As a team grows, keeping track of work can quickly become difficult.
Tasks get assigned in different places, priorities change, and it's not always obvious what someone is currently working on.
A Kanban board gives teams a simple visual way to see what's happening.
What is Kanban?
Kanban is a workflow method where work is represented as cards and moved through stages.
A basic team workflow might look like:
Todo → In Progress → Review → Done
Each card represents a piece of work and can include an owner, priority, due date, and other useful information.
Why Kanban works well for teams
The main benefit is visibility.
Instead of asking for updates repeatedly, team members can look at the board and quickly understand:
What needs to be done
What is currently being worked on
Who owns each task
What is blocked
What has been completed
This becomes especially useful for remote and distributed teams.
Keep the workflow simple
One common mistake is creating too many columns.
A team doesn't necessarily need a separate stage for every small step. The board should reflect the actual workflow the team follows.
It's also useful to limit how much work is happening at the same time. Too many tasks in progress can make it harder to finish anything.
Make ownership clear
Every important task should have a clear owner.
When ownership is unclear, tasks can remain visible on the board but still not move forward.
A simple combination of task + owner + due date + status can make accountability much clearer.
Kanban is about visibility, not just task lists
A useful Kanban board should help answer a few basic questions:
What are we working on?
Who is responsible?
What's blocked?
What's coming next?
That's where Kanban becomes more than a task list. It becomes a shared view of how work is moving through the team.
We originally explored these ideas in more detail in our guide on Kanban for teams.
If you're setting up a Kanban workflow for your team, start simple and add complexity only when the workflow actually requires it.
