How to choose the columns on a kanban board

What a column actually represents

A column is a state a piece of work can be in, not a category of work and not a person. The point of drawing them side by side is that you can see where work piles up. Kanban comes out of the Toyota Production System, where Taiichi Ohno used cards to signal what should be produced and when; the Japanese word means signboard, and the signboard is doing the same job on a software team that it did on a factory floor (see the overview of kanban and its origins).

That is worth holding on to, because it rules out a lot of column schemes. Columns named after people (Sam, Priya, Alex) tell you who is busy but not what is stuck. Columns named after types of work (Bugs, Features, Chores) turn the board into four to-do lists that never interact. If you cannot point at a column and say what has to happen to a card before it leaves, it is not a state.

Start with three and add only under pressure

A new board here opens with To Do, In Progress and Done, plus a separate Backlog panel. Three columns is a genuinely good default, and most boards that go wrong go wrong by adding a fourth and fifth column before anybody has felt the need for one.

Run it for a week or two first. The columns you need will announce themselves as the ones you keep explaining in standup: it is done but not reviewed, it is waiting on the client, it is merged but not deployed. Each of those sentences is a column you do not have yet.

The test for splitting a column

Split a column when you cannot answer whose turn is it? for every card in it. In Progress usually fails this test first, because it holds two different things: work somebody is actively doing, and work that is parked waiting on someone else. Those look identical on the board and are completely different problems. Splitting into Doing and Waiting, or adding a Blocked column, makes the difference visible and makes the pile-up embarrassing, which is the point.

The other common split is at the end. In Review before Done catches the work that one person considers finished and nobody else has looked at.

Name columns after states, in the order work travels

Left to right, in the direction cards move. It sounds obvious and it is the first thing that breaks when a column is added in a hurry, because the new column lands on the end. Drag columns into the right order using the handle in the column header, and rename them from the column menu. Both are safe to do at any time and neither touches the cards.

Prefer short, concrete names. In Review beats Awaiting stakeholder sign-off, which will be truncated on any narrow screen anyway.

Make Done mean exactly one thing

The most expensive ambiguity on a board is a Done column that means I stopped working on it to one person and it is live for customers to another. Write the definition down somewhere the team can see it. On this board the natural place is a card in the last column that never moves and holds the checklist, because card descriptions accept markdown and any line written as - [ ] deployed to production becomes a real tickable checkbox with a progress count.

If the definition of done is long enough that people forget half of it, that is a signal to split the last column rather than to write a longer card.

The backlog is not a column

Everything not scheduled yet belongs in the Backlog, which sits as its own panel to the left of the columns rather than as an ordinary column. Keeping it separate matters more than it sounds: the moment the backlog becomes column one, it starts competing for attention with work that is genuinely in flight, and a board with two hundred cards in the first column tells you nothing.

The Backlog is also where cards land by default, so the fastest way to empty your head is to open Create, choose Paste a list, and drop in one line per card. Bullets, numbering and checkbox markers are stripped, so you can paste straight out of a notes app or a meeting document.

How many columns is too many

The honest answer is: as soon as the board no longer fits on one screen. Columns are a fixed width and the board scrolls horizontally past that point, and a state you have to scroll to find is a state nobody looks at. On a laptop that is around five or six columns including the backlog; on a phone it is fewer.

Deleting a column removes every card inside it permanently, so move the cards out first. That is deliberate, but it means column pruning is a job to do carefully rather than while distracted.

Limiting work in progress (WIP limits)

The reason kanban has columns at all is to expose how much is in flight at once, and the classic discipline is an upper limit on the number of cards allowed in a column. This board does not enforce limits: it shows a count next to each column name and leaves the limit to you.

That is less useless than it sounds, because the count is the number you actually argue about. Agree that In Progress holds at most two cards per person, put the number in the column name if it helps (In Progress (4)), and treat going over as a signal to finish something rather than to start something. If you are working alone, the limit matters even more, which is the subject of the personal kanban guide.

Checking whether the columns are working

A column layout is a hypothesis, and the board will tell you if it is wrong. Two things to look at:

• Cards that never move. Open the terminal from the board header and run stuck 7 to list every card that has not changed column in a week. It skips the backlog and the last column, so what comes back is genuinely stalled work. If everything stuck is in one column, that column is either mis-named or hiding a handoff.
• Columns nobody uses. The Pulse view summarises what moved recently and what is overdue. A column that never appears in it is decoration.

Four kanban board layouts worth copying

• Small software team. Backlog, To Do, In Progress, In Review, Done. The review column is the whole reason this is not three columns.
• Freelance or client work. Backlog, To Do, Doing, Waiting on client, Done. The waiting column is where the money goes, and it is the one you want to be able to point at in a status call.
• Hiring. Applied, Screening, Interview, Offer, Closed. Each card is one candidate and the columns are stages, which is the cleanest possible fit for a board.
• Content or launch checklist. Ideas, Drafting, Edit, Scheduled, Published. Due dates on the cards make the Scheduled column readable in the calendar view as well.

Change the columns, keep the board

Renaming and reordering are cheap and you should do them the moment the names stop describing reality. If the layout has drifted far enough that you want a clean start, duplicate the board with Include cards switched off: you get the same columns, the same password and a fresh 60-day lifespan, with nothing on it.

That is also a decent way to keep a house layout around, since boards here are deleted after at most 60 days. For a board that only needs to exist for one meeting, the retrospective guide covers a column set built for exactly that.