A kanban board is not just a prettier list. It's a running visualization of the state machine of your workflow. Each column is a state. Each card is a record. Moving a card across columns is a transition, with whatever follow-on effects that transition implies. The shape of the board — which columns are full, which are empty, which are starting to bulge — tells you at a glance where the work is piling up. For sales pipelines, support queues, task boards, editorial flows, and any number of similar domains, a kanban isn't an aesthetic alternative to the table. It's the right viewer.
Our kanban is driven by a choice property on the underlying type. The columns are the options of that property — deal stages on an Opportunity type, statuses on a Ticket type, priorities on a Task type. Creating a board is as simple as picking the property that represents state; the columns appear automatically, with the property's configured ordering and its color coding carried across.
Dragging a card is how state changes. Pull a deal from Negotiation to Closed Won and the underlying property value updates, which in turn fires whatever automations are wired up: a notification to the account team, a welcome email to the customer, an onboarding task created. The kanban is the visible surface; the automations are the quiet machinery below. That separation matters — the same workflow can be driven from a table edit, from an API call, or from a drag on a board, and the downstream effects are identical.
Card content is configurable per type. At a minimum every card shows a title; beyond that, you can add a short description, a colored accent, a thumbnail image, a handful of key fields. Cards stay compact by design — a busy board is useless if each card eats half the screen — but the fields you choose to display are the ones a user needs to make a triage decision without clicking through. Custom backgrounds per card or per board provide additional visual cues: a red background for overdue cards, a muted background for archived boards, a highlight for cards assigned to the current user.
Order within a column is respected and persisted. The default can be a property of the underlying record — most-recent-first, highest-priority-first, due-date-ascending — and individual users can drag to reorder within a column if their workflow needs it. That's useful for teams that use vertical position within a column as a priority signal: the top of the column is "work on next," and a drag is how you promote a card.
A handful of small conveniences round the experience out. A counts per board display shows how many cards are in each column, which is the headline number for most workflow dashboards. An add button per column lets you create a new record pre-set to that state, which speeds up the common "add and categorize" flow. A scroll-to-current-state button jumps the board to a column of interest — typically the user's own work — which matters on wide boards with many columns. A show-all-boards toggle hides empty columns when they're noise and shows them when they're context. A hide-groups setting lets a view exclude certain states from the board entirely, so an Archive column doesn't clutter the daily view.
Performance on busy boards is a practical concern we've put care into. Columns load their cards lazily and can carry thousands of entries without the browser straining. Filters, sort order, and search behave the same way they do in the table view — the kanban isn't a different product with different rules, it's a different rendering of the same query machinery you already know.
The kanban adapts to light and dark modes, and the colors of the underlying choice property carry through in both. That consistency is small but appreciated: a deal at Qualified is the same green whether you're looking at the table, the kanban, or a homepage widget.
Because the kanban is just a grouping rendered sideways, everything that works for grouped tables works here. The same query, the same filters, the same user permissions, the same automations. What you gain is the visual language — a workflow made legible at a glance, rather than a column of statuses you have to mentally reconstruct from a sort order. For teams whose days revolve around transitions, that's often the piece that finally makes a system feel like theirs.