Using Value Proposition Design to Develop a Mobile Strategy for Trello
The Value Proposition Canvas. This strategic tool helped our mobile team gain clarity on user needs and align our product strategy.
Challenge
In 2022, as the Design Manager for Trello Mobile, I faced a significant challenge: our mobile app usage was declining despite increasing time spent on mobile business apps overall in the market. This trend directly threatened our company goals, as mobile MAU (Monthly Active Users) had a -5% growth rate, and mobile signups were experiencing a dramatic -23% YOY decline. With mobile accounting for approximately 36% of Trello's MAU, this negative trend significantly impacted overall Atlassian business metrics.
Context
Business Impact: Mobile app usage was 10 percentage points less sticky (DAU/MAU) than web app usage
Strategic Importance: Trello mobile needed to contribute to Atlassian's 100M MAU company-wide goal
Team Structure: A newly formed dedicated mobile pod with cross-functional representation but a limited historical focus on mobile-specific strategy
Design Environment: When I joined Trello, I was explicitly hired to revamp the mobile app and build out the mobile design practice. The organization knew its current approach wasn’t working but wasn't entirely sure why.
Leadership Approach
Traditional approaches to product strategy weren’t yielding the insights we needed to reverse the negative trends. We had plenty of user research and analytics data, but we lacked a unified understanding of why users would choose our mobile app and what unique value it could deliver. Rather than proceeding with feature-based planning, I recognized an opportunity to introduce a more holistic strategic framework.
1. Introducing Value Proposition Design Methodology
I championed the adoption of the Value Proposition Design methodology from the book “Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want.” Instead of immediately focusing on features, I shifted our strategic thinking toward understanding the deeper motivations behind our users’ behaviors:
Functional jobs: What tasks were users trying to accomplish?
Social jobs: How did using Trello mobile affect users’ status or perception by others?
Emotional jobs: What feelings or states of mind were users seeking?
2. Facilitating Cross-Functional Collaboration
I designed and facilitated a series of workshops with the mobile pod triad (Design, Product, Engineering) and expanded team members to:
Define our primary customer segment: “Team champions doing light work.”
Identify customer jobs, pains, and gains for this segment.
Generate potential pain relievers and gain creators.
Prioritize opportunities through collaborative voting.
Rather than using standard templates, I adapted the workshop process to suit our team’s dynamics, starting with broad ideation and applying affinity mapping to identify strategic themes before voting, a highly effective modification.
Workshop Participants: To ensure comprehensive input, I brought together representatives from:
Engineering
Design
Product
Data Science
User Research
3. Translating Insights into Strategic Direction
After the workshops, I synthesized the extensive inputs into a cohesive strategy document organized around clear hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1: Focus on Light Work We determined that focusing on product features supporting “light work” (single actions in nature) on smartphones for collaborative business users would result in increased mobile Team MAU and CSAT.
This made feature prioritization easier, pivoting from when mobile attempted feature parity.
Hypothesis 2: Target Deskless Workers We identified an opportunity to expand our user base by targeting deskless workers, a segment twice the size of knowledge workers globally (2 billion vs. 1 billion).
This ended up not being a strategic choice for Atlassian but was a great exercise in market trends.
4. Establishing a Two-Pronged Strategic Approach
Based on the Value Proposition workshops, I helped shape a dual-focused strategy:
Retain mobile users and increase app stickiness through:
Experience quality improvements (pain relievers)
New features designed to gain creators
Increase new MAU by targeting mobile-reliant user segments:
Identify and validate specific deskless worker use cases
Create tailored experiences for these segments
Implementation and Results
Key Shipped Improvements
Simplified permissions was one of many improvements we made as a result of our strategy work.
We implemented numerous improvements:
Authentication: Simplified login/signup flow (iOS: +4.4% auth success rate)
Email Verification: Updated flow on Android (+2.7% verification rate)
Request Board Access: Enhanced functionality (+5% board join rate)
Reverse Invites: Allowed new users to share their Trello Profile easily
Notifications: Advanced checklist notifications (+8% increase in paid enabled users from trials)
Card Cover Settings: Improved usability (3X increase in card cover usage)
Design System: Added consistency and improved experience quality
Measurable Results
Trello Turnaround
Mobile contributions were proportionally significant as part of the broader “ctrl+alt+delete: Reboot Trello's MAU” initiative that ultimately resulted in a 7% increase in Team MAU. Mobile experiments delivered approximately 30% of the program’s total impact on signups and activated users.
The Value Proposition Design process transformed our approach to mobile strategy with impressive results. The mobile strategy work was a cornerstone of Trello’s overall growth turnaround. By focusing on mobile-specific value rather than web feature parity, we not only reversed negative mobile growth trends but positioned mobile as a vital acquisition and engagement channel. This strategic shift recognized that for many “Team Champions,” mobile represented a significant percentage of their interactions with Trello, with approximately 36% of MAU coming from mobile platforms. Our mobile experience quality improvements were essential to driving overall company growth objectives, contributing directly to the 10 percentage point improvement in mobile stickiness (DAU/MAU) compared to web usage.
App Store Ratings (highest in years)
Android: 4.60 (as of Apr 2022) - highest since Sep 2019
iOS: 4.35 (as of Apr 2022) - highest since Sep 2020
Customer Satisfaction
Q1 CSAT: 90 (with 39% “Extremely satisfied”) vs. Web CSAT of 85
Q2 CSAT: 91 (with 46% “Extremely satisfied”) vs. Web CSAT of 87
Industry context: The average CSAT for software in 2022 was 77
Team Health
Team Effectiveness: Improved from 45% to 89% favorable
Work Happiness: Improved from 33% to 78% favorable
Drivers of Work Happiness: Improved from 72% to 89% favorable
Strategic Benefits
Team Alignment: Created shared understanding across the pod about strategic priorities
Clear Focus: Established specific metrics to track success (DAU/MAU, app store ratings, session length)
User-Centered Direction: Shifted from feature parity with web to mobile-specific value creation
Strategic Framework: Provided a structure for ongoing decision-making about feature investments
Leadership Buy-in: Secured executive support by presenting a data-informed, user-centered strategy
Most importantly, the process helped us define transparent "not doing" areas: enterprise admin features, deep work (initially), and web feature parity for parity's sake. We focused our limited resources on the highest-impact opportunities.
Key Leadership Lessons
1. Strategic Frameworks Drive Clarity
Introducing the Value Proposition Design framework transformed vague discussions about "improving mobile" into structured conversations about specific user needs and how we could uniquely address them.
2. Cross-Functional Input Creates Better Strategies
We created a strategy considering multiple perspectives and constraints by involving design, product, engineering, research, and marketing team members, increasing its viability and adoption.
3. Synthesis is as Important as Generation
While the workshops generated hundreds of ideas, the real leadership value came from synthesizing these into coherent themes and hypotheses that could guide ongoing work.
4. Focus Enables Impact
By clearly defining what we would and would not do, we created a strategy that allowed the team to concentrate resources where they would make the most difference.
5. Process Documentation Enables Reuse
By documenting the approach and creating reusable templates, I enabled other Atlassian teams to adopt similar methodologies for their strategic work.
Personal Reflection
This experience reinforced my belief that effective design leadership goes beyond visual or interaction design to shaping strategic direction. By introducing structured methodologies that help teams understand user needs more deeply, designers can drive product strategy that balances business goals with genuine user value.
The Value Proposition Design approach I championed for Trello Mobile became a model I later adapted for our Confluence AI strategy work, demonstrating how design-led strategic frameworks can be applied across different products and contexts. The most satisfying aspect was seeing how this approach helped the team move from tactical feature discussions to strategic conversations about value creation, conversations that ultimately led to more focused and impactful work.