the scope of the project.

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