What is Kanban?
Kanban is an Agile method focused on visualizing work and optimizing flow. Work items move across a board through columns representing stages (e.g., To Do → In Progress → Review → Done), and the team caps how many items can sit in each column at once via work-in-progress (WIP) limits.
Unlike Scrum, Kanban has no fixed-length sprints or prescribed roles. Work is pulled continuously rather than committed in batches, which makes it well-suited to teams with unpredictable, interrupt-driven work such as support, platform, or operations teams.
For PMs, Kanban offers a lightweight way to manage continuous delivery and to surface bottlenecks: if items pile up in one column, that stage is the constraint. Many teams blend the two approaches ("Scrumban") to get Scrum's planning cadence with Kanban's flow focus.
Examples
- A platform team uses a Kanban board with a WIP limit of 3 in the "In Review" column to prevent review bottlenecks.
- A support-driven team pulls the next highest-priority bug as soon as an engineer is free, with no sprint commitment.
Where PMs use this
Related terms
Agile
An iterative approach to building products that delivers value in small, frequent increments instead of one large release.
Scrum
A popular Agile framework that organizes work into fixed-length sprints with defined roles, events, and artifacts.
Sprint
A fixed, short period (typically 1–2 weeks) during which a Scrum team completes a set of committed work.
Product Backlog
A prioritized, continuously updated list of everything that might be built for a product.