Kanban Board Examples for Eight Kinds of Team

A useful kanban board has three things: columns that match the real stages your work passes through, cards small enough to move within a few days, and at least one written rule about how cards move. The columns differ from team to team; the rule is what makes the board more than a list. Below are eight example boards, one for each of eight common kinds of team, each with its columns, three to five sample cards and the single rule that does the most work. Copy the one closest to yours and change it until it describes what you actually do.

What makes a board kanban, not just columns

The Kanban Guide↗ (opens in a new tab) defines Kanban as a strategy for optimising the flow of value through a process, built on three practices: defining and visualising a workflow, actively managing the items in it, and improving it. The board is the visual part. The guide also asks for a definition of how work in progress will be controlled, and for explicit policies about how items move from one state to the next. So a kanban board shows the work, limits how much of it is started at once, and makes the rules for moving it visible.

That is why every example below ends with a rule rather than a tip. A column called Review is decoration until someone writes down what has to be true before a card enters it. If you are still deciding between this and a sprint-based method, Kanban vs Scrum compares the two guides side by side, and what is a kanban board covers the basics.

1. Software development

• Columns: Backlog · Ready · In development · In review · Done.
• Cards: “Bug: password reset email arrives twice”; “Add CSV export to the invoices page”; “Upgrade the payment library before its old version stops being supported”; “Speed up the search results page”.
• Rule: nothing enters In review without a linked pull request and a line saying how it was tested; nothing leaves it until someone other than the author has read the change.

Software teams usually add columns until the board mirrors their whole release process. Resist it. Ready and In review are the two that pay for themselves, because they are where work waits, and waiting is what a board is for seeing. A kanban board for software developers goes further on keeping it lean.

2. Customer support

• Columns: New · Investigating · Waiting on customer · Waiting on engineering · Resolved.
• Cards: “Customer cannot log in after changing email address”; “Refund request for a duplicate charge”; “Three customers report the mobile app crashing on start”; “Question about exporting data for an audit”.
• Rule: every card in a Waiting column says who it is waiting on and since when, and anything waiting more than two working days is raised at the morning check.

Support boards fill up with cards nobody can move, because the next step belongs to someone else. Splitting Waiting into two columns shows at a glance whether the queue is stuck on customers or on your own engineers, which are very different problems. More on setting a board up for this work is on fenbs for support teams.

3. Marketing content

• Columns: Ideas · Briefed · Drafting · Editing · Scheduled · Published.
• Cards: “Guide: how to choose a payroll provider”; “Case study with the Leeds customer”; “Newsletter for October”; “Update the pricing page screenshots”; “Refresh last year’s most-read article”.
• Rule: an idea becomes Briefed only when it has a named reader, a goal and a deadline; a draft moves to Editing only when the writer has read it aloud once.

Content boards drown in Ideas. That column is fine to be long; it is a list of options, not a commitment. The limit belongs on Drafting, where one writer with four half-finished pieces publishes nothing this week.

4. A construction site

• Columns: To do · This week · On it · Snagging · Signed off.
• Cards: “Level 2 east: first-fix electrics”; “Scaffold inspection due Friday”; “Replace cracked window in plot 14”; “Order plasterboard for level 3”.
• Rule: a card moves to Signed off only with a photo attached and the name of the person who checked it, because on site “done” is worth nothing without the proof.

A site board has to work from a phone in a cold van, so fewer columns and shorter card titles beat anything clever. Project management for construction site teams walks through a whole job on a board.

5. Hiring

• Columns: Applied · Screening · Interview · Offer · Hired or closed.
• Cards: one per candidate, titled by role and a reference number rather than a name: “Backend developer, candidate 07”; “Office manager, candidate 03”; “Backend developer, candidate 11”.
• Rule: every candidate hears back within five working days of each stage, and a card that has not moved in five days is chased before anything new is screened.

Hiring is the one example where the cards are people, so keep personal details in your recruitment system, not on a shared board. The board is for the flow: how many candidates are stuck at each stage, and whether anyone has been left waiting.

6. An agency with clients

• Columns: Requested · Agreed · In progress · With client · Done.
• Cards: “Homepage first draft”; “Client to send copy for the About page”; “Set up hosting and domain”; “Second round of logo changes”.
• Rule: nothing moves from Requested to Agreed until the client has confirmed the scope in writing, and anything in With client for a week triggers one polite reminder.

The With client column is the one that saves arguments: it shows the client, plainly, which delays are theirs. One board per client is easier to share than one board with a column per client. The client project board template is built this way.

7. A personal board

• Columns: To do · This week · Doing · Done.
• Cards: “Book the dentist”; “Finish the tax return”; “Fix the squeaky door”; “Plan the weekend away”.
• Rule: no more than two cards in Doing at once, and nothing new goes in until one comes out.

The authors of Personal Kanban↗ (opens in a new tab) reduce it to two rules: visualise your work and limit your work in progress. A personal board is where that second rule is easiest to keep, and where it makes the most difference. Personal kanban covers setting one up and reviewing it each week.

8. AI agents working alongside people

• Columns: To do · Next up · In progress · Completed, with a person checking every card before it counts as finished.
• Cards: “Bug: date picker shows the wrong month on the first of the month” (for an agent); “Write the migration plan for the billing tables” (for an agent, reviewed by a person); “Decide whether to drop support for the old API” (a person only); “Add tests for the export service” (for an agent).
• Rule: one card in progress per agent at a time, and an agent never marks its own work as finished; a person reads the change and the test notes first.

Agents change where the limits and policies go: they will start as many cards as nobody stops them starting, and they follow written policy literally. Kanban for AI agents goes through those changes lane by lane.

Rules that work on any of these boards

• Name the column where work waits. Waiting on customer, With client and In review are more useful than another In progress column, because they show where time goes.
• Write the rule where people see it. A policy in someone’s head is not a policy.
• Keep cards small. If a card has sat in one column for two weeks, it is probably three cards.
• Review the board, not the people. Ask what is stuck and why, not who is slow. The UK government’s Service Manual↗ (opens in a new tab) describes kanban as a way to find the bottlenecks in your processes and control the amount of work you are doing, which is a question about the system.
• Change one thing at a time, and give it a few weeks before you judge it.

How these examples map onto fenbs

To be plain about the limits first: fenbs is kanban-style, but its lanes are fixed at four, To Do, Next Up, In Progress and Completed, and you cannot add, rename or remove them. It has no WIP-limit setting, no sprints and no due dates. So the columns above that describe waiting, such as Waiting on customer or With client, become something else on fenbs: a comment on the task saying who it is waiting on, a project or category to group tasks, or, for a client, the client added to a team board with the Client role so they see where things stand.

The rules carry over as written policy. A limit like “one task in progress per agent” goes in the board’s AI context, which assistants read when they connect, and in the rules file of the project they work on. Every task is a feature, an enhancement or a bug with a priority from 1 to 10, and when a task reaches Completed the board records how it ended: Completed, Won’t fix, Duplicate, Cannot reproduce or Obsolete. History records every move and who made it, person or AI assistant, which is what you need to spot a card that has been sitting still.