Kanban board templates: column setups that fit how your team works
A new board opens with three columns: To do, Doing, Done. It looks clean, the team starts adding cards, and within three weeks "Doing" holds 40 cards, half of which are waiting on someone else. The template was not wrong. It was just describing a team that does not exist.
A kanban board template is useful only as a starting point for describing how work actually moves through your team. This article gives column setups for the kinds of work small teams most often run, explains the reasoning behind each column, and shows how to adapt a template once real cards start to pile up in the wrong places.
What a kanban template is really deciding
Every column on a kanban board answers one question: what state can a piece of work be in, such that someone would act differently because of it? A template is a set of answers to that question, written before your team has done any work on the board.
Columns are hand offs, not activities
A common mistake is to create a column for every activity: Research, Writing, Editing, Formatting, Proofreading. If the same person does all of these in one sitting, the card will race across five columns in an hour and the board will say nothing useful. Columns earn their place when work changes hands, waits for something, or needs a decision.
Waiting deserves its own column
The single most useful column most templates leave out is some form of "Waiting". Work waiting on a client, a supplier, or another team is not in progress, but it is not done either. When it hides inside "Doing", the column looks overloaded and nobody can see what is actually blocked.
Done needs a definition
"Done" means different things to different people. Written, reviewed, published, invoiced. A template should make the last column specific enough that two people would agree whether a card belongs there. If they would not, split it or rename it.
Keep these three ideas in mind while reading the setups below. The column names matter less than whether each column marks a real change in who acts next.
Five starting templates for common small team work
The layouts below are starting points. Each includes a short note on why the columns are there, so you can remove what does not apply.
| Work type | Columns | Why these columns |
|---|---|---|
| Client projects | Backlog, This week, In progress, Waiting on client, Internal review, Delivered | Separates client delays from internal delays |
| Content production | Ideas, Planned, Drafting, Editing, Ready to publish, Published | Editing is usually done by a different person than drafting |
| Customer support | New, Triaged, In progress, Waiting on customer, Resolved | Waiting on customer is where tickets stall silently |
| Hiring | Applied, Screening, Interview, Offer, Hired, Not moving forward | Each stage involves a different decision maker |
| Internal operations | Requests, Accepted, Doing, Blocked, Done this month | Blocked makes dependencies on other teams visible |
Client projects
This is the setup most small agencies and freelancer teams need. "This week" is a deliberately small column. It forces a short weekly conversation about what is actually being worked on, rather than letting the backlog masquerade as a plan. "Waiting on client" protects the team: when a deadline slips, the board shows exactly which cards sat waiting for feedback and for how long.
Content production
Content work has a natural hand off between writer and editor, so "Drafting" and "Editing" are separate. "Ready to publish" matters when publishing depends on a schedule. A finished article that is not supposed to go live until Tuesday should not sit in "Editing" pretending to be unfinished.
Customer support
Support boards fail when tickets waiting on a customer reply are mixed with tickets waiting on the team. Splitting them means the team can review its own queue without wading through cases it cannot move. Some teams add a label for urgency instead of a column, since urgency is a property of the ticket, not a stage.
Hiring
Hiring is a good example of a board where the last column is not one column. "Hired" and "Not moving forward" are both final states, and mixing them makes the board unreadable. Candidate information is sensitive, so this board usually needs tighter access than the rest of the workspace.
Internal operations
Requests from inside the company tend to arrive faster than they can be done. An explicit "Accepted" column separates what the team has agreed to do from what someone has merely asked for. "Done this month" can be cleared at the start of each month, which keeps the board from turning into an archive.
What goes on the card, not in the column
Templates often fail because they try to encode everything as columns. Many properties belong on the card instead.
Labels for type and urgency
Bug versus feature, client A versus client B, urgent versus normal. These are attributes that do not change as work progresses. Put them in labels, and filter the board when you need to see only one kind. A column called "Urgent" means a card has to leave that column to make progress, which makes no sense.
Custom fields for numbers and names
Estimated hours, budget, client contact, due date. Fields let you sort and total things that columns cannot. If a template includes a column like "Over 8 hours", it is doing a field's job badly. Check that the tool you use supports the custom fields your template needs on the plan you intend to use.
Checklists for small steps
If the steps inside a stage always happen in the same order and are done by the same person, a checklist inside the card is better than more columns. A content card might carry a checklist for "add images, check links, write meta description" while staying in the "Editing" column.
A short card template
Many teams also benefit from a template for the card description itself. For client work it might be three headings: what was asked, what done looks like, and where the files are. It takes ten seconds to fill in and saves long threads later.
Adapting the template after two weeks
No template survives contact with real work unchanged. The right time to adjust it is after about two weeks, when enough cards have moved to show patterns.
Look for columns where cards pile up
If one column consistently holds far more cards than the others, something is wrong at that step. Either there is a hidden waiting state inside it, or too much work is being started. Split the column if there is a hidden wait. Limit how many cards can sit there if the team is starting too much.
Look for columns cards skip
If most cards jump straight from "Planned" to "Editing", the "Drafting" column is not describing reality. Maybe drafting happens outside the board, or the same person drafts and edits. Remove the column or merge it rather than keeping it for appearance.
Look for cards that move backwards
Cards returning from "Review" to "In progress" are normal occasionally. If it happens to most cards, the review step is catching problems that should be caught earlier. The fix is usually a checklist or a clearer card description, not another column.
Add a work in progress limit where it hurts
A template can suggest limits, but the right numbers only show up with real work. Pick the column where cards pile up most and agree on a maximum, often the number of people who work in that column plus one. When the column is full, nobody starts a new card there. Instead, they help finish or unblock one that is already in it. Write the number in the column name, such as "In progress (4)", if the tool has no setting for it. The limit will feel restrictive for a few days. That friction is the point: it shows where the team was quietly starting more than it could finish, and it turns a crowded column into a conversation about what to finish first.
Change one thing at a time
When adjusting a board, change one column per week and tell the team why. Several changes at once make it impossible to tell which one helped, and people stop trusting where cards are supposed to go.
Templates for work that does not flow left to right
Some work fits a kanban board poorly no matter how the columns are arranged. Recognising this early saves effort.
Work with dependent dates
A launch plan where each task has to finish before the next one starts is fundamentally a timeline. On a kanban board the dependencies are invisible. The same cards shown as a Gantt chart make the critical path obvious. If your template keeps growing columns like "Starts after design", consider a timeline view instead.
Schedules and slots
A content calendar, a shift rota, or a set of recurring meetings is about when, not about stage. A calendar or timetable layout fits these directly. Forcing them into a kanban template produces cards that never move.
Decisions and open questions
Some teams build a kanban board for decisions: Proposed, Discussing, Decided. This can work, but decisions often need long threaded discussion. A discussion style board, or card comments that keep the reasoning attached, may serve better than columns.
Tools vary here. Some offer only kanban, others let the same set of cards be displayed as a board, a timeline, or a calendar. A comparison of tools can help identify which support the layouts your work needs.
Bringing an existing board into a new template
Teams rarely start from nothing. Usually there is an old board, a spreadsheet, or a pile of notes that needs to move into the new structure.
Map old columns to new ones on paper first
Write the old column names on the left and the new ones on the right, and draw lines. Where one old column maps to two new ones, decide the rule before moving cards. Where an old column maps to nothing, those cards are probably done or dead and can be archived.
Archive before importing
Moving hundreds of finished cards into a new template clutters it from day one. Archive completed work in the old tool, then import only what is still active. If the history matters, keep the old board read only for a while.
Use an importer where one exists
If the old board lives in another tool, an importer can carry over cards, labels, checklists, and comments without retyping. The import from Trello page is an example of what such an import can include. Check afterwards that comments and attachments arrived, since those are what people most often need to look up later.
What to change first
Take the template closest to your work from the table above, add a waiting column if it lacks one, and run it unchanged for two weeks before adjusting anything. Then look at where cards pile up and change one column at a time. If you want to try these layouts alongside a Gantt or calendar view of the same cards, Pinateca is free for up to 5 people and 10 boards.
Q1. How many columns should a kanban board template have?
Most small teams do well with four to seven. Fewer than four usually hides waiting states, and more than seven often means activities have been turned into columns. Count the real hand offs in your work and start there.
Q2. Should every team in a company use the same kanban template?
Usually not. Support, content, and client work move through different stages. A shared naming convention for the first and last columns helps people read each other's boards, but the middle columns should match each team's actual process.
Q3. Where should urgent work go on a kanban board?
Mark urgency with a label or a priority field rather than a column. Urgent cards still move through the same stages as everything else. Some teams add a single swimlane or place urgent cards at the top of each column to make them stand out.
Q4. Can a kanban template include deadlines?
Yes, as due dates on the cards. A board shows stage, not time, so it helps to also view the same cards on a calendar or timeline when deadlines matter. Sorting or filtering by due date inside a column is another simple option.
Q5. How often should a kanban board template be revised?
Review it after the first two weeks, then roughly once a month or whenever cards keep piling up in one place. Change one column at a time so the effect of each change is clear.
