![]() ![]() I believe engineers exist in organizations to deliver value. Across the company, anyone who cared could see what’s happening, without asking someone for a dreaded status update.įor some work cultures, this level of openness is a given, for others its ghastly. ![]() Occasionally, my boss would walk by the board and take a quick look. Whenever some stakeholder outside the engineering team has a question about priorities, I bring them to the board and show them what we’re working on. We welcome anyone to come to our standup, and some folks from other teams who we work closely with actually show up daily. “Boo ya!” That satisfaction is eerily absent in digital tools. There’s just something that feels really good about moving a card you’ve been working on for a few weeks into the Deploy column. Software engineers work with code, which is abstract and intangible. Moving a card from column to column also has a subtle, satisfying psychological effect. If you tried this with a virtual task board, you’d have to crowd around a small computer screen. We don’t have to think too hard about what we worked on yesterday, because we can see our card. Standups are short (~15 minute), daily meetings in which we recap our latest progress, and discuss what we’re doing next. The first reason that a physical board is the bee’s knees is that it acts as a natural gathering place for standups. We have post-its, pens, markers, and scissors because a physical board is an arts and crafts project, too. We added a calendar on the right so we can see our milestone goals. ![]() This board supports 9 engineers, among other team members. Each card represents something that delivers value: a feature, a bug fix, or an infrastructure upgrade. It’s a Kanban board! This post is not about Kanban, but for the record, Kanban rocks. ![]()
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