The Lean Startup KanbanProject management for Lean startups

The Lean Startup philosophy has been introduced by Eric Ries. Eric Ries is an entrepreneur and author of the book "The Lean Startup", recognized for pioneering the Lean Startup movement.

Small Kanban board

Lean startups are about innovating. It is a field-tested philosophy that provides a recipe to minimize failure and increase chances of success. It's a powerful approach for learning about customers and their problems and about providing them with solutions of great value. The concept borrows from production practices, such as lean manufacturing and Kanban, which focus on execution and adaption as strategies to achieve innovation. The Lean Startup approach fosters both companies that are more capital efficient and those that leverage human creativity more effectively. This approach enables an organization to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch.

Lean Startup Kanban Approach

Kanban is a powerful method that supports visualization of work. It is the best choice for startup environments - characterized by constant adjustments and quick feedback loops. While using Kanban you should focus on: visualizing the work-in-progress, keeping the workflow smooth and learning from mistakes to reduce the cycle time. It is really easy to get started. You can use a white board with and sticky notes or online solutions if your team is more spread-out (e.g. Kanban Tool).

Lean Startup Kanban Board Example

On a Kanban board, work progresses from left to right. When you come up with a new task, you put it in the backlog (to do) column.

Kanban board online

Why Kanban helps Startups?

Startups face many challenges. Kanban is a perfect solution for such companies. It allows them to learn and to pull more value out of a process.

Teams using Kanban typically make surprising discoveries almost immediately about their workflow - insights that can dramatically improve the pace of development. Such improvement is important to any business, but in a startup it can be a matter of life or death. Therefore, with Kanban startups are often prone to continuous improvement.

Kanban streamlines flow, limiting work-in-progress so that value is delivered speedily and regularly, thus making the whole system much more capital-efficient.

Become a Lean Startup with Kanban Tool!

Kanban Tool is a visual project management tool for lean startups. It supports real-time team collaboration and allows teams to get work done faster. It provides advanced online Kanban boards with wide range of customizable features, including power-ups. Kanban Tool offers also insightful analytics and metrics for planning, monitoring and improving project performance that allows users to visualize key results with breakdown charts, cumulative flow charts or lead & cycle time and than export data to Excel or CSV.


Improve your team performance like Kanban Tool happy customers did:

Kanban Tool customers