What happens when one of the world's most loved productivity tools decides to reinvent itself for the age of AI? At Team 25 in Anaheim, I sat down with Gaurav Kataria, Head of Product for Trello at Atlassian, to unpack the biggest release in Trello's history and what it means for individuals and teams navigating the chaos of modern work.
Gaurav describes the new Trello as "an AI-powered to-do list," built not to replace project management tools like Jira but to complement them—especially for those personal tasks, scattered action items, and mental notes that get lost in a sea of email, Slack messages, and SaaS app notifications. With half a million users opting into the beta within 48 hours of launch, it's clear that the new direction is resonating.
In our conversation, we explore how Atlassian is using AI to enhance, not overwhelm, individual productivity—by capturing inputs from everywhere, organizing them intelligently, and helping users block time visually with integrations into Google and Microsoft calendars. This isn't about automating your life; it's about giving you clarity and control without friction.
We also talk about how Trello remains deeply personal. From list colors to card covers and mobile widgets, the design philosophy centers on reducing cognitive load and sparking focus. Trello isn't trying to be a super app. It's trying to be the app that respects your mental model, works the way your brain works, and empowers you to get meaningful work done on your own terms.
If you're overwhelmed by task sprawl or skeptical of AI's growing role in daily workflows, this episode offers a grounded look at what thoughtful, user-centered innovation looks like in action. How do you strike the balance between simplicity, automation, and human creativity? Let's explore that together.
[00:00:04] [SPEAKER_00] What if your to-do list could think ahead, sort the noise and even help you find time to get those things done in a manner that is not overwhelming and something that's not yet another bloated productivity tool? Well, in today's episode, I'm going behind the scenes of the biggest evolution in Trello's history. Whenever I hear the word Trello, it reminds me of a good friend, Bob Elkins, who is located in Montana.
[00:00:32] [SPEAKER_00] He's not been feeling the best recently, and I'm hoping that this episode will bring that smile to his face. So a big hello to Bob if you're listening. And today, I'm live at Team 25 in Anaheim. My guest is the head of product for Trello at Atlassian. And for long time, Trello users, like myself, this new direction is both familiar and fresh.
[00:00:56] [SPEAKER_00] Because it's time for Trello to be reimagined, not as a team-based project management platform that it grew into, but more of a deeply personal productivity assistant. One that's powered by, yep, you guessed it, AI.
[00:01:11] [SPEAKER_00] So today, I want to unpack new features like Inbox, Planner and Atlassian Intelligence and learn more about how Atlassian Intelligence is transforming Trello into something more intuitive, more integrated and more human-centered. And whether that is syncing with Slack, summarizing your inbox or helping you block time out on your calendar with a simple drag-and-drop interface that Trello has become famous for.
[00:01:39] [SPEAKER_00] So if you've ever felt buried under a sea of apps, alerts and endless tabs, hopefully this conversation offers a more insightful look at how design empathy and smart automation can restore some of that clarity and let's hope even joy to your daily grind. But enough from me. Let's get my guest onto the podcast now.
[00:02:03] [SPEAKER_00] So thank you for joining me on the Tech Talks Daily Podcast here live at Team 25 in Anaheim. Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do?
[00:02:13] [SPEAKER_01] Thank you for having me, Neil. This is so exciting. I'm head of product for Trello. My name is Gaurav Kataria and I've been with Atlassian for five years. So very excited to be here and to tell you everything about the new Trello that we just launched this week.
[00:02:29] [SPEAKER_00] Well, I must warn you, I'm what you would call a legacy Trello user. We use it for over a decade. Use it in everything from managing IT projects to travel plans and Christmas gift buying even. But for people hearing about Kanban boards and Trello for the first time, can you just set the scene? Tell listeners what it is and why they are so helpful to equally individuals and teams.
[00:02:50] [SPEAKER_01] With you earlier, Neil, like we released the new beta on Monday this week and within 48 hours, half a million people had opted into the new beta. So this is a very, very loved tool and people are passionate about Trello. Now for users, for your listeners that are not familiar with Trello, I'll describe it as a very visual and tactile. Tactile as in touch sensitive type of tool, which is very easy to get started.
[00:03:18] [SPEAKER_01] If you want to get started, just go to Trello.com and I can promise you in five minutes you will have your whole thing set up and you would be using it with no glitch, no errors. And the simplicity that you would not have seen anywhere else. That's what makes Trello special. And people personalize Trello for their own kind of taste, style, personality. It's available on the phone, so on iOS and Android and also on the website, so Trello.com.
[00:03:48] [SPEAKER_01] And one of the things people do with Trello is they'll kind of bring their own personality into the tool. So there are board backgrounds and card cover images and stickers. And that's what makes Trello very liked and loved by our users. So I can tell you so much about Trello. Let's see what do you want to know next.
[00:04:07] [SPEAKER_00] Again, especially in IT departments, the traditional Kanban boards of to do, doing and done is so simple and yet so effective when managing workloads. But it can spill into so many different areas of your life, can't it as well? Absolutely.
[00:04:21] [SPEAKER_01] In fact, you could say it is sort of a little bit of double-edged sword. And it has been somewhat controversial that when do you use Trello versus when do you use Jira? Like on one hand, it can be so simple to create a board with to do, doing and done. And you can get started with a project. And that's how a lot of Trello users start by kind of creating a simple project.
[00:04:45] [SPEAKER_01] Over the many years, what we have seen is as teams grow, their needs grow, and their projects get more sophisticated. And we believe Jira is the right tool for managing complex, more sophisticated projects because it is built as a project management tool. So you can track things like dependencies and roll-up reporting and compliance and so on.
[00:05:09] [SPEAKER_01] Whereas Trello is more suited for managing your own individual productivity. And with this new release that we have done this week, it's the biggest release in the history of Trello, is we are really focusing on making the individual user more productive. And I would describe the new Trello in as simple words as this. It is an AI-powered to-do list for you.
[00:05:35] [SPEAKER_00] And as you said there, Trello has always had this reputation for being both visual and intuitive. But with this new evolution, it seems that you're almost repositioning it from a team tool to an individual productivity companion. So what sparked that strategic shift? And how do you see Trello's identity continuing to evolve over the next decade?
[00:05:56] [SPEAKER_01] Absolutely, absolutely. So that is a very deliberate shift in focusing Trello more around individual productivity as opposed to the project management use cases. Because we believe Jira is a better tool for project management use cases. One of the capabilities we have launched in Trello, and a lot of users have loved it, is as your projects grow in complexity, you can easily move them over from Trello to Jira.
[00:06:23] [SPEAKER_01] And all the kind of nice things about Trello will move over to Jira. For example, if you had a board background, label, card cover image, the content will kind of move over to Jira. And then you can build the more sophisticated workflow in Jira. Now, at the same time, there are things which are more about your own productivity. So let's talk about kind of what does a person need? So not necessarily a project, a team, but really an individual.
[00:06:50] [SPEAKER_01] And I'm guessing, Neil, for you, for your listeners, we are all familiar with this kind of challenge or problem that we get tons of emails, we get tons of Slack messages or Microsoft Teams messages, and then we get notifications in a dozen different SaaS applications that we use, from Salesforce and Workday to HubSpot and you name it. Like every knowledge worker is probably spending their time in dozen different applications.
[00:07:19] [SPEAKER_01] Now, how do you keep track of all the work that's in kind of scattered across many different places? It's just not possible. In fact, most of the people tell me that they forget. And that is very human. Like you can't keep track of the firehose of information and notifications that are coming at you. This is where AI comes into play.
[00:07:43] [SPEAKER_01] And when I describe Trello as an AI-powered to-do list, that is the core experience we want to nail and serve for our users. If you get an email, you forward it to Trello, and AI will summarize it, extract the important information, and add it to your Trello card. Like that's new capability powered by Atlassian AI. If you get a Slack message or Microsoft Teams message, same thing.
[00:08:13] [SPEAKER_01] If in Slack you click on Save for Later, or in Microsoft Teams, the equivalent experience, create a card. The Atlassian intelligence will summarize that information and then create a card in Trello. And Trello is so easy to use and it's accessible. Like people have it on their phone. It's one of the most downloaded apps on both iOS and Android all over the world. It's very easy to keep track of things that are on your to-do list.
[00:08:41] [SPEAKER_01] So our intention here is to make, in fact, the framework we have used is what we are calling capture, organize, and get shit done. So capture is a very seamless, frictionless way to capture your action items and to-dos from emails and notifications and Slack messages and sort of meeting notes and hallway conversations all in one place.
[00:09:08] [SPEAKER_01] So Trello can be your AI assistant that's keeping track of everything that you need to do. And then the second capability is what's, after capturing everything, is organizing it. So kind of finding, like, what needs to be done, what's more important, what's less important. Because we will always have too many things to do. We'll have to decide which ones to do. Because we'll never be able to do everything that comes our way.
[00:09:34] [SPEAKER_01] So with organization in Trello, we help people organize so you can drag and drop in the familiar Trello interface, prioritize things that are important to you. And then the last bit, which is the most exciting bit and a new capability we have released this week, is how do you find time to do the things? It's one thing you have a wonderful to-do list. It's nicely prioritized and organized and it's beautiful. But where do you find the time to do the things that are on your to-do list?
[00:10:01] [SPEAKER_01] So we have done an integration with Google Calendar and Microsoft Calendar where you can drag and drop things from your Trello inbox onto your calendar. So very simple. I mean, for your listeners that are familiar with Trello, it's the classic drag and drop experience. And for folks that are not familiar with Trello, as I said, it's very visual and tactile experience where all your to-do lists are right in front of your eyes.
[00:10:28] [SPEAKER_01] And you can drag and drop things on a screen to say that, okay, I have these 10 things to do and I have only two more days remaining in this week. I'm going to get these three done today and the other seven done tomorrow. And you just drag and drop those things on your calendar. Simple as that.
[00:10:44] [SPEAKER_00] Wow. So for anybody listening that wants to get hands-on with this, let's drill down onto those new features that we're talking about. So we have Inbox, Planner and AI features that all mark a big leap in integrating Trello into everyday tools that we all use, whether it be Slack, Gmail or even Siri, I believe as well. But with so many task management apps already claiming to unify work, what's Trello's unique angle here in solving that task sprawl challenge?
[00:11:13] [SPEAKER_01] Absolutely. And I think the reason there are so many apps in the market that are trying to tackle this is because it's a real need that we all have. And it's an unsolved problem. And that is just the proof that there are so many apps coming at this because it's yet unsolved. And with Trello, we believe we can solve this. And as I shared with you in a few minutes ago, we launched the new experience as a beta experience on Monday.
[00:11:41] [SPEAKER_01] And in less than 48 hours, we had half a million people opt into the new beta experience because they know and they can feel the experience in Trello is so intuitive and so easy to use. And it just makes sense.
[00:12:26] [SPEAKER_01] And one of the things that we learned was when Atlassian intelligence is summarizing the information. What if you had an email where half the email was written in one language and the other half of the email was written in another language? It's not a common use case. I've never come across that use case. But when you have sort of millions of users all over the world and working in like dozens of different languages, someone runs into this problem.
[00:12:52] [SPEAKER_01] Does AI summarize it in language A or language B or both? And those are the type of cases where we are able to detect and solve for, which if you did not have the level of expertise in AI, you would not be able to tackle some of these very unique edge cases and complicated cases. So Atlassian has invested a ton in AI over the last two years.
[00:13:21] [SPEAKER_01] And we are at the cutting edge. So we are able to create experiences that are very special and very deeply thought out. And we have the user's trust that has allowed us to kind of improve and iterate on these experiences over a year plus time period. So I'm very proud of what we have built. And I would urge all your listeners and viewers to try it out. Go to Trello.com and see for yourself how well it works.
[00:13:48] [SPEAKER_00] We're talking on a tech podcast at a tech conference. So we've got to talk about AI. We've mentioned it several times already. And it's clear that you've leaned into AI to reduce manual overhead, whether it be passing messages or even suggesting due dates. But as AI becomes more embedded in all our daily workflows, I'm curious, how do you ensure it complements human decision making rather than dictating? Is that something that's top of mind as well?
[00:14:15] [SPEAKER_01] Absolutely. So let's start with there are many tools that were created over the last decade that will just try to aggregate information from many different places. And there is an information overload. If you aggregate it, you're only going to make the overload worse for everyone. Like I already get 100 emails and I don't want 100 emails plus 100 other notifications to be combined together as 200, 300 different notifications.
[00:14:42] [SPEAKER_01] So what AI is able to do is summarize and extract the most important things to help you as the kind of the human in charge prioritize things because you will do the work eventually. Now, at some point, we could argue that AI can do the work and you as a human can just kick back and relax. We are not there yet.
[00:15:05] [SPEAKER_01] So there is a lot of human and AI companion work that happens where AI gives a summary of information to the human and then human is able to act on it. Or AI is able to give a first draft of something to a human and then human is able to act on it.
[00:15:22] [SPEAKER_01] But the use case that we have identified in Trello, which is such a common use case, is everybody in the world, every knowledge worker in the world has too many things to do and not enough time to do it. So if you were an executive, you're very familiar with this problem. And typically you have an executive assistant who helps you. But if you are not an executive, most likely you don't have an executive assistant and there's nobody to help you.
[00:15:50] [SPEAKER_01] AI can be that executive assistant for you, even if you do not have an executive assistant. So that's the use case we are going after first is someone going through all your action items and notifications and messages to identify the most important things, helping you prioritize those things, helping you prioritize those things, and then finding time on your calendar so that you can do those things.
[00:16:17] [SPEAKER_01] Very much what you would think an executive assistant should be able to help you with. It's just that not everyone can have an executive assistant. So with Trello, we are aspiring to create that experience first. Now I'm sure you will ask like what comes next? Well, at some point in the future, we would want the workflow to be a companion workflow between AI doing, let's say, half the work or three quarters of the work
[00:16:42] [SPEAKER_01] and the human kind of providing the final approval, verification, or the human touch to that experience. And this is where agents come into play. So you could have an agent that will do some deep research for you. It'll integrate with other tools, pull information from other places, summarize it, compile it, give it to the human for the final review and final assistant.
[00:17:06] [SPEAKER_01] Just like if you had an assistant in real life, they will kind of create a nice folder or binder for you with information from every place and then give it to you with an executive summary up on the top. That's the experience we want to create with AI agents that can help you do your work. And I'm sure you heard about it in the Atlassian keynote.
[00:17:27] [SPEAKER_01] We are making very big investments in Rovo and pretty significant investments with connectors to 50 plus applications so that you can bring information from all of those places and do a consolidated, aggregated, summarized view of information by connecting the dots. If you saw the presentation by Mike Cannon Brooks, you saw that we have created a teamwork graph under the hood that connects all of these disparate data points
[00:17:56] [SPEAKER_01] into a cohesive logical structure that helps you extract the most important insights. And this is where I think the AI will have the biggest impact in the next years to come.
[00:18:08] [SPEAKER_00] Wow, exciting times ahead. And of course, making Trello more personal, letting users mirror tasks across boards, block time in a visual way and preserve their own mental models. All feels deeply empathetic, may I say. So what has been your response to, was that a response to specific user behavior or more of a design philosophy? What inspired that approach?
[00:18:30] [SPEAKER_01] Absolutely. I think that's such an important question that when Trello started out, it was an easy to use, simple project management tool, right? As we said, you could create a simple project by creating to do, doing, done as a Kanban board. And oftentimes the projects grew in complexity, the teams grew, their size grew.
[00:18:52] [SPEAKER_01] And we kept on adding more and more complex features into Trello, which made it a more complex product to use. With this new release, we are going back to the basics. And this is what we have heard from our users, that what makes Trello special is its simplicity. So in a way, in this new release, we are removing some of that complexity that we had built over the years
[00:19:17] [SPEAKER_01] and focusing on Trello on the simplest end user experience for tracking your own work, as opposed to a full-fledged project management tool, which Trello was never truly intended to be, but it was used in that way. So we are trying to go back to the basics. And one of the things that many of your listeners may be familiar with, Trello has kind of nice, easy-to-use mobile apps. So if you are on Android or iOS, like you can work straight from your phone.
[00:19:45] [SPEAKER_01] And we have released now widgets, a full-screen widget experience, where you don't even have to open the app. Like on your phone, you can just look at your list of things, prioritize in importance in an ordered way, and then you just check them off as you complete those tasks. So that's what makes Trello very unique. And this release is really doubling down on that simplicity of the experience.
[00:20:11] [SPEAKER_00] And as a Trello user myself, the joy of checking off a task still resonates more than any form of external validation. I know that's something you're passionate about as well. But how much of Trello's design is driven by behavioral psychology? And are there any surprising user insights that might maybe have helped shape these latest features? Do you look at that side of things at all?
[00:20:35] [SPEAKER_01] We absolutely do. And because we have such a large and passionate user base, they're not shy of giving us feedback. We constantly get a lot of good, valuable, constructive, productive feedback from our users. I'll share a couple different examples. So Trello was a simple, nice, beautiful interface with kind of colors and board backgrounds and card cover images. And one of the things that our user said is,
[00:21:02] [SPEAKER_01] my boards become complex with time because I have too many cards, too many lists. Is there a way to color code the list? And we said, well, that's a great idea. All Trello lists used to be gray in color. The cards were beautiful. The background was beautiful. But the lists were kind of plain old gray in color. And we launched the list colors in Trello just to bring more kind of bring them to life and make them pop more. So those are the type of features which we are building directly based on the user feedback,
[00:21:32] [SPEAKER_01] where users tell us that this is how the product will be better for them. I'll give you a very recent example. Just two months ago, we launched a checkmark in Trello. Now, this could be a controversial topic because Trello had the concept of a Kanban board where there is a done list and something is done only if you drag an item to the done list. But for many users, that's too much extra work.
[00:22:00] [SPEAKER_01] Like, why do I have to drag it? Can't I just mark it in place that it's done without the dragging action? I mean, dragging is fun and we had confetti and everything and people loved it. But there was still some friction involved in dragging. So the new experience that we have launched, which is in addition to the confetti and the done list, is ability to check off tasks right where they are.
[00:22:26] [SPEAKER_01] So if you have a list of things, you can check them off with the, again, very what we call Trello-E or fun and exciting way of marking things off on your checklist. So those are the things that we have done based on what we have heard from our users. And the feedback we have gotten after we have released these features is people are thankful, grateful, and they appreciate that we listen to them and we create features that make their life even easier and even more delightful.
[00:22:57] [SPEAKER_00] Another thing that stood out for me was your openness that Trello isn't going to replace tools like, I don't know, Salesforce or Workday, but instead coexist and organize their output. So do you think more productivity platforms should stop chasing the one app to rule them all vision, the super apps of the world? Do you think we should be moving away from that? Because that seems to be your philosophy here.
[00:23:20] [SPEAKER_01] That is indeed our philosophy. And I'll tell you kind of where we are coming from. And at Atlassian, we have done a lot of deep thinking on this, that do you have one app where everything happens in one app, or do you have multiple apps that are more kind of specialized for different use cases? And after talking to our users and looking at what's developed in the market, we've realized
[00:23:43] [SPEAKER_01] that if you build one app that does everything, academically, it may sound good, but it's going to become a very complex app. Because if it is doing a million different things, there are probably a million different buttons and menu items and configurations. And nobody wants to click million different buttons and configurations and steps. So oftentimes you're looking for something very, very simple.
[00:24:10] [SPEAKER_01] As I said, the widget that we have created for Trello mobile apps, so that's available on Android and coming very soon in iOS, is you don't even have to open the app. It's just a list that's available on your home screen on your phone, and you just check it off. And if you could go to an app, go to the right section of the app and mark something as done, it may be five clicks and five seconds. But we want to make it happen for you in one click and less than a second.
[00:24:39] [SPEAKER_01] So that's the design goal and design philosophy that we have really absorbed, and we believe in that. And that's what our users love about what Atlassian is able to deliver.
[00:24:49] [SPEAKER_00] Love it. And finally, as AI becomes more powerful, where do you draw the line between helping users and over-automating their workflows? What do you think about trust, explainability, control? Sorry to go all IT on you here, especially for Trello's global user base with varied expectations. How do you rein that in and maintain that balance?
[00:25:09] [SPEAKER_01] Absolutely. I think that is a very, very important and timely question. I'll start by saying this, that many of your viewers are familiar with a lot of different enterprise software. In very simple terms, I'll describe an enterprise software as buttons, menus, and text boxes. No matter what software you're using, there are buttons, menus, and text boxes.
[00:25:33] [SPEAKER_01] In the world of AI and AI agents, do we really need buttons, menus, and text boxes? We probably don't need that. What are the things that humans are uniquely good at? Humans are uniquely good at sort of connecting the dots in some ways and visualizing things and imagining things that don't even exist in many ways. Now, Gen AI is doing a lot of cool work there. So I understand that many of your viewers may challenge that thinking.
[00:26:02] [SPEAKER_01] It's like, no, AI can do imagination as well. But let's just stick with me for a second. What humans are uniquely good at is imagination and connection and empathy and taste. So if these are the things that humans are uniquely good at, if we build software that's more visual, that's more tactile, that's more available to you without buttons and menus and text boxes,
[00:26:32] [SPEAKER_01] then that's where we are truly tapping into the human creativity and the human energy. And with Trello, that's where we are going. Because we want to eliminate the things that can be done by AI and can be done by AI better than a human can. And then there are things that are uniquely human. And that's where the software and human kind of work together.
[00:26:55] [SPEAKER_01] So our kind of bet here, our vision here is to keep Trello as a very visual tool that spark ideas in your mind, sparks your creativity and helps you think through what's important. Because there is always too many things to do in the world. There's never going to be enough time to do all those things. Where we want humans to spend their time are the most important, the most creative things. And that's what we are here for. That's what we are building Trello for.
[00:27:23] [SPEAKER_00] Trevor Burrus And I think that is a powerful moment to end on. I will have links to everything so people can join those 500,000 people in signing up or joining the new version. But more than anything, just thank you for stopping by and talking with me. David Absolutely. Thank you for having us. Trevor Burrus I think the future of productivity isn't about building a super app. That's something we keep hearing about. An app that tries to be the best of everything. I think it's more about creating tools that know when to step in. And when to get out of the way.
[00:27:52] [SPEAKER_00] And with Trello's new AI-powered features, the team at Atlassian isn't just chasing trends. They're now doubling down on simplicity, personalization, the power of human focus. All the things that we fell in love with Trello. All the things that made us fall in love with Trello many years ago. And whether you are blocking time, checking tasks off your phone's home screen, or simply making sense of one of those messy weeks. This new Trello promises to be your calm in the chaos.
[00:28:22] [SPEAKER_00] But how do you feel about productivity tools? Tools becoming more intelligent, more proactive, and more integrated into your personal workflows? Are you ready to let an AI co-pilot your daily tasks? Or are there lines that you simply wouldn't cross? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Email me. TechBlogWriterOutlook.com Neil C. Hughes on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram. Share your perspective with our little community we've got here.
[00:28:51] [SPEAKER_00] Certainly lots to think about. I'm going to be playing with Trello's new features. And I'll return back tomorrow with another topic. Bye for now. Bye for now.
[00:28:59] Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now. Bye for now.