• admin
• Dec. 30, 2022
• • Insights-Help

Kanban boards are one of our favorite Product-tivity (see what did there?) tools here at Buildly and as we love to borrow from the greats, the lean manufacturing process built around it from Toyota fits into our philosophy here as well. Also one of our favorite Buildly Insights integrations is with the Trello API, so we thought we'd share how we use Trello as well as our own open and public template you can use for simple and fast product management.

First a couple of things about Kanban boards, because there are many out there. The vertical or "swim" lanes in our opinion should be prioritized top to bottom. Then cards move from one lane to the next based on readiness. It should be simple to use and feel very zen like, so our templates and our own implementation of a Kanban board are just that, simple, clean and easy.

Our template is designed as a Product Roadmap, to help you map out product features fast and get feedback on it from everyone who needs to be involved. To use our template, sign up for a free Trello account if you don't have one, then just click on the link to our template and click "create board from template". That's it, now you have your own board based on our template.

Our swim-lanes and template cards are based on a light touch sprint/kanban approach mixed with a bit of user centered design to help keep the business, design, development and management teams all involved.

• Ideas lane for every feature you could ever think of for your product. Think big…save the small stuff for issues.
• Research lane is where the ideas are brought back down to reality. Get the team involved and figure out how and how long.
• Sprint Ready lane if for the features that are ready to be worked on. If you use Buildly Insights this is where your features will be split into Issues for developers to start work on automagically!
• Done! Well you know what done means.. right? it’s the same for everything isn’t it? or is it?
• Freezer is where good ideas go to die, or maybe not?! Maybe your idea is to great for today but tomorrow, who knows?
  

Now the easiest way to mange those features and get them into Issues for your dev team, we think is using Buildly Insights and the GitHub or Jira Integrations, especially if you are doing microservice and multi-repo work, however it's not required. Also, if you have idea on how to improve or change our implementation and template let us know in the community.