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Glossary
Agile & Scrum

What is Kanban?

Kanban is a visual system for managing work as it moves through a process. It uses a board with cards representing tasks and columns representing stages of completion, allowing teams to see bottlenecks and balance their workload in real-time.

When to use it

Use Kanban when your team has a continuous flow of work rather than fixed time-blocks like sprints. It is ideal for support teams, DevOps, or product teams that need the flexibility to reprioritize tasks instantly without disrupting a rigid schedule. It solves the problem of 'invisible work' and overloaded team members by setting limits on how many tasks can be active at once.

Example

A SaaS marketing team manages their content calendar using a Kanban board with columns for 'To Do,' 'Writing,' 'Editing,' and 'Published.' They set a Work-In-Progress (WIP) limit of 3 on the 'Editing' column to ensure the editor isn't overwhelmed and articles don't get stuck in a queue. This visual system allows the team to see that while 10 items are 'To Do', only 1 is currently in 'Writing', indicating they have spare capacity. When an urgent announcement needs to be drafted, they can immediately pull it into the 'Writing' column without waiting for a new sprint to start. This approach helped the team increase their monthly output from 8 to 12 articles by reducing idle time.

How Planet Roadmap helps with Kanban

Planet Roadmap provides a Kanban view that allows teams to drag and drop tasks across customizable columns to track status and visualize project flow.

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FAQ

How is Kanban different from Scrum?
While Scrum uses fixed-length iterations called sprints with a set commitment of work, Kanban is a continuous flow model where tasks are pulled into the workflow as capacity allows. Scrum is roles-based and prescriptive, whereas Kanban is more flexible and focuses on visualizing the process and limiting work-in-progress (WIP).
What is a WIP limit in Kanban?
A Work-In-Progress (WIP) limit is a constraint on the number of items that can exist in a specific column or stage of the workflow at one time. By enforcing these limits, teams can identify bottlenecks faster, prevent multitasking, and ensure that tasks are finished before new work is started.

Related terms

ScrumSprintProduct BacklogDaily StandupVelocityDefinition of Done

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