Trelliswork Turns 1: Enabling Team Managers, Wherever Work Happens

Mike Nash
October 23, 2024

When you have your first kid, time changes. It no longer moves at the same speed, you never have enough, and each minute quickly becomes precious. Every once in a while you’ll look back and think, ‘it’s been 3 years!?’ 

Starting a company isn’t that different. 

This week, Trelliswork turned 1, and I can’t decide which is harder. Raising a tiny human, or building a company from the ground up. Both are wild rides, and each brings its own sense of purpose and fulfillment that only comes through living the experience. 

We started Trelliswork to reimagine the everyday life of team managers, and with today’s hybrid workplace our mission is more important than ever. 

We know the formula: help managers get organized, run better meetings, and keep their teams in sync. And with Trelliswork, the structure and tools to make this radically simpler are finally in reach. This means less time wasted on operational overhead, and more managers empowered to lead great teams - every day.

Managers are always under pressure, and they’re on the frontlines of more disruptive change than ever before. From a new hybrid workplace, to a period of corporate cost cutting, to navigating a wave of AI that’s arrived to change seemingly everything, to company return to office mandates, it’s easy to sympathize with the managers left to chart the course through it all. 

Yet, there’s a category of manager who wakes up everyday and just shakes their head. Because while the workplace and workforce are changing, they know their everyday responsibilities remain the same. 

A manager’s role is to enable their team. It’s to facilitate decisions and keep priorities aligned - across people, projects, and teams - in service of a greater company purpose. Managers live in tactics one second and strategy the next. Every day requires connecting the dots, communicating ideas and information, and constantly seeking clarity to provide it when and where it’s needed. 

Yet, today’s best tools only solve isolated pieces of this management puzzle. This is why even the simplest of tasks, like creating the next meeting agenda, begin as informational scavenger hunts across email, Slack, sticky notes, and ‘that doc on your desktop’, searching for a topic you meant to bring up with the team. Multiply this by 10. Every day. Welcome to management in 2023. 

When basic operational tasks consume 40% of the week, it’s no surprise why culture, team norms, and connectedness struggle to exist across organizations. And, no, you don’t get to add these at the end of the day with a virtual happy hour or ‘prescribed fun’ from HR.  

If you’re a good manager, you’re scraping by with what you have - wasting time trying to manually create structure, meaning, and context with general purpose productivity tools. And if you’re a new manager, you don’t even know where to start.

The work of being a manager is too important to live in the margins of general purpose tools.

Starting now, this is the work that lives in Trelliswork.

The next 6 months for Trelliswork are all about product market fit as we get our product into the hands of more users. From core product features, to integrations, to templates and AI, lots of goodness is on the way, and we can’t wait to get it into the wild.

If you’re a team manager, and you’re looking for tools to finally make your life easier, we invite you to try Trelliswork today, for free.

Share this post