Visualize Tasks With These 5 Kanban Card Templates

Why do work descriptions matter for productivity and clarity? Learn how detailed Kanban card templates can streamline your work processes. Even if this topic does not sound attractive, do not settle for mediocrity and pay attention to how work is described. Here are 5 Kanban card templates to help you organize tasks and improve workflow efficiency.

What is a Kanban card template?

In short, a Kanban card template is a predefined visual or contextual structure that ensures the necessary information for successful output is present.

There is a wide range of what can be treated as a card template, from text-only sticky notes to super-specific technical cards such as those used in manufacturing.

Why does good work description matter?

If you are working or striving for truly asynchronous communication inside your organization, you should ensure that work descriptions meet quality criteria. If someone taking over the task will need to write questions and seek missing information, the time waste is already there. In the majority of cases based on productivity community feedback as well as our own experience, people neglect details and keep knowledge implicit, when describing what needs to be done. This lack of clarity often leads to unnecessary meetings and wasted time.

The creator of a task must clearly outline the problem, expected results, and possible solutions to avoid misunderstandings. If the person does not feel sure about the problem being solved, it is another problem. So, all in all, it is about saving your colleagues time.

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How work is described on Kanban cards?

In all cases, the Kanban card must have at least a title, stating what’s the problem to be solved or what is the actual task to be done. Everything else comes as optional descriptive data. Based on which Kanban board tool you use, you will have some flexibility to decide what’s shown on each Kanban card, and you might even be able to save your own custom Kanban card templates.

Different tasks need specific Kanban card templates to maximize clarity and efficiency. Here’s how to tailor templates for different types of work.

5 simple Kanban card templates for ideation

1. The Lean One
Nothing special, just the title!

2. 20% effort, 80% result

Has a responsible person, has a deadline, has a detailed breakdown of what fulfills the more significant piece of work, or makes specifics explicit.

3. The Visual One

Use images, colors, and tags to provide additional non-text information. Reading text produces cognitive load on human beings, color coding helps to ease out.

For example, card colors can symbolize work type, and once people get used to them, they can skip reading and get that information just by seeing the color. Color coding works great in Kanban.

4. The One with Relations

Suppose work requires some other task to be finished first or the opposite, a good rule of thumb is to decorate a card with such information. So that whenever someone considers what to do next, that person has all the necessary knowledge to succeed instead of getting blocked immediately.

If you feel unsure, you might want to read up on work relation types.

5. The High Quality One 🔥

This one is crafted by our own product team, and it is more about detailed description than the actual card itself. The card can be any of the first four examples, but the inside delivers the most value. It has been refined by fire, failure, and pain.

The goal of sharing is to trigger some thinking and discussions. When performing any product change, we aim to meet 4 fundamental elements of good description:

💥 Problem – essential to keep everyone aligned. What are we solving here? Quite often, we find ourselves drifting to solution space and forgetting what the problem was.

📢 Evidence – what’s the proof for the problem and its importance?

⚒️ Solution – how to solve the problem. For a bonus, it can include more than one option with pros/cons.

❓ Questions – to capture unsolved parts or define risks.

Example of such template in action

So, which template to choose?

You should start with the easiest one and move up gradually. But, you must understand that the real value with significant risk reduction comes from the more detailed templates. Moreover, you should embrace best practices in work description, it is not a single person’s job. Your team should participate in refining and crafting the contents of each work item. Only then you will be able to have a proper overview of why, what, and how needs to be done.

Lastly, you can juggle different templates for different types of work. The more trivial the task at hand, the simpler the template. This will give you some balance of risk reduction and effort invested.

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