What 5 Million Users Taught Us About Productivity

When we started Gryphin in 2018, we had theories about how people work. Now, six years and 5 million users later, we have data. And the data has challenged a lot of what we assumed.

This isn't going to be a press release disguised as a blog post. I want to share what we've actually learned—including the stuff that surprised us—because I think it's genuinely useful for anyone thinking about how teams work.

The Data We're Looking At

Some quick context on what we measured:

• Board activity patterns — when do people work, how do they organize
• Card lifecycle — how long things stay in each stage, what gets abandoned
• Collaboration patterns — how teams communicate, coordinate, review
• Feature usage — what people actually use vs. what they say they want

This is all aggregated and anonymized—we're not reading anyone's cards, just analyzing patterns. And obviously, patterns from our user base aren't universal truth. But with 5 million users across many industries and team sizes, we're seeing some consistent signals.

Finding #1: Most Boards Fail. The Ones That Succeed Share Common Traits.

That's not great for our engagement metrics, but it taught us something important: the boards that survive share specific characteristics.

Finding #2: The Best Teams Finish Things, Not Start Things

We can predict with reasonable accuracy whether a team will hit their goals based on one metric: their completion rate.

The difference isn't that high-performing teams start fewer things—they actually start slightly more. But they finish at a much higher rate. They're focused on moving cards to Done, not adding cards to To Do.

Finding #3: Real-Time Features Changed Behavior More Than We Expected

When we built live cursors and real-time presence, we thought it would be a nice-to-have. A fun feature for the marketing page. What we didn't expect was how fundamentally it changed collaboration patterns.

Teams with real-time features enabled have:

The mechanism seems to be awareness. When you can see what your teammates are looking at, you don't need to ask. When you can see that someone is stuck on a card, you can offer help proactively. The information flow happens passively instead of requiring active communication.

Finding #4: Integration Breadth Matters Less Than Integration Depth

We have 200+ integrations. But most successful teams use only 2-3 of them—deeply.

The pattern we see: teams pick their core tools (code repo, communication tool, maybe a design tool) and build tight integrations with those. Having their GitHub commits automatically update cards, having Slack notifications for card changes, having Figma designs embedded in cards—this creates genuine workflow improvement.

Having 15 integrations set up usually indicates someone spent a lot of time configuring and not a lot of time using.

Finding #5: Team Size Correlates With Structure Need

The mistake we see: teams adopting enterprise-level process when they're 5 people, or teams staying with startup-level chaos when they're 50 people. Both hurt productivity.

Finding #6: The Features People Ask For Aren't Always The Features They Use

Classic product lesson, confirmed by our data:

Gantt/timeline view was our most requested feature for years. When we shipped it, usage was much lower than expected. Turns out many people wanted the option of Gantt, but their actual workflow didn't require it.

Meanwhile, features we shipped without big requests—like card templates, bulk editing, keyboard shortcuts—have extremely high usage among power users.

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What This Means For You

If I had to distill everything we've learned into actionable advice:

None of this is revolutionary. But it's validated by millions of users across thousands of teams. Sometimes the basics are basic because they work.

Thanks for reading. And thanks for being part of the 5 million—every pattern we learn comes from watching how you work and trying to serve you better.