Guides
Setting up your first production board: a five-step walkthrough
A first board you can run for two weeks without rebuilding. Honest defaults, room to refine, no premature complexity.
Define 3-7 phases that match your real production cycle
Open {PRODUCT}, create a new board, and add phases as columns. Use the names your team already uses verbally, not abstract ones. Briefing → Shoot → Cull → Edit → Deliver beats Stage 1 → Stage 2 → Stage 3. Don't add a "Done" column unless you genuinely archive there - the deliver phase usually plays that role.
Add owners (or skip if you're solo)
For each phase, name the person typically working it. Solo operators skip this step entirely - the field becomes noise when it's always you. For team boards, add per-phase owners; the dashboard groups overdue cards by owner so it's clear who needs to look at which.
Seed the board with real cards
Don't import historical jobs - that creates noise. Add only the items currently in flight, dropped into the phase they're actually in. If you have ten jobs going, you should see ten cards spread across the relevant phases by the end of step 3. Backlog items can come later; today is about getting the live state mirrored.
Skip durations and WIP limits for now
Counter-intuitive but right. Both work best when calibrated against observation, not guess. Run the board without them for two weeks - {PRODUCT} records phase entry / exit times automatically, so you'll have empirical data to set both numbers from. Setting them upfront produces wrong values you'll have to argue against later.
Run the board for two weeks, then refine
Use it daily. After two weeks, look at the median time-in-phase {PRODUCT} has recorded; that's your starting phase duration. Set it. Look at how many cards typically sit in each phase at once; that's your starting WIP cap. Set it. Run another week. Most teams need exactly one round of refinement; further tweaks come quarterly.
Before you start
Have a single sheet of paper to hand. Spend ten minutes writing down the actual stages of one production cycle, not what the team-handbook says they should be. The board needs to mirror the work that happens, not the work the org chart describes. If you can't list the stages from memory, walk one job through your shop / studio / cell and write each stage as you watch it move.
FAQ
Frequently asked
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Written by
Julia Yukovich
Co-Founder + CEO
Julia is one of the Co-Founders. She handles design, product direction, and most of the support replies that arrive in the morning.
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