Your first workflow
Add a workflow to your factory from a template or build its stations by hand, and understand what a card has to carry before a worker can use it.
A workflow is an assembly line, drawn as a board: columns and cards. The columns are its stations, so it is worth ten minutes of thought before you staff them.
Start from a template
A new, empty workflow offers Start from a template. Pick one and three things happen in one step:
- the workflow's columns are replaced with the template's stations,
- the agents the template needs are installed into your workspace, if they are not there already,
- each agent is put on its station, with its trigger and its pass and fail routes set.
The workflow runs the moment it opens.
There are 46 templates in 9 categories — Start a business, Run a business, Sales, Marketing, Customers, Finance, People, Product and Software — and the picker is searchable, so "invoices" finds Invoicing & collections without your knowing it is filed under Finance.
Templates apply to an empty workflow only: no cards and no agents. One that already has work in it refuses, so a template can never overwrite what you have done.
See Workflow templates for the library.
Or build the stations yourself
Add columns in the order work actually moves. Two rules of thumb:
- A station should be one job. "Development and QA" is two jobs and cannot be held by one worker with one definition of done.
- Name the failure path too. If a card can come back from QA, Development must be a station that can accept it — not a stage you have already deleted.
Then staff each station.
More than one workflow
A factory holds as many workflows as the team needs. Most software teams end up with a few: feature development, bug fixes, incidents, security remediation. Keep them separate — they move differently and are worked by different specialists — and let them hand off to each other where the work crosses.
Cards
A card is the work item and the entire brief a worker receives. Everything on it — every field, checklist item, attachment and comment — goes to the worker that picks it up.
That makes the card's shape worth designing. Use a card template to define the fields the work actually needs: a bug card that demands a browser and a build number, a story card that demands the user and the outcome.
The quickest way to get cards is to ask for them: open the agent on the first station and say what you want. See Conversations.
What happens with no workers
Nothing. An unstaffed workflow is an ordinary, good kanban board: drag and drop, groups, labels, filters, a list view, checklists and discussion. Starting there for a week before putting a worker on anything is a reasonable way to begin.