What is Kanban?

How Kanban Works

A Kanban system has three core components: the board, the cards, and the columns. Together, they create a complete picture of your team's work at a glance.

The board is the central workspace — physical or digital — where all work is tracked. Each piece of work gets a card that shows the task name, owner, deadline, and any relevant details. Cards move through columns as work progresses.

• Board — the workspace where all work is visible (usually digital for distributed teams)
• Columns — represent stages of work: To Do, In Progress, Review, Done
• Cards — individual work items that move through stages as tasks progress
• WIP limits — caps on how many cards can sit in a single column at once
• Swimlanes — horizontal rows that separate work by team, project, or priority

WIP Limits: The Most Important Kanban Rule

Work-in-progress (WIP) limits cap the number of tasks allowed in any single column at a time. If "In Progress" has a WIP limit of 3, no new card can enter that column until one moves forward.

WIP limits force teams to finish tasks before starting new ones. Most teams find they work faster with WIP limits than without them — because finishing one task completely is more efficient than half-finishing five.

A WIP limit of 3–5 per column works well for teams of 4–10 people. If the column fills up and work is blocked, that's signal to investigate the bottleneck — not to raise the limit.

The 4 Core Principles of Kanban

Kanban methodology is built on four principles that distinguish it from other project management frameworks.

• Start with what you do now — Kanban doesn't require a process overhaul. It maps onto your existing workflow and improves it incrementally.
• Agree to pursue incremental change — small, continuous improvements rather than big-bang transformations
• Respect current roles and responsibilities — Kanban doesn't reorganize teams or impose new titles
• Encourage leadership at all levels — anyone can identify bottlenecks and propose improvements, not just managers

Kanban vs Scrum: Which Should Your Team Use?

Kanban and Scrum are both Agile frameworks, but they work differently. Scrum organizes work into fixed time periods called sprints (usually 1–2 weeks), with defined ceremonies: sprint planning, daily standups, sprint review, and retrospectives. Kanban has no fixed cadence — work flows continuously.

Scrum works well when your team can batch work into predictable chunks and you want structured checkpoints. Kanban works better when work arrives unpredictably, priorities shift frequently, or your team prefers flow over sprints.

Kanban for Agencies and Service Teams

Agencies and service teams get particular value from Kanban because client work is inherently unpredictable. A new revision request, an urgent client call, or a shifted deadline shouldn't break your entire sprint — and with Kanban, it doesn't.

Many agencies run two Kanban boards in parallel: one for active client projects (per-project boards showing deliverable stages) and one for the agency's internal operations (global board showing all client work across the team). The global board gives managers visibility into team capacity; the per-project boards give clients visibility into their own work.

The time tracking integration matters here. Every Kanban card should have a timer — so when a designer moves a card to "In Progress", the clock starts. That data feeds directly into billing without a separate Toggl session.

Kanban in Melororium

Melororium includes a global Kanban board and per-project Kanban boards in every plan. Cards show task name, assignee, deadline, priority, and time logged. WIP limits are configurable per column.

The key difference from standalone Kanban tools: time tracking is built into every card. Start a timer from the card, stop it when done — the logged time appears in Work Reports automatically and can be invoiced directly. No Toggl, no copy-paste, no lost hours.

Starter plan is $29/mo for 4 users. Agency plan is $59/mo for 10 users. No per-seat fees, no seat tax.

Kanban in Practice: A 10-Person Agency Example

Orbit Creative is a 10-person digital agency: 1 account director, 2 project managers, 4 designers, 2 developers, and 1 copywriter. They run 6-8 active client projects at any time, each at different stages.

Before Kanban, the project managers tracked work in spreadsheets. Designers picked up tasks based on Slack messages. Nobody had a clear view of what was in progress versus waiting for review. Twice a month, something fell through the cracks — a revision request sat unnoticed for three days, or a developer started new work while a previous deliverable waited for client feedback.

After switching to Kanban, the team set up a global board with five columns: Backlog, In Progress, Client Review, Revision, Done. WIP limit on In Progress: 8 cards (roughly one per delivery team member). WIP limit on Client Review: 6 cards.

The result: no task sits unassigned or invisible. When Client Review hits its limit of 6, no new work moves there until a client responds. This forces the account director to chase approvals rather than letting them stall indefinitely.

They also run per-project boards for larger engagements. A brand redesign project has its own board: Brief, Concepts, Feedback, Final Production, Delivered. The client sees their project board in read-only mode, which cut status-update emails by roughly half.

Three months in, average task cycle time dropped from 6.2 days to 4.1 days. The WIP limits exposed one bottleneck immediately: the copywriter was a single point of failure for four concurrent projects. That visibility led to a decision to bring in a second writer for large campaigns.

• Global board: 5 columns, WIP limits of 8 (In Progress) and 6 (Client Review)
• Per-project boards for engagements lasting more than 3 weeks
• Client read-only access to their project board — no Slack status requests
• Timers built into every card — no separate time tracking session needed
• Cycle time dropped from 6.2 to 4.1 days over 3 months

Setting Up Your First Kanban Board

A working Kanban board takes 30 minutes to configure if you follow a clear sequence. Most teams overcomplicate it by adding too many columns upfront.

Start with four columns: Backlog, In Progress, Review, Done. Add more only after you identify a genuine stage with a different owner or approval step. A fifth column (like 'Client Feedback') makes sense once you confirm it represents a distinct wait state, not just a sub-stage of Review.

Step 1: List every type of work your team handles. Group similar items. A design agency might have: brief intake, concept development, design, copy, client review, revisions, final delivery, and internal admin. That list becomes your starting point.

Step 2: Map your work types to columns. Avoid a column for every work type — that creates a 9-column board that nobody reads. Group stages that one person owns into a single column.

Step 3: Set WIP limits. Start conservatively. For a 10-person team, a limit of 8-10 in the In Progress column is a good starting point. Adjust after two weeks based on what you see.

Step 4: Add card fields that match your workflow. At minimum: task name, assignee, due date. Add client and project fields so the global board stays filterable.

Step 5: Run a kickoff with the team. Walk through one real project's tasks and put them on the board together. The discussion surfaces assumptions about what 'In Progress' actually means.

Review the board after two weeks and adjust. The board should reflect how work actually moves, not how you wished it moved.

• Start with 4 columns: Backlog, In Progress, Review, Done
• Add a column only when a stage has a different owner or approval step
• Set WIP limits before going live — adjust after 2 weeks of real data
• Card fields at minimum: name, assignee, due date, client, project
• Run a live kickoff with the team — don't send a link and hope for the best
• Review and adjust after the first 2 weeks

Kanban Metrics: What to Track

Kanban boards generate useful data, but most teams only look at the board itself — they never measure how work flows through it. Three metrics matter most.

Cycle time measures how long a task takes from when work starts (enters In Progress) to when it's done. If your team's average cycle time is 4 days but a specific card type consistently takes 9 days, that's a bottleneck to investigate.

Lead time measures from when a task enters the Backlog to when it's Done. This is the number clients actually care about: 'I submitted a revision request on Monday — when will it be ready?' Lead time includes the wait time in Backlog, not just active work time.

Throughput measures how many tasks the team completes per week. For a 10-person team, a baseline might be 25-35 tasks per week. Track throughput over time to spot trends. A drop from 32 tasks/week to 19 tasks/week is a signal worth investigating before it becomes a delivery problem.

If throughput drops while cycle time stays constant, the team is completing tasks at the same speed but handling fewer of them — a capacity problem. If cycle time increases while throughput holds, tasks are taking longer — a process or complexity problem.

Common Kanban Mistakes Teams Make

Most teams that 'tried Kanban and it didn't work' made one of four predictable mistakes. The system isn't at fault — the implementation was.

Ignoring WIP limits. A team sets up the board with WIP limits but then overrides them whenever a new urgent task arrives. Within two weeks, In Progress has 18 cards instead of 8. Everyone is busy, nothing is finishing. WIP limits require discipline. When the column is full, the right move is to help finish something already in progress, not to push the limit.

Too many columns. An 8-column board with multiple waiting states sounds thorough but creates confusion. Cards sit in intermediate states and nobody knows who's responsible for moving them. Start with 4 columns and add only when a stage genuinely has a different owner.

Not reviewing the board together. Kanban only works if the team looks at it regularly. A board that team members update individually but never review together misses the point. Weekly or twice-weekly board reviews, even 15 minutes long, surface bottlenecks before they become delivery problems.

Using the global board as the only board. A 10-person team running 7 client projects needs both a global board (team capacity overview) and per-project boards (detailed task tracking). Global boards show that a designer is at capacity; per-project boards show which specific tasks need attention.

Missing the metrics. Kanban without measurement is just a to-do list with columns. Track cycle time and throughput from the start, even manually.

• Overriding WIP limits for every 'urgent' task — this defeats the system's core purpose
• Building an 8-column board before you understand your actual workflow stages
• Updating cards individually but never reviewing the board as a team
• Running one global board for all projects — per-project boards are essential above 4-5 active clients
• Never measuring cycle time or throughput — the board becomes a to-do list