Kanban for a team of three

By Darko Bačić, founder of App Tube · 9 October 2026

Kanban is a way to see work on a board. Each column is a stage, like To do or Done. Each card is a task. Cards move from left to right as the work moves.

Big companies add rules and charts on top of that. A team of three needs much less. This post shows a setup Luka, Mira and Ivan could start on a Monday, with no extra meetings. It is one of the plain explainers on our blog.

An example

Luka, Mira and Ivan are a three-person studio shipping a mobile app. Their board has four columns:

• To do: the next ten tasks, in order. The top card matters most.
• In progress: what someone is working on right now.
• In review: done by one person, waiting for another to check it.
• Done: finished and checked.

They have one rule. Each of them may have two cards in In progress, so six at most. When Ivan has two, he finishes one before he pulls a new card from To do.

There is no planning meeting. On Monday, each of them takes a card from the top of To do. When a card is stuck, they say so in chat. Everything else is on the board. Mira keeps To do in order, because she talks to the client the most.

Work that is not in the next ten lives in a backlog, out of the way. A backlog is the list of work you have not started. What a backlog is covers how to keep it small.

How big it should be

Three to five columns is enough for three people. Each column should be a real stage that a card waits in. "Waiting for the client" can be a column. "Thinking about it" cannot.

Keep To do short. Ten cards is plenty, because you will finish them before the list goes stale. Put the rest in the backlog.

Set a limit on In progress. A good start is two cards per person. Limits feel slow at first. They are not. A team that finishes one card before it starts the next ships sooner than a team with nine cards half done.

When Done fills up, it is time to ship. How a three-person team ships a release picks up from there.

Common mistakes

• A column for every tiny step. Seven columns for three people means cards spend their day being dragged.
• A To do column with 200 cards. Nobody reads past the first screen, so the order stops meaning anything.
• Cards that sit for weeks. If a card has not moved in two weeks, split it, finish it or archive it.
• A meeting to go through the board. The board is meant to replace the status meeting, not add one.
• Keeping the board in your head. If nobody moves the card, the board lies.

How devBoard handles it

A new project in devBoard starts with three columns: To do, In progress and Done. You can rename, recolour, reorder and delete them, up to 20 columns. When Ivan moves a card, Luka sees it move at once. You can switch between the board and a list. There is no limit setting on a column, so the two-card rule is one you keep yourselves. Boards in devBoard shows more, and the guide to planning a release shows how to group cards into the next version.