Software development teams often benefit from implementing Agile frameworks. Teams using other methodologies can also gain an advantage by visualizing their workflow in a kanban board. Development processes typically require more than the four standard statuses, and project managers should start by ensuring their board’s columns reflect the many steps their team’s projects progress through. This often includes stages like a backlog, grooming, development, testing, validation, review, regression, implementation, and delivery.
Swimlanes can also represent different priorities for a development team. Some Scrum teams, for example, estimate the effort different tasks will take using points or t-shirt sizing. Tasks can then be separated into swimlanes based on the level of effort. Another use for swimlanes is to divide tasks into priority levels to ensure that urgent items have the right resources allocated and are prioritized ahead of less timely tasks.
Using kanban boards can also help managers, product owners, or Scrum masters ensure that no one developer is assigned more than they can handle in a given sprint or iteration cycle. Again, WIP limits become essential to ensuring that everything assigned in a sprint can be completed as promised, keeping deliverability deadlines in mind.
Kanban board example for design and creative teams.
Creative teams often have several different campaigns and projects running at once, planning ahead for anything from product launches to event promotions. Resource management can be a struggle if project managers don’t understand how involved assigned projects are at a given point in time, when items worked on today may not be needed until six months later.
Creative workflows also tend to be more protracted when it comes to brainstorming and development. Instead of having a single “In progress” stage, project managers may prefer to create an “In progress” header and group multiple columns together to represent progress stages such as “Ideation” and “Concept refinement” with multiple review points built in for team consideration and stakeholder approval. All of this may happen before a true “In development” status — one that reflects the actual work being done, including copywriting, graphic design, editing, final delivery, and implementation.
For example, kanban boards for creative teams should encourage efficiency by using a single column for reviews instead of seven different review columns, while also reflecting real-world workflows and realistic steps. Swimlanes are a great way to separate sandbox, experimental, or nice-to-have items from essential projects. They can also break out campaign deliverables with different task cards to determine which tasks ladder up to which deliverable.
Kanban board example for engineering and product development
With its roots in manufacturing, it’s no surprise that kanban works expertly for physical production environments. Product development often involves several teams, making communication of deliverables and timeframes essential. A kanban board can break down a complex process into a simple status report that’s easy to read.
Project managers commonly align each column on their kanban board with a different stage in the production lifecycle. Often, this includes several pre-production statuses, sometimes called a drop lane or an unassigned column, to show inbound requests and monitor issues. Project managers can also group columns in broader categories that make the board easier to read, such as creating a header called “Task queue” and placing “Backlog” and “To-do” columns underneath it.
Kanban boards are also widely used to provide management and stakeholders with project or product progress updates. Managers can choose to organize their boards to group tasks more broadly and progressively become more detailed as they move down the board through various swimlanes. For example, the top swimlane may show a high-level timeline for all projects in progress, with a swimlane below it for cards allocated to a particular project.
Kanban board example for customer support teams.
For smaller customer support teams that don’t use a ticketing system for support inquiries, a kanban board might be the right solution for tracking task statuses. Statuses can be grouped under headings that give a clear picture of how many issues are in for review versus out for customer reply while tracking individual statuses such as “Requested,” “Working,” and “Escalated.”
Items may move back and forth between column statuses depending on the actions taken by support personnel and customers. A column for “Waiting on customer” can also reflect items that have been addressed but aren’t quite ready to be closed out. Having every interaction noted on the card also helps, as items are picked up by various team members or reassigned depending on the level of support needed.
Swimlanes can further segment the cards in your kanban board by grouping them based on service level agreement (SLA) statuses, time to complete, or criticality. They can also be used to reflect support tiers and issue escalation if other internal teams, such as development or sales, are needed to resolve an issue.
Kanban board example for marketing.
Marketing departments often consider campaigns and need complex organizational workflows to keep their projects on track. Kanban boards provide visuals not only for developing campaign details but also include statuses that reflect when an asset is ready to publish, when it’s live (and where), and when it’s taken down.
Marketing managers can use the kanban board's organizational properties by grouping columns depending on pre- and post-launch tasks. For example, an “In design” status header might encompass “Initial mock-ups,” “Stakeholder review,” and “Revisions.” Swimlanes can be used in several ways, from grouping similar items in a single campaign or grouping similar types of tasks, such as SEO, design, and copywriting, to viewing resource allocation by type. Teams can also use active campaign statuses once projects are completed to understand what’s live.
Another way to structure a marketing kanban board is to reflect an organization's overall marketing funnel and customer journey. The most complex boards can represent different header groupings for stages reflecting top, middle, and bottom-of-funnel activities, with swimlanes that further segment programs based on activity or campaign type.
Kanban board example for sales.
Speaking of the customer journey, sales teams can also use kanban boards. While sales leaders may use more complex systems to track commissions or financial goals, they need to understand how their pipeline looks from the top down clearly. This can help them better picture how their team performs against sales targets for the customer journey and deal progression. Managers can also use this method to visualize individual sales representative performance and spotlight areas for coaching opportunities.
Kanban boards can use sales funnel stages to organize opportunities and tasks:
- Prospects who know of the brand and have the attention of a sales representative but are not ready to make a purchase decision yet.
- Prospects who’ve demonstrated curiosity regarding specific products or services could be nurtured to sales readiness by providing more information or follow-ups.
- Prospects who are primed to make a purchase selection and have narrowed down their options to the point of considering pricing.
- Prospects who finally convert to customers by making a purchase, turning opportunities into closed-won deals.
Within these broader sales funnel stages, smaller teams may find it helpful to use statuses that reflect the sales team's in-and-out actions, such as calls, emails, and collateral sent to engage prospects further. Swimlanes are also a great option to call attention to slower or stalled-out deals that might need further attention or to be removed from the pipeline moving forward.
