What is a kanban board?
A kanban board is a wall of columns with cards that move left to right as work progresses. The columns are the state of the work; the card is the work.
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A kanban board is a way of seeing work: columns for the stages it passes through, cards for the pieces of work, and the cards move from left to right as they progress. It came from Toyota’s factory floor, where “kanban” meant a signal card, and was adopted by software teams because it shows two things at a glance that a list does not: where everything is, and where it is piling up.
The one rule
Limit work in progress. A board with thirty cards in the “doing” column is a list with extra steps. The board only tells the truth if the doing column is small enough that each card in it is actually being done. Everything else about kanban — the columns you choose, the colours, the swimlanes — is decoration on that rule.
Why fenbs has four columns and no more
To Do, Next Up, In Progress, Completed. Most tools let you add columns, and most boards end up with nine, including two nobody can explain. fenbs calls its columns lanes and fixes them at four, so a board made this year and a board made next year read the same way, and so a person joining a board never has to ask what a column means. Priority is a number on the task, not a column.
Kanban with an AI assistant on the board
A board is a good shape for an assistant to work with: the lane is the state, the card is the task, and “move BU-014 to In Progress” is unambiguous. fenbs lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Claude Code work the board as members with a role, over MCP.