Trello: Fog Creek's fix for 'who is doing what' becomes a $425M product

Around Fog Creek Software's ten-year anniversary, founder Joel Spolsky confronted a paradox: after a decade of running the company he still didn't know what anyone was working on. 'Once in a while I would walk around asking everyone what they were doing, and half the time, my reaction was why the hell are you working on THAT?' He decided four two-person teams would each attempt a new product to keep veterans motivated.

Make 'who is working on what' a shared board of draggable cards, born from a rule that nobody carries more than five things - two active, three next, never six.

The first concept was 'Five Things': every person's list capped at exactly five items, two in progress, three queued, never six - too long a to-do list sags motivation. Five Things itself wasn't the answer, but its shape led to Trello: a web board where work became cards on lists anyone could see and drag. The team - four programmers and two summer interns - dogfooded the product when it was only 700 lines of code, and by the end of the summer Spolsky knew they had something. It launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2011.

The internal experiment became the business: spun out of Fog Creek as an independent company in 2014 with $10.3 million from Spark Capital and Index Ventures, grown to 19 million users, and acquired by Atlassian in January 2017 for $425 million - the vast majority cash - Atlassian's largest deal to that point. Fog Creek, the project-management company, ended up with its biggest hit coming from the product built to manage itself.

Fog Creek Software had spent a decade making project-management software - and its own founder still couldn't see who was doing what inside his company. Around the firm's ten-year anniversary, Joel Spolsky concluded that keeping employees excited meant letting them work on new things, so he set up four two-person teams to launch four new products, each run 'in the spirit of lean startups': ship early, listen to real users, pivot freely.

The team that attacked 'who is working on what' started with a management mechanic rather than a feature: Five Things, a hard rule that nobody is ever assigned more than five items - two being worked now, three waiting, never six - because overlong to-do lists kill motivation. Five Things didn't survive, but the discipline behind it did, and it hardened into Trello: one board, cards for tasks, lists for states, everything draggable and visible to everyone.

The proof came from within. Trello was dogfooded at 700 lines of code, and even that skeleton was 'incredibly useful' at Fog Creek; by summer's end Spolsky called it a hit. TechCrunch Disrupt launched it publicly in September 2011 as a free, real-time web app with an iOS companion, positioned explicitly against developer-centric project tools as something any team in any industry could use.

The aftermath validated the internal-tool origin: a 2014 spin-out raised $10.3 million from Spark and Index, and in January 2017 Atlassian paid $425 million for a product with 19 million users - half of them in non-technical functions like finance, HR, legal, marketing and sales. The company that made bug trackers had accidentally built the world's simplest answer to Spolsky's own management question.

The problem was universal and personally felt: a CEO who still couldn't track his own team had both the motivation and the authority to keep the solution ruthlessly simple.

The Five Things cap encoded a real insight - visible, limited work in progress beats exhaustive planning - and the card-board interface turned that discipline into something people wanted to touch.

Dogfooding from 700 lines of code meant the tool was validated by real daily use before launch, exactly the lean-startup behavior the two-person teams were chartered to follow.

It was deliberately pitched beyond developers, which let an internal tool for a small firm grow into a consumer-grade standard for any team's workflow.

The most honest product research is your own chaos: build the tool your team actually needs, cap the work in progress, and a side experiment can outgrow the core business.

Trello spun out of Fog Creek in 2014 as an independent company with $10.3 million from Spark Capital and Index Ventures, and in January 2017 Atlassian acquired it for $425 million in mostly cash - Atlassian's largest acquisition to that date - with Trello near 19 million users and half of them working in non-technical functions like finance, HR and marketing. The board Spolsky's team built to answer one internal question is now one of the most recognizable productivity products in the world.