Kanban

Kanban is a visual workflow management method that uses boards and cards to represent work items moving through defined stages, from backlog to done. Adapted from lean manufacturing into software and knowledge work, it emphasizes continuous delivery, explicit work-in-progress limits, and steady, incremental improvement. It is less a rigid process than a lens for seeing where work actually stalls.

• Boards and cards - Columns model the stages of a process and cards model individual work items, so the state of everything is visible at a glance.
• Work-in-progress limits - Caps on how many items sit in a stage force teams to finish work before starting more, exposing bottlenecks.
• Pull-based flow - Work is pulled into the next stage as capacity opens up, rather than pushed on a schedule.
• Continuous improvement - Flow metrics like cycle time and throughput drive ongoing, evidence-based tuning of the process.

In real API operations, Kanban shows up wherever teams manage the pipeline of API work — design reviews, endpoint delivery, governance exceptions, and support tickets all flow across boards with WIP limits. Many API management, project, and issue-tracking platforms expose Kanban boards through their own APIs, which is how the method gets wired into automation: cards move stage-to-stage in response to events, and increasingly agents open, advance, and close work items as part of a larger delivery workflow.