Update: The standalone Boards app has been discontinued, but we’re taking what we learned and plan to incorporate it into the Todoist app soon. Sign up for the Ambition & Balance newsletter and be the first to know when it’s released.

Today, we’re announcing Boards by Todoist, a simple, stand-alone app for Windows 10. Boards is very much about the Todoist team learning how to work with the Kanban visualization and listening intently to our users on how it could be improved to fit with their workflow.

It’s the first time we’re doing an experiment like this, and it seems like a good time to share some of the motivations, goals, and engineering behind Boards.

Experiment, ship fast, and learn a lot

One of the big challenges of having a tremendously popular product like Todoist is retaining the ability to innovate. Todoist has an amazingly diverse customer base, from real estate managers to couples renovating their houses to fitness instructors. Each one of those customers has their own unique way of using Todoist. Some prefer to use labels a lot, others create deep task structures, etc.

We love that Todoist is flexible enough to fit all of these workflows, but it also means that every time we change our app, we’d better have a good reason for it as we’ll inevitably break a few patterns that some of our customers use along the way. Together with other expectations our customers have, like feature parity across platforms, this makes integrating more experimental ideas into the Todoist app quickly, and scrapping them if they don’t work, very hard.

There are multiple ways to solve this problem.

We could constrain ourselves to experimenting internally, keeping testing within our team, and sharing the results only when we have something that is very polished and ready for production. This could allow us to move relatively fast, but would prevent us from tapping into our users’ collective wisdom. I personally interact with quite a few of you when you send feedback for our Todoist for Windows 10 app. The fact that our users care deeply about Todoist and demonstrate it by taking the time to write very detailed feedback containing concrete suggestions and new ideas, continues to blow me away and humble me at the same time.

We use this feedback loop to make the Todoist for Windows 10 app better and it’s starting to show. (More on that another time.) Our experience with Todoist for Windows 10 shows that there’s a ton of value in engaging with our community, so internal-only experiments aren’t an ideal solution. The path we’re starting on with Boards is somewhat similar to what companies like Microsoft and Facebook are doing. It can be summarized as:

Let’s ship an idea fast and learn a lot.

Now that’s more like it.

This model usually takes the form of launching fairly straightforward apps, iterating on them in collaboration with the community, and then deciding what to do with it. That might mean integrating the experiment into the main app (like Microsoft is doing with Office Lens and OneNote), keeping it as a standalone app, or scrapping it entirely if the idea turns out to not work. Of course, the amount of resources Doist (the company behind Todoist) can devote to these experiments is on a bit of a different scale than the technology behemoths mentioned above. But where there’s a will, there’s a way.

The engineering behind our Boards experiment

If you think about Boards, it’s essentially a stripped-down version of the Todoist app with very specific UI pieces swapped for something different. However, the basics stay the same: synchronizing with Todoist.com servers, storing data locally, natural date parsing, etc. As we’re building the Todoist for Windows 10 app, we’re trying to adhere to certain decisions about how the app is structured internally in order to create a certain architecture.

One of the basic principles we try to adhere to and that’s very popular in the software engineering industry, is component decoupling. Simply put, component decoupling means you should try to keep individual components of the app, like the comment editor or the engine that keeps your data in sync with the server, as independent from other components in the system as you can.

When done right, component decoupling makes it fairly easy to build a completely new app, like Boards, by using a lot of things from another app, like Todoist. Instead of starting from scratch, you only need to create the components that are going to be different. For example, in Boards each individual task is represented as a card (shown in the screenshot below). As you can see, we reused a lot of the third pane functionality from the Todoist for Windows 10 app, but gave the Boards version a very different look.

Building new apps from Todoist’s existing components like this creates a virtuous circle. Having multiple apps using the same component forces our developer team to adhere to the type of component independence I outlined above even more strongly. As a result, it’s even easier to reuse the component in the next experiment.

Todoist and Boards comments pane

What Boards means for Todoist

This decoupled approach enabled us to have Boards up and running very quickly, while being stable enough to become a good vehicle for an idea many of our users have suggested.

It also helps us improve the main Todoist app. A lot of the bugs that will surface as more people begin using Boards might be bugs in the shared components. Fixing them will improve the main Todoist client as well.

We think that experimenting this way is going to be a lot of fun for everyone involved. Seeing an idea evolve and trying to nudge it along is always an enjoyable experience. We hope that you will consider joining forces with us to help us build something that you’ll find truly useful. We’re very excited to publish Boards and see how we can work with the our Windows community to improve on the idea and transform it in ways we haven’t anticipated.

Join us for the ride! Download Boards by Todoist from the Windows store and send us your thoughts at boards@doist.io.