What is the difference between a kanban board and a task board?

A task board is any board that shows a team’s tasks. A kanban board is a task board whose columns follow the stages of the work and whose cards move from column to column as the work progresses, often with a limit on how much may be in progress at once.

What is a WIP limit in kanban?

WIP stands for work in progress. A WIP limit is the largest number of cards a column may hold at one time. When a column is full, the team finishes something before it starts anything new, so the work flows instead of piling up half done.

Who moves the cards in featureloom?

People move plans between the columns of the board. An agent in a console chooses neither the column nor the position: when it starts a plan, the card goes to the column marked in realization, and when it reports the plan delivered, to the column marked realized. A person gives the verdict on delivered work, in the app.

Kanban board examples: the method, columns and cards

How the kanban method works

The word kanban is Japanese and means roughly a signboard or a visual card. The method comes from manufacturing, where a card signalled that a station could take on more work, and it later spread to software and office teams.

A kanban system rests on a few principles:

Make the work visible. Every task is a card on the board, so nothing waits hidden in someone’s head or inbox.
Limit work in progress. A column may hold only a set number of cards at a time, its WIP limit. New work starts when something is finished, not whenever it arrives.
Pull, don’t push. Whoever has capacity takes the next card from the column before theirs. Work isn’t handed out in bulk in advance.
Manage the flow. The team watches where cards pile up and how long they take to cross the board, and removes what slows them down.
Make the rules explicit and keep improving. What a column means and when a card may move on is agreed and written down, and it changes when the team learns something.

Kanban prescribes neither roles nor iterations of a fixed length. A team can start with the process it already has and improve it step by step.

The kanban board

A kanban board is a task board divided into columns. The simplest has three: To do, In progress and Done. Teams add their own columns, such as review or testing, so that the board shows how the work really flows.

Each kanban card holds one task: its name and often the person working on it, its type or a due date. Where the card sits on the board shows how far the work has come, and the order of the cards in a column shows what comes next. A board can be a wall with sticky notes or an app the whole team shares.

Kanban in featureloom

featureloom gives you a kanban board for plans. Each project is one board, and each card on it is a plan: a markdown document with one piece of work for an AI agent or a person. A new project’s board starts with three columns: Planned, Started and Completed. You rename, reorder and add columns on the Project settings screen, in the Columns tab, up to 20 per board including the archive.

In the Column state field, a column can mark one plan state: backlog, in realization or realized. A plan moved into such a column gets its state, and a column set to No state is only for sorting. Each card also shows the plan’s type as a colored bar with its name, and a plan that waits on another says so on its card.

Agents pull their work, as the method suggests. An agent in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor that asks for the next plan gets the next ready plan from the column marked backlog, in the order the board shows, unless it is assigned to another person. Ready means every plan it waits on has been delivered. When the agent starts the plan, the card moves to the column marked in realization and shows the person and the console working on it. When the agent reports the plan delivered, the card moves to the column marked realized. The agent chooses neither the column nor the position.

The last step stays with you: you accept the delivered work or choose Do not accept with your reasons, and the agent goes back to rework. The How featureloom works page shows a plan’s whole road across the board.

A kanban board example

Here is the board of a fictional project, Invoices. It has the three columns every new project starts with, and its cards are five plans of one epic, Billing:

Planned: INV-15 Import bank statement, whose card says “waits on INV-14”, and below it INV-16 Payment reminder.
Started: INV-14 Export invoices to CSV. Its card shows the person and the console working on it.
Completed: INV-12 Yearly invoice numbering and INV-13 Invoice correction, both delivered.

One look at the board tells the team what is in progress, what is done and what is waiting. An agent that asks for the next plan now gets INV-16, the first ready plan in the Planned column, because INV-15 still waits on INV-14. Once INV-14 is delivered, INV-15 is ready too, and as it is higher in the column, the next agent takes it first.

Kanban