Guides
How to set up swimlanes for multiple product lines on one board
Running two or three product lines through the same stages, but tired of them blurring together? Swimlanes keep each line in its own horizontal track while sharing one pipeline.
Key takeaways
Confirm shared stages
Make sure every line moves through the same columns.
Add a line tag per card
Tag each card with its product line.
Group the board by tag
Switch the view to group by line; lanes appear.
Cap at ~5 lanes
More than that, split into separate boards.
1. Decide if swimlanes are even the right tool
Swimlanes make sense when several streams of work move through the same stages and share the same team, you want them visually separated but managed together. If two product lines have genuinely different workflows, or are run by different teams who never touch each other's work, separate boards are cleaner — and it's worth designing those columns carefully before you add lanes on top. Use lanes for "same pipeline, different categories", not for "different processes".
2. Set your stages first, then your lanes
The columns are your shared workflow (for example: Backlog, In production, Quality check, Packing, Done). Get those right for all lines first. The swimlanes are the horizontal split, one per product line (say: Furniture, Lighting, Textiles). A card now lives at the intersection of a stage and a line, so you read its position as both "how far along" and "which line" at a glance.
Stages are the workflow; lanes are the category
Keep the distinction crisp: columns answer "what happens next?", lanes answer "which kind of thing is this?". If you ever feel tempted to make a stage that only one lane uses, that's a sign that line needs its own board, not a special column.
3. Tag cards by line and group the view
In Production Board, give each card a line tag (Furniture, Lighting, …) and switch the board to group by that tag. Each tag becomes a horizontal lane; the stages stay as the columns. Now a glance down a column tells you the load per stage, and a glance across a lane tells you where one product line is stuck. You get both readings from one view instead of toggling between filtered boards.
4. Keep the lane count honest
Lanes earn their keep up to about five. Past that the board gets tall, scrolling kills the at-a-glance benefit, and you're better off splitting into two boards or grouping lines into families. The whole point of swimlanes is to see everything at once, so the moment you can't, you've added one lane too many.
FAQ
Frequently asked
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Written by
Julia Yukovich
Co-Founder + CEO
Julia is one of the Co-Founders. She handles design, development, product direction, and most of the support replies that arrive in the morning.
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