How research shaped one of Atlassian's boldest product bets — pivoting a 50M-user tool away from project management and into personal productivity, with a tight timeline and high organizational stakes.
Trello was acquired by Atlassian in 2018 for $500M and had grown to 50M+ users — but most were on free accounts, and the product's identity had become muddled. In early 2024, Atlassian leadership made a decisive call: Jira would own all project management use cases. Trello needed to pivot.
The new direction was personal productivity — helping individuals manage their own tasks, routines, and goals. A suite of new features was already in development: Inbox, Planner, Jira Lists, Mirror Cards, and Quick Capture. In June 2024, Trello's Head of Product brought me back specifically to answer the research questions that would determine whether this pivot would succeed.
Joining a product mid-sprint means everything is moving fast and the questions are changing week to week. I structured my work around four objectives that ran in parallel, not in sequence.
Inbox and Planner are only useful if users can easily navigate between them and their existing Trello boards — the solution was Split Screen. But how that navigation should be built split the organization in two.
"Can Design 1 support Split Screen for Personal Productivity, while still supporting current Project Management use cases — and also change perception of what Trello is?"
The real business question was harder: can Trello convince Atlassian that Design 1 is the right call? This wasn't just a usability test — it was research designed to resolve a genuine organizational disagreement under time pressure.
I couldn't afford a long study. The research had to be fast, credible, and persuasive enough to settle strong opinions. I designed a 3-phase comparative study.
The biggest objection to Design 1 was that existing project management users would reject it. I designed the sample as a risk/reward matrix to address this head-on.
The initial assumption was that S4 (project management-only users) would strongly resist Design 1. The research showed otherwise.
Trello was releasing six feature areas simultaneously. With a hard deadline and a small team, I needed a method that was scalable, fast, actionable, and repeatable. The answer was a standardized SEQ-based usability framework.
The Single Ease Question (SEQ) is a validated 7-point scale created by Jeff Sauro at MeasuringU. After completing a task, participants answer: "On a scale of 1 to 7, how would you rate that task?" Scores below 5.5 signal a feature needs improvement before shipping.
I worked with 6 PMs to align on 36 actions to test across all feature areas. Rather than 36 separate sessions, I combined related features to run 22 sessions total.
Users didn't understand these surfaces are private and not tied to boards. Added copy to make this explicit.
No visual signal that a Mirror Card had been created. Added confirmation affordance to close the feedback loop.
Users expected to see the "Reporter" field when setting up a Jira List. A missing field with a straightforward fix.
Created a step-by-step guide so PMs and designers could independently run SEQ studies on future iterations.
The navigation study and the SEQ framework answered urgent questions. But as the team moved toward GA, a deeper question emerged: what do Trello's personal productivity users actually need to accomplish? Without a shared answer, every roadmap conversation would start from scratch.
I designed a 3-wave qualitative research program to map the full landscape of personal productivity goals — producing 33 Jobs to Be Done that became the foundation for product decisions, AI feature direction, and cross-team alignment at Atlassian.
A Job to Be Done describes why someone uses a product — the goal they're trying to achieve, not the task they're performing.
For easier scanning across the program, I simplified statements to just the motivation and outcome — keeping the full format available in the detailed reports. This made the JTBDs immediately usable by PMs, designers, and engineers without needing to read an entire research report first.
Personal productivity isn't a single moment — it's a cycle. I structured the research around the three phases of Trello's Feedback Loop framework, running one research wave per phase.
The 33 Jobs to Be Done weren't filed away — they became the team's shared language for every product conversation that followed.
The question isn't just "what do users need?" — it's "what do we need to know, by when, with what confidence?" Designing for velocity changed every study.
The Split Screen study had to be persuasive to stakeholders with strong opinions — which shaped the participant strategy entirely.
The SEQ framework, JTBD program, and self-service templates kept delivering value long after individual studies ended. Infrastructure is impact.
The pivot decision came from leadership. The validation that it was feasible, usable, and desirable — that came from research. Neither works without the other.