We use Trello and it works great. Its closest skeuomorphic equivalent is... a whiteboard with Post-it notes stuck to it.
If you have stringent rules in place like "only the project manager can add cards, they can only add them in the sprint planning session on Monday morning, and we are keeping strictly to Kanban", then Trello will work fine - but any competent project manager should also be able to use JIRA, and will surely benefit from its extra functionality (and any non-technical stakeholder should at least be able to log into JIRA and click the requisite few buttons to see the current sprint and the backlog, if they care enough).
But hey, each to their own.
So I actually am having trouble following your example.
1 - Do you mean that the landed contract is actually really big and important (basically it's now paying for all of the development) or just another signup?
2 - you called them hyperbolic but picked two examples that can keep clients from taking the software seriously: both examples seem to be something that might be much more important than whatever the team was working on.
What I mean is that if the client is trialing the software, and has a certain process in place but trying yours, then if their search is too slow they might go back to whatever process they had before; you can lose the client. Likewise blurry profile pictures might cause them to decide that it is not polished software they can use.
You did not use examples like "unclear icon on search label!!!" or "client logo NOT on their dashboard" or something stupid.
I also thought that anyone could talk to the stakeholder who added to your board and figure out why it is so important (if it is) or immediately move it if it's not (Assuming it's a big, important client.) Or edit it as appropriate.
Obviously this might mean totally rewriting the feature: perhaps slow search can just be rewritten as showing a recent list of the last ten (whatever) and allow them to be pinned, as the client doesn't really care about search but just wanted to bring up (whatever). I say this because for really old searches from archives people wouldn't care about waiting a few seconds, whereas for workflow type things done lots of times all the time it really matters.
Obviously a PM is supposed to stand between such a client/internal sales director and the developers but I am having trouble understanding why the PM can't move and translate from the board - assuming these issues and the client is big/important enough.
Emails often get lost or not handled with appropriate urgency for the case at hand (and can even be marked wontfix or feature request simply due to lack of communication) so if you wrote a bit more about your example I might understand better.
As I said upthread, Trello is adequate if you've got a project manager vigilantly pruning the board - but if you have the resources for a project manager able to do that, then why not just get them to use something that's really much better suited to the purpose?
Anyway, this is just my opinion based on my experience. Trello is a good tool for certain things. I don't think it's a great tool for managing a software project with a team of more than about three people, and even if you can make it work, I think most teams would really just benefit from using either JIRA or equivalent, or maybe GitHub Projects (which I haven't tried, but it looks quite good).
Thanks for your reply.
What do you think about this:
Based on what you've written, for companies that are married to Trello it almost sounds like there should be a 'staging' board and a 'production' board where the process failures you allude to can happen on 'staging', but the devs really just see 'production' -- and as soon as stakeholders stop interfering for a while they start matching. :) Then the vigilant PM can move things over to production as they figure out wtf just got 'committed' to staging. (This sync and the fake access may require some kind of automation).
Thoughts? (I know this is off-hand. But in a way I kind of like the power of important people to directly fuck with a todo board. There are so many broken processes where unimportant things are worked on and important things get pushed into a backlog. I mean there's a reason the people you mentioned got the access to fuck up the board in the first place, isn't there?)
This is veering kind of off-topic and I do feel I understand your point very well now, so this is just kind of a hypothetical. Thanks for your answers.
As long as that board doesn't interfere with an actual development sprint board, I would be totally happy!