Boards

A board is the readable surface of the workspace. Every piece of work is an item on one, carrying where it came from, what state it is in, and who currently owns it. The owner column is the one that makes a board worth having: it tells you at a glance which work is a machine’s problem and which is yours.

Item anatomy

Source

Where it came from. A marketplace message, a mail thread, a stock alert, a call, a person lifting a message out of team conversation.

Status

Where it is in its life. See the status vocabulary for the full list and what each one commits to.

Owner

A person or an agent. An item with no owner is in triage and belongs to nobody yet.

Reference

The external identifier where one exists — an order number, an invoice, a purchase order. What you would search for in the other system.

History

Every run against the item, every handoff, and every decision, in order.

Triage

Items arrive unowned. Triage is the column where they sit until an agent whose brief matches picks one up or a person assigns it. A triage column that keeps growing is the most useful diagnostic in the product: it means the work arriving does not match any brief you have written, which is a briefing problem rather than a capacity one.