Kanban
A kanban board lays records out as columns of cards, where the column a card sits in is its status and moving a card between columns is how that status changes. Orvain's Kanban family is two column styles. The deal column gives each card a company logo, a deal number and a field list (website, amount, contact, categories, close date) over an attachment, comment and duration footer. The task column carries priority and category tags, a title and description, a progress bar, an avatar stack and comment and link counts.
The column, not the board, is the unit worth designing. Whether a board gets used comes down to how much a card says before anyone opens it, which is a triage decision, not a layout one: pick the two or three fields somebody reads to decide what to touch next and leave the rest in the detail view. The count pill deserves the same care. It is the number people quote in a stand-up, so it has to count what the current filter shows, not the column's whole contents.
Deal board
Best for
CRM pipelines, sales deal tracking, revenue-ops boards
Anatomy
Column header with a count pill · logo, deal number and avatar per card · a Website/Amount/Contact/Categories/Close-Date field list · attachment/comment/duration footer
Task board
Best for
Sprint boards, project trackers, editorial pipelines
Anatomy
Column header with a count badge · priority and category tags · title, description and an optional cover image · a progress bar · an avatar stack and comment/link counts
Rate-limit the export endpoint
Three tenants are pulling the full ledger every minute. Cap it per key and return the retry window in the header.
Photograph the Kreuzberg site
The listing has gone live with last year's exterior shot. Book the walkthrough and replace the hero image.
Retire the old empty states
Four screens still draw the 2024 illustration. Swap them for the current set and delete the asset.
Using Kanban
Reach for it when
- Work moving through a fixed set of stages everyone on the team names the same way.
- Sets small enough that a column can be read top to bottom: a sprint, a quarter's open deals.
- When the shape of the work is the question: where things pile up, what has stalled.
- Records whose status changes far more often than any of their other fields.
Reach for something else when
- Items genuinely in two states at once, or whose status is derived. A table with a status column and filters does not force a single bucket.
- Columns hundreds of cards deep. Nobody scrolls that far; a filtered list or a saved table view finds the record instead.
- Planning by date. A board says what stage something is at and nothing about when: a calendar or a schedule view answers that.
Where it shows up
Sales pipeline
Deals grouped by stage, each card showing amount, contact and close date. The column counts tell a manager where the quarter actually stands long before anybody opens a forecast report.
Sprint board
One iteration, one column per state. Tags carry priority, the avatar stack says who is on it, and the progress bar separates work that has genuinely started from work that has only been claimed.
Hiring stages
Candidates moving from screen to offer. This is the shared view in a weekly review, because a column that is emptying, or one that never does, is visible from across the room.
Content pipeline
Drafts moving from idea to published, where the editor mostly cares about what is stuck in review. A cover image makes a card recognisable faster than its working title ever will.
Questions
How many columns should a kanban board have?
As many as there are real stages, which usually lands between four and six. Past that the board scrolls sideways and the far column stops being looked at, which quietly hides the finished or blocked work. If you need more, merge stages nobody treats differently, or collapse terminal columns behind a count.
Does a kanban board need drag and drop?
It needs a way to change status, and dragging is one of them. It cannot be the only one: dragging is fiddly on a trackpad, impossible with a keyboard alone and awkward on a phone, so a board also needs a move action on the card itself. Build that path first and treat dragging as the shortcut it is.
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Kanban
A kanban board lays records out as columns of cards, where the column a card sits in is its status and moving a card between columns is how that status changes. Orvain's Kanban family is two column styles. The deal column gives each card a company logo, a deal number and a field list (website, amount, contact, categories, close date) over an attachment, comment and duration footer. The task column carries priority and category tags, a title and description, a progress bar, an avatar stack and comment and link counts.
The column, not the board, is the unit worth designing. Whether a board gets used comes down to how much a card says before anyone opens it, which is a triage decision, not a layout one: pick the two or three fields somebody reads to decide what to touch next and leave the rest in the detail view. The count pill deserves the same care. It is the number people quote in a stand-up, so it has to count what the current filter shows, not the column's whole contents.
Deal board
Best for
CRM pipelines, sales deal tracking, revenue-ops boards
Anatomy
Column header with a count pill · logo, deal number and avatar per card · a Website/Amount/Contact/Categories/Close-Date field list · attachment/comment/duration footer
Task board
Best for
Sprint boards, project trackers, editorial pipelines
Anatomy
Column header with a count badge · priority and category tags · title, description and an optional cover image · a progress bar · an avatar stack and comment/link counts
Rate-limit the export endpoint
Three tenants are pulling the full ledger every minute. Cap it per key and return the retry window in the header.
Photograph the Kreuzberg site
The listing has gone live with last year's exterior shot. Book the walkthrough and replace the hero image.
Retire the old empty states
Four screens still draw the 2024 illustration. Swap them for the current set and delete the asset.
Using Kanban
Reach for it when
- Work moving through a fixed set of stages everyone on the team names the same way.
- Sets small enough that a column can be read top to bottom: a sprint, a quarter's open deals.
- When the shape of the work is the question: where things pile up, what has stalled.
- Records whose status changes far more often than any of their other fields.
Reach for something else when
- Items genuinely in two states at once, or whose status is derived. A table with a status column and filters does not force a single bucket.
- Columns hundreds of cards deep. Nobody scrolls that far; a filtered list or a saved table view finds the record instead.
- Planning by date. A board says what stage something is at and nothing about when: a calendar or a schedule view answers that.
Where it shows up
Sales pipeline
Deals grouped by stage, each card showing amount, contact and close date. The column counts tell a manager where the quarter actually stands long before anybody opens a forecast report.
Sprint board
One iteration, one column per state. Tags carry priority, the avatar stack says who is on it, and the progress bar separates work that has genuinely started from work that has only been claimed.
Hiring stages
Candidates moving from screen to offer. This is the shared view in a weekly review, because a column that is emptying, or one that never does, is visible from across the room.
Content pipeline
Drafts moving from idea to published, where the editor mostly cares about what is stuck in review. A cover image makes a card recognisable faster than its working title ever will.
Questions
How many columns should a kanban board have?
As many as there are real stages, which usually lands between four and six. Past that the board scrolls sideways and the far column stops being looked at, which quietly hides the finished or blocked work. If you need more, merge stages nobody treats differently, or collapse terminal columns behind a count.
Does a kanban board need drag and drop?
It needs a way to change status, and dragging is one of them. It cannot be the only one: dragging is fiddly on a trackpad, impossible with a keyboard alone and awkward on a phone, so a board also needs a move action on the card itself. Build that path first and treat dragging as the shortcut it is.
Related blocks
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Join the list and we’ll email you the moment the code library and MCP server go live: with a 10% discount code to use whenever you decide to buy.