How do you use Planner?

We have approached Planner strictly as a Group tool, rather than Groups as a by product of a Plan. (We arent considering Teams at this point).

It is much easier for our users to digest Groups as a collaboration-in-a-box product, with multiple workloads (including a Plan), than provisioning them a plan and them asking why the heck did I get all the rest of this stuff, I just wanted a Plan.

We primarily have things organized (1) Workgroups, (2) Project Groups, (3) Organizational Groups. Each of these traditionally would try to do action items in SharePoint lists, and they are diving into Planner with lots of excitement because it is way better than SharePoint lists.

Some (lets call them old school) users it has taken a little bit of getting used to, especially if they have never used a tool like Trello or Wunderlist before, but the learning curve is pretty small IMO. The views and charts make analyzing what they are actually doing (or not doing) way easier than it ever was in SharePoint task lists.

We are struggling in some ways for more complex use cases, because some users have also discovered Trello around the same time, and the biggest feature now missing from Planner is the ability to email in to auto-create a task. So we are trying to head that off at the pass, but Planner has got to catch up in some basic functionality areas to achieve parity with their 3rd party competitors, and as others have mentioned in these forums, progress has been slow going.