How product managers use kanban (4 example use cases)
Last updated: January 2025
Product leaders manage a large amount of critical work at once. You are responsible for planning what the product team will deliver and the timeline for implementation. With so much in motion, it is useful to have a high-level view of the status of work items so you can identify delays or blockers and keep everything on track. Kanban boards give product managers a lightweight way to visualize and manage product development work.
Try a kanban board built on a whiteboard in Aha! software. Learn more.
Kanban complements goal-first product management. As a product manager, you set the product strategy that determines feature priority upfront. Teams pull new features from the backlog as capacity allows and add them to in-progress work. You can also apply tags or labels to indicate which strategic imperative each work item supports.
Kanban teams use a physical or digital kanban board to map out a team or organization's workflow. Vertical lanes or columns visualize each step in the workflow. Column labels can be as simple as “Not started," "Some progress," and "Achieved," or you can choose terminology that is unique to a specific workflow. Work items are represented by cards that are moved from left to right across the board to show how each work item is progressing within the workflow.
In this guide, we cover a few ways product managers can leverage kanban to support successful product development. Keep on reading, or use the following links to jump ahead:
(For a more in-depth review of how product managers set up and optimize a kanban board, check out this guide.)
Product development
Product managers and engineers often collaborate using kanban boards. In this scenario, a product manager prepares features and requirements in a "Ready for development" (or similar) column of a kanban board and partners with the engineering manager to ensure the backlog is prioritized.
Engineers then choose cards to pull into their workload as capacity allows and within the board's work-in-progress limits. Adding swimlanes to the kanban board, organized by engineer, can help both the product manager and engineering manager better understand the team's workload and identify bottlenecks.
Kanban is valuable for its simplicity — but you can still tailor it to your team's workflows. In this example built in Aha! Develop, color-coded columns with custom names visualize work in progress. Dedicated swimlanes also segment work items by the engineer who will tackle them.
Product management
There is quite a bit of work that happens before product managers send the details of what to build to the development team. And there is also a lot of work that product managers do that is not directly related to development work.
Product management teams can create kanban boards for core product management responsibilities, such as defining and formalizing strategic initiatives, creating go-to-market launch materials, and writing knowledge base documentation. Kanban boards can also help manage ongoing product operations work.
Kanban boards can also help teams track nontechnical work (in this case, progress on strategic initiatives).
Scaled Agile Framework® teams
If your organization follows the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®), you might use a kanban board tailored to SAFe within an agile release train. Most product managers who operate using SAFe choose scrum as their value delivery method — but in particularly fast-moving or dynamic contexts, the planning iterations involved in it can be too burdensome.
In this scenario, a kanban board provides a more fluid, continuous way to manage incoming work. Product managers support the work by creating and refining backlog items (stories with acceptance criteria) that the SAFe team can then build, integrate, test, validate, and deploy.
Stakeholder communication
Product managers need to be highly disciplined and organized to keep track of all product work — all while communicating the big picture to stakeholders and cross-functional teams. And a kanban board can be a useful visual for sharing status at a high level.
For example, swimlanes could represent different releases or launch components. If product managers choose to share a kanban view with stakeholders, it is critical that the board is accurate and up to date. Add visual cues by color coding the cards with labels or tags that indicate the strategic objectives that the work supports.
By applying function-specific tags to individual features, this example kanban board makes it easier for stakeholders to track progress on specific work items.
Choosing the right tool
For all of the use cases above, physical kanban boards are challenging to maintain and can quickly become outdated. Of course, this defeats the intention of building a fast-moving pipeline of work.
If you choose to go digital and use Aha! software, you can select among several tools that are purpose-built for product and engineering teams. Aha! Whiteboards comes with a lightweight kanban board template. Aha! Roadmaps is a complete product management solution — set product strategy, prioritize features on a workflow board, and share visual plans. And the kanban board in Aha! Develop is meant specifically for engineering teams.
