How We Use MeisterTask: Task Management Software Made Simple

At Meister, we don’t just make simple, intuitive productivity tools… We use them too! MeisterTask is a task and project management software that helps teams everywhere collaborate smoothly, communicate effectively, and get more done. Here at Meister, we try to get the most out of the excellent features that MeisterTask has to offer. Read this post to see how your team can reap the same benefits. 

Beyond the fact that it would be unusual for us to use a competitor tool, there are plenty of reasons why we use MeisterTask in-house. Firstly, we really do think that MeisterTask is the best software for simple, secure task management on the web. More importantly though, the Meister team is quite similar in size and structure to many of the companies who use our tools: growing, changing, and cross-functional. This makes us the perfect test subjects for the new features we develop – in fact, every update to MeisterTask is extensively “Lobster-Tested” before it reaches our users. 

Since we first launched the tool way back in 2015, we’ve used MeisterTask to digitalize our processes and support the rapid growth of our team. If your team is going through a similar phase – some of our “growing pains” may sound familiar to you – get in touch with our sales team! We’ve got plenty of first-hand experience in helping teams just like yours become more productive with MeisterTask. 

Why MeisterTask? The Benefits of Task Management Software

We created our task management software because we know that keeping track of your team’s time, tasks and resources can be complicated. When your team is growing, you need to think bigger: writing to-dos with pen on paper might work for small teams, but isn’t a scalable solution. Digital task management is, in our view, the only way you can keep on top of your tasks once your team reaches a certain size. 

MeisterTask Product Manager Liis Monson works every day to make MeisterTask the best it can be for millions of users worldwide. She took the time to run us through what she sees as the main benefits of task management software: 

• Organization is simple. Trying to remember everything that’s going on in your team is impossible. With a task management tool – especially a Kanban tool like MeisterTask – your team’s to-dos are visual and trackable.
• Communication is simple. Task management tools are perfect for managing communication. Rather than writing down information in emails and Slack chats, communication via tasks ensures transparency and consistency.
• Workflow management is simple. As your team grows, you’ll need processes that tell people how work gets done. Task management software helps you transform those processes into live projects that reflect how your team actually works.
• Going Agile is simple. Attempting digital transformation with the wrong tools is like trying to dig to China… with a spoon. Most task management tools can help you implement agile workflows – intuitive ones like MeisterTask achieve this with minimum fuss.

How Meister Uses MeisterTask: Simple, Secure Task Management Software

With these benefits in mind, we thought we’d show you how the Meister Team uses MeisterTask to maximize productivity in house. It’s not always about having the tool that does the most, but the one that gets you what you need. The MeisterTask philosophy is all the features you need, none that you don’t – we never overload our tool with functionality that slows you down. Let’s see how just a few well-chosen features have aligned our team and how you can use them to do the same. 

MeisterTask for Task Management: We Have Projects for Everything

First and foremost, MeisterTask is a task management tool. It’s designed to bring structure to everyday working processes and visualize task progress: from to-do, to doing, to done. That’s why we don’t hold back when it comes to creating projects and managing our tasks in them. By visualizing what we’ve done and what’s still to do, we can keep an overview of progress, manage resources effectively and bring you even better productivity tools. 

Key Feature: Kanban Boards

MeisterTask is built around Kanban boards. These are visual representations of the way teams work. There are two key parts of a Kanban board. Sections, which show the different stages of the workflow, and tasks, which provide details on the work that needs to be done. In MeisterTask, tasks are represented by cards. From the Kanban board, you can see the assignee, the due date, and the task name on the card, or open the task for even more detail.

When we use MeisterTask, we move tasks between sections, left to right, until the workflow ends. A three-section board for Open, In Progress, Done would be the most simple example, but projects can have as many or as few sections as they need to.

What the Team Says

MeisterTask saves us time and ensures new team members are up to speed in no time.

Kanban boards have their roots in manufacturing, but they’re increasingly used by creative and commercial teams too, especially in marketing. Meister B2B Marketing Manager Julia Borshkova is already seeing the benefits.

“MeisterTask’s Kanban boards give everyone an instant overview of task status and project progress. It’s simple, and it’s effective. Our B2B team is growing at the moment, so we’re onboarding a lot of new team members who need to get to grips with the way we work, fast. The project structure in MeisterTask saves us time and ensures new team members are up to speed in no time”.

MeisterTask for Workflow Management: We Let the Machines Work for Us 

Almost every process we have at Meister is represented by a project in MeisterTask. Although every project is different, there are some parts of processes that are always the same. For example, some sections always require tasks to be assigned to a specific person, others require the task to be moved to a different project, some need the task to be marked as complete. While all these actions can be completed in MeisterTask, we’ve thought it might be easier to let the tool work for us instead… so that’s exactly what we did.

Key Feature: Automations

If you spend a lot of time clicking through your task management tool, automations could be the solution. Automations are actions in MeisterTask that are completed by the tool on an “if this, then that” principle, i.e. one thing happening causes another thing to happen automatically. In MeisterTask, automations can be set up to create recurring tasks, trigger time tracking, or update task status. The benefits of automations are twofold. Not only does it save your team time, it also ensures that small, but important tasks are never forgotten. 

What the Team Says

Just two automations save my designers days and weeks of working time.

At Meister, we’re proud of our sleek, streamlined designs. However, this focus on aesthetics does mean that our design team can get extremely busy. Fortunately, as Design Lead Adam Buckley explains, automations are helping the team get precious time back. 

“We always want a second set of eyes on the assets we create. That’s usually my responsibility: look at designs, add my feedback, then approve. All tasks that get moved to “Review” are assigned to me automatically, and another automation notifies me in Slack. Completing that process manually might take one minute, but over the thousands of tasks we complete, just two automations save my designers days and weeks of working time. As we grow, those savings will increase.”

MeisterTask for Communication: We Don’t Use Emails

When you join the Meister team (we’re always hiring), one of the first things you notice is that we don’t use emails. If you’re one of the millions of office workers who finds their day dominated by email overload, this is probably difficult to conceptualize. However, weaning your company off their inbox doesn’t need to be difficult: MeisterTask can help you transition to a more productive setup. In our own case, we’ve found that by centralizing team communication in our task management software, we can keep everyone who needs to know, in the know.

Key Feature: Comments and Mentions 

Emails have their purpose, but for collaborative projects, they’re simply unsuitable. Vital information gets lost in email chains, some people miss out on mails because they aren’t in CC, and long-running topics get buried under the next avalanche in your inbox. At Meister, MeisterTask is the single source of truth for projects – when a team member has something to say, they comment directly on the task, attach relevant documents and @mention stakeholders for their input. Instead of writing long emails as replies, we simply leave emojis! Our features help us maintain clarity throughout the team, and they’ll help you too.

What the Team Says

Thanks to MeisterTask, we focus on actually getting things done instead of drowning in emails.

For our product management team, collaboration is the name of the game – they act as a bridge between the technical and commercial departments. The team uses MeisterTask to collaborate with stakeholders in customer success, engineering and marketing, and how they use our task management software is one of the secrets to their success. Head of Product Kevin Kuhn explains how communication works so much more effectively with MeisterTask than with emails:

“Our projects range from large-scale new features to small bug fixes. MeisterTask enables us to keep everyone on the same page and ensures that information doesn’t fall through the cracks. Thanks to MeisterTask, we focus on actually getting things done instead of drowning in emails and constantly needing to catch up in meetings and calls.”

MeisterTask for Agile Projects: We Avoid Bottlenecks

Are you frustrated with the speed of projects in your company? It might be time to go agile. Transitioning to agile project management from waterfall (or no methodology at all) is a goal for many MeisterTask customers – just as it was for us. As we scaled as a team, we found that by sticking to the key principles of agile, especially collaboration and rapid iteration, we could achieve better results faster. So that other teams could enjoy these advantages too, we’ve kept agile at the heart of the MeisterTask experience.

Key Feature: Timeline

When there are lots of moving parts within a process, sometimes the Kanban board structure alone is not quite enough to visualize when tasks will be completed, by who. Essentially, all tasks in Kanban look the same – it isn’t always clear how long they will take to complete or when they will be worked on, a potential issue for highly-collaborative agile projects.

The solution? MeisterTask’s Gantt-style Timeline feature gives your team a clear calendar view of their tasks and visualizes how these relate to others in the project. In your team, you can use Timeline to plan, schedule and visualize your team’s tasks over the coming weeks and months. This visualization makes it far easier to identify inefficiencies, eliminate bottlenecks, and empower team members to stay productive.

What the Team Says

Timeline provides a clear overview:  where tasks are in the workflow and when they will be completed.

At Meister, Timeline keeps our engineering teams on track and helps them manage their resources efficiently. Our QA Lead Oana Balaceanu explains the value for her team: 

“Coordinating everybody’s tasks can be difficult and the potential for bottlenecks is significant. I could have a QA engineer with a huge potential workload, but nothing to do because they’re waiting on new builds. Timeline provides a clear overview on where each task is in the workflow, who is working on it and when it will be completed. This lets us work effectively together and enables me to provide a better estimate of deadlines to project stakeholders.”

How to Introduce Task Management Software to Your Team

Introducing a new tool to your team can be daunting. The task management software you choose can have big implications across your company. To ensure acceptance and usage of MeisterTask stay high, here are our top tips for a seamless rollout:

• Brainstorm ideas on how you want to use MeisterTask before you introduce it. 
• Think about how quickly you want to roll out MeisterTask. Unsure? Take a look at our blog on the two most popular rollout methods for guidance.
• Document your processes on task management so that your team has a source to refer to when they are unclear. Think about possible places for automations here.
• Practice! MeisterTask is intuitive, but it still needs commitment from your team. As you can see from this post, “in the field” experience can help you figure out how to get the most out of our tool.

Your Turn: Get Productive!

We hope that by sharing the ways in which we use MeisterTask at Meister, we’ve provided some inspiration that will help you achieve similar results with your team. Think you can do it better? Why not give MeisterTask a go today?