Every Friday, we’re answering your questions about business, startups, customer success and more.
Happy Friday!
In our new Groove Friday Q & A segment, we’re answering any questions that you have about, well, anything.
A huge thank you to Laura Roeder, Sébastien Tromp and Pedro Alonso for this week’s questions.
Check out this week’s answers below, and jump in with your own thoughts in the comments!
How Do You Manage Your Trello Boards?
Oh man, do I know this pain. This is something we did a lot of tinkering with to get right, but we’ve finally settled on a system that works without being too overwhelming.
We have two types of Trello boards:
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One board for each team (or employee, if we only have one person doing a particular function)
- Examples: Marketing, Customer Support, etc.
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One board each for multi-person, ongoing projects
- Examples: Startup Journey Blog, Customer Support Blog, Product Roadmap
The team Trello boards are where we put weekly and upcoming to-do’s, as well as quarterly goals (as well as stash ideas for the following quarter).
Every Monday, team leaders (or team members) pull to-do cards from Upcoming (and from our project boards) to This Week, so a team member’s respective board (or their team’s board) is the only board that they need to check on a day-to-day basis to see what they should be doing.
The project boards are where we track ongoing efforts like the blogs. We use them to brainstorm ideas and build our version of an editorial calendar.
These boards aren’t meant to be immediately actionable (e.g., you shouldn’t be checking these boards to see what to do next), but are meant to update when you make progress on something, or to grab to-do’s from for the coming week.
I’ve seen dozens of ways to organize Trello boards from others who use the app, but this is what’s worked best for us so far.
Hope that helps!
What Should You Write About When You Have Two Very Different Audiences?
This is a great question, because it gets at an interesting challenge: content marketing success comes from writing posts that your audience feels was written just for them. But how can you accomplish that when you’re a two-sided platform and have two totally distinct audiences?
Groove isn’t a platform, but we do have experience publishing for two different audiences.
Our Startup Journey blog speaks very specifically to entrepreneurs and others responsible for growing their business. Our Customer Support Blog targets people responsible for customer service and success. There is some overlap, but not overwhelmingly so; we still see different things working (or not working) depending on the blog. This approach has worked really well for us.
My advice – although again, I’m not exactly in your shoes – would be to split your content that way, with separate blogs for each audience. Separate lists, separate editorial calendars. A personalized, relevant experience for every reader.
If you don’t have the bandwidth for this, then pick the side that’s most valuable to your platform (often one side influences the other more when it comes to signups) and attack that.
How Do You Decide What Features to Add or Remove From Groove?
We spent the first six months of our development completely screwing this up.
We built the product that we thought people wanted, and when we considered features, we simply asked “does this add to the product?” The answer to this wrong question was, far too often, yes.
And we ended up launching with a bloated, complex product that simply confused people.
These are all of the pages from our original site, listing all of the features we stuffed in to the product:
Check out this post for more on that early fail.
Since then, we’ve taken a much more methodical approach to adding new features, and at the core of that approach is customer development.
I really can’t stress that enough: it is amazing how many of your problems and business questions can be solved by making a conscious effort to systematically talk to as many of your customers as possible, and listen very, very hard.
You’ll find clarity like you’ve never had before about your product roadmap, your marketing, your customer service… everything.
Ultimately, our customer development efforts are the biggest driver of our product decisions; we consider what we hear and from how many customers we hear it from.
We also take into account support tickets (we use labels in Groove to track how many customers are requesting various features) and other customer research (NPS surveys, for example.
Ultimately, it’s a combination of a mathematical decision and a gut one, but my biggest piece of advice here would be to arm yourself with as much insight into what your customers actually want as possible, because it’ll make all of your decisions better.
