What information belongs on a card on a Kanban board?

## A card is a token, not a container A card on a Kanban board stands for **one piece of work moving through the team's workflow**. Its job is to be recognisable from across the room and to say where that work has got to. It is not the place the work is written down. The specification, the acceptance criteria, the design sketch and the test evidence live wherever the team already keeps written material; the card carries a pointer to them. Confusing the token with the container is the most common way a board quietly dies. Cards grow into documents, nobody can read the board without opening things, and within a few weeks the team stops looking at it and goes back to asking each other what is happening. A board that has to be interrogated is not a visualisation. The working test is a stranger test. Someone who is not on the team walks up to the board and, without opening anything, should be able to answer: 1. What is being worked on right now? 2. Who has each of those items? 3. What is stuck, and for how long? If the board cannot answer those three, adding fields will not fix it. ## The fields that earn their place | Field | What it buys | What it costs | | --- | --- | --- | | Short human title | Recognition at a glance | Somebody has to phrase it well | | Identifier | The link to the written detail | Nothing, if it stays small | | Current owner | Ownership is a fact, not an assumption | Must be changed at every handoff | | Date it entered the first activity column | A long-sitting card is visible without anyone's memory | Set once, never edited | | Class of work | The card's handling rule is visible where it is pulled | Needs an agreed set of classes | | Blocked marker, reason and date | A blockage is a fact rather than a rumour | Must be added the day it happens | Two of those deserve emphasis. - **The owner** matters for work in an activity column. A card with nobody's name on it, sitting in a column where somebody is supposedly working, is the board telling you that the work is really waiting. - **The blocked marker** has three parts: a visible mark, the reason, and the date it started. A mark without a date turns into wallpaper, because every reader assumes it is recent news and nobody can tell how old it really is. ## What to leave off - **Percent-complete figures.** Nobody consults them to decide what to pull, and they are wrong within days of being written. - **Fields maintained for a report the team never reads.** If the only reader is outside the team, keep the report outside the card. - **Long checklists** that make the card unreadable. If an item has ten mandatory sub-steps, that is a rule for the column, not text on the card. - **Duplicate detail** already held behind the link. Two copies means one of them is wrong and no reader knows which. The rule behind all four is that **every field is a manual promise**. Somebody keeps it true by hand, forever. One stale field is worse than a missing one, because a reader who catches a lie starts discounting the fields that are accurate. ## A worked example A four-person farm-equipment telematics team ran a board whose cards carried nine fields, including an estimate in hours, a priority number and a percent-complete. During the week the release was being lined up for an annual industry conference, two cards showed 80 per cent for eleven straight days, and one blocked card had no date on it at all: it had been waiting fourteen days for a spare test rig, and everybody assumed somebody else was chasing it. They cut the card face to five things - title, identifier, owner, start date, and a blocked marker carrying a reason and a date. Nothing about the work changed, but the board began to be read again, because everything on it was something a person would notice was wrong. ## Physical cards and cards on a screen A physical card is limited by the size of the paper, and that limit is a feature: it forces the team to choose what matters. A card on a screen has no such limit, so the team has to impose one deliberately - decide what shows on the card face, and let everything else stay one click away, unshown. The same discipline applies to colour and markers. Colour should **mean** something agreed - a class of work, an item type - and mean the same thing on every card. Colour used decoratively trains people to ignore it, and then the one time it carries information they miss it.