When priorities change twice a day and half the work lives in someone’s head, a simple Kanban board can be the difference between chaos and a team that keeps work moving.
You can build a Kanban board on a wall with sticky notes or in a digital tool. Both work, but digital boards scale better when your team grows or transitions to a hybrid model. You’ll get flexible workflows, automation for handoffs and updates, and analytics that show where work is really getting stuck.
That means no more guessing which column is the bottleneck or who’s drowning in hidden tasks.
In this article, you’ll get a concise step-by-step guide to setting up a Kanban board, practical tips for work-in-progress (WIP) limits and clean, useful cards, and a two-minute jump start on using Kanban in Wrike. By the end, you’ll have a visual system that identifies blockers fast and keeps your team focused.
How do you create a Kanban board
To create a Kanban board, you’ll need to map workflow stages into columns, add task cards, and set WIP limits per column. That way, you can drag and drop work left to right and review regularly. For better collaboration, reporting, and automation, use a digital board; in Wrike, you can start with the Kanban template and customize statuses to match your process.
Understanding Kanban fundamentals
Before you start dragging cards across a board, it’s helpful to understand what Kanban is actually trying to achieve. It helps visualize work, limit work in progress, and improve flow over time. You pull tasks through clearly defined stages, watch where they pile up, then tweak your process, WIP limits, and policies to keep things moving.
Kanban principles and practices help you see work clearly, limit overload, and fix bottlenecks so your team’s flow actually improves over time.
Creating your Kanban board: The steps
Plan your board structure
Start by sketching the real path work takes, from the moment someone asks for something to the moment it’s genuinely finished. Name the key stages in that journey and decide what has to be true for a task to move from one to the next.
If you’re torn between extra columns or a simpler flow, choose the more straightforward option. You can always add nuance later; pulling it back is harder.
Set up Kanban digitally
Once you’ve got the rough shape of your structure in place, move it into a digital board so it isn’t trapped in someone’s notebook or on a whiteboard no one sees. In Wrike, you can set up a project or space, switch into Board view, and map your stages to custom statuses.
As soon as work is represented as cards in columns, your team has a shared source of truth instead of scattered lists and direct messages.
Customize for clarity and scale
When the board is live, you should refine it so it stays readable as the volume grows. Add custom fields for the few details you truly care about, such as priority or effort, and use lanes or simple grouping when you need to separate different types of work. The test is straightforward: someone should be able to glance at the board and understand what’s in play, what’s blocked, and what’s next without needing a legend.
Establish WIP limits
A Kanban board without WIP limits is just a colorful to-do list. You should decide how many items can sit in key stages before you consider that stage “full,” and stick to it. When a column hits its limit, the job shifts from starting new work to helping move existing work forward. Over time, you’ll see where limits are too tight or too loose, and expose potential bottlenecks in your process.
Create effective task cards
Treat each card as a small, self-contained brief. A clear title, a short description, an owner, and any must-have links or dates are usually enough. Extra detail can live in subtasks or comments instead of being crammed into the card body. If someone new to the project can open a card and know how to move it one step forward, you’ve hit the right level.
Carry out governance and maintenance
Kanban is not “set and forget,” so make the board part of your team’s rhythm. Review it in stand-ups, clean up stale or abandoned cards, and adjust stages or policies when they stop reflecting reality. When the board drifts out of sync with how people actually work, fix the board. The teams that get the most from Kanban are the ones that keep fine-tuning it, one small change at a time.
Step | What to do | Why it matters | How it works in Wrike |
1. Plan your board structure | Map how work actually moves from “Requested” to “Done” and define clear stages. | Ensures the board reflects reality so updates stay honest and consistent. | Create a project or space and set up custom statuses that match each stage of your workflow. |
2. Set up a digital Kanban board | Turn that workflow into a live board everyone can see and update. | Gives the entire team a single source of truth instead of scattered lists. | Switch to Board view to see tasks as cards in columns tied to your custom statuses. |
3. Customize for clarity and scale | Add just enough fields and structure to keep work easy to read as you grow. | Keeps the board usable as volume, projects, and teams increase. | Use custom fields, filters, and groupings (e.g., by assignee or custom field) to slice the board. |
4. Establish WIP limits | Decide how many items can sit in key stages before they’re “full.” | Reduces overload and exposes bottlenecks before work grinds to a halt. | Track WIP with custom fields and dashboards, and use Workload view and analytics to tune limits. |
5. Create effective task cards | Capture clear titles, owners, and only essential context on each card. | Makes it easy for anyone to pick up a task and move it forward. | Use task descriptions, assignees, due dates, custom fields, and checklists for key details. |
6. Carry out governance and maintenance | Review the board regularly, clean up stale work, and adjust as things change. | Keeps the board trustworthy so people can rely on it to make decisions. | Run stand-ups from Board view, use reports and dashboards for reviews, and refine statuses and fields over time. |
How to create a Kanban board in Wrike
Ready to turn your workflow into a Kanban board? To create a Kanban board, it’s easiest to start with a template, then tailor it to how your work really moves.
First, define your workflow steps: The Kanban board template includes five starter stages: “To-Do,” “Doing,” “Done,” “Canceled,” and “Backlogged.” If you need something different, open your settings and go to “Manage workflow” to add, rename, or remove statuses so they match your real process.
Next, add tasks to populate the board: That way, each task becomes a card in the relevant column, representing a single piece of work moving through the flow.
Assign your tasks so ownership is clear: Open a card, click “Add assignee,” and choose the right teammate. Use the date picker to set start and due dates, so the board reflects not just what needs to be done, but also when it should happen.
As work progresses, keep the board current: Changing a task’s status will move it to the right column automatically, or you can drag and drop cards between stages during standups and reviews.
To go a step further, use Wrike’s automation rules to reduce manual updates. You can trigger status changes, @mentions, or assignments when certain conditions are met, so routine handoffs and follow-ups happen automatically instead of relying on someone to remember.
With customizable workflows, real-time updates, and built-in automation, Wrike’s Kanban boards give teams a clear, always-current view of work in motion.
Types of Kanban boards
Not all Kanban boards look the same. The basics are consistent — columns, cards, flow — but how you set them up depends a lot on where and how your team works.
Physical Kanban boards
This is the classic whiteboard-and-sticky-notes setup. It’s fast, tactile, and great for small, co-located teams. You can huddle around it, move cards in seconds, and see the state of work the moment you walk into the room. The obvious problem is that there’s no automatic history, no easy reporting, and it’s useless for anyone not physically in the office.
Digital Kanban boards
Digital boards live in your work management platform and update in real time. They’re easier to share across locations, integrate with other tools, and support things like automation, custom fields, and analytics. For distributed or hybrid teams, this is usually the default because everyone sees the same board, wherever they are.
If you’re leaning toward digital, Wrike’s Kanban templates give you a head start. You can adjust columns, fields, and automations so the template matches your team’s real workflow.
Hybrid Kanban boards
Some teams use both a physical board for quick in-office conversations and a digital one as the system of record. The key is discipline. If you’re running a hybrid set-up, the digital board has to stay accurate, or you end up with two conflicting versions of what’s going on.
Putting your Kanban board into practiceYou’ve now seen how a Kanban board can bring structure to moving work and give everyone a clear view of what’s happening right now. Instead of guessing where things stand, the board shows what’s in motion, what’s blocked, and what should come next.
If you’re ready to put this into practice, start with a digital Kanban board template in Wrike. Use a Kanban template, adjust the workflow to match how your team actually works, and add automations to handle routine updates. That means that the board stays accurate, the team stays aligned, and you spend more time moving work to “Done.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Most teams start with three core columns: “To Do,” “In Progress,” and “Done.” You can add different stages as needed, but the goal is a clear left-to-right flow that shows where work sits right now.
Work-in-progress (WIP) limits cap how many tasks can sit in a column at once. When a column hits its limit, the team focuses on finishing existing work instead of starting something new.
Physical boards use sticky notes on a wall and work well for small, in-person teams. Digital boards live in your project management tool and provide distributed teams with better collaboration.
Yes. You can use Wrike’s Kanban templates or Board view to turn tasks into cards and map them to custom workflow stages that match your process.
You can approximate Kanban in a spreadsheet using columns and color-coding, but it’s manual and prone to errors.
