Kanban Board for Video Production: The Columns My Team Actually Uses
The eight columns, WIP limits and card rules I run on my editing team's board, and how I keep the review column honest by linking every card to one PlayPause review card.
My agency's old kanban board for video production was a Trello board with a column called Client Review, and on any given Tuesday it held a dozen cards, of which maybe half were genuinely waiting on a client, right. The rest had been approved on WhatsApp days earlier, or had notes sitting in one editor's inbox, or had quietly split into cards called v2, v3 and v3 FINAL. So the board looked very very organised from across the room and told me almost nothing about where the work actually was.
Now the board has eight columns, every editor has a hard limit on how many cuts they hold, and every card in the review lane carries one link to where the review really happens, which for us is PlayPause. To be very honest upfront, PlayPause has no kanban view of its own, it is the review lane the board links out to, and the board finally tells the truth because it stopped pretending to be the review tool.
Why a kanban board for video production beats a Gantt chart
I've planned post both ways, and a Gantt chart is basically a promise about durations, right, it assumes you know the assembly takes two days and the grade takes one. An editor can estimate their own work reasonably well. Nobody can estimate the wait, meaning how long the client sits on a link and how many rounds the notes take, so every post project I planned that way was accurate until the first client review and a guess after it.
A Gantt chart on a post project is accurate right up to the first client review, and after that it is a guess with nicer colours.
Kanban doesn't ask you to predict any of that, it only shows where each piece of work sits right now and caps how much can pile up in one stage. For a video team that shifts the question from when will this be done to what is blocked and on whom, which you can answer in ten seconds as long as the board reflects reality, and that last condition is what the rest of this post is about.
The post production kanban columns I actually use
I've tried boards with fifteen columns, one each for colour, sound, graphics, captions and so on, and for a team of 3 to 15 editors that mostly created more places for a card to hide. The crafts of post-production genuinely are that many, but a small team doesn't hand work between that many people, right, so I run eight columns in the order a card moves.
Brief and Assembly
Brief is where a card is born, and it doesn't move until the footage has arrived, the deliverable spec is written down and the client's Playbook in PlayPause is linked, since that is where their creative direction lives. Assembly is the stringout, every usable take laid down in order. I keep it apart from the edit because an assembly and a rough cut are different stages that clients mix up constantly, so the board shouldn't blur them as well, right.
In edit and Internal review
In edit belongs to one named editor per card, and it's the column the WIP limit protects. Internal review is where my lead or the producer watches the cut before any client does, because the cheapest note is always the one your own team catches, and that is how a typo in a lower third never leaves the building.
With client and Changes
With client means a review link has gone out and we are waiting on the client's eyes. Changes means notes came back and an editor is working through them, and I keep it apart from In edit so I can see how much of the week goes into revision rounds versus new work. Trust me on any level, that ratio tells you more about your pricing than any spreadsheet will.
Approved and Delivered
These stay as two columns rather than one Done, because approved means the client said yes to a specific version, while delivered means the correct files in the correct specs landed where they had to go. Anyone who has exported a master in the wrong aspect ratio after sign-off knows those can be very different days, right. My team runs a final pass before anything crosses into Delivered, a lot like the checklist before uploading we use for YouTube clients, and I've written up post production team roles if you're deciding who owns each column.
Setting WIP limits so editors stop juggling five cuts
Before we had limits, a producer who wanted something moved would just add a card to an editor's pile, so a good editor would end up with five cuts in In edit, each maybe 60 percent done and every one of them late. The fix was a boring rule, two cards per editor across In edit and Changes combined, and I count Changes against the same limit because revision work is edit work, right, it uses the same hands and the same afternoon.
Two cuts per editor across In edit and Changes combined, and when a third job arrives it waits in Assembly until one of the two moves on.
For instance, with six editors that's twelve cards maximum across the two editing columns, and a thirteenth job waits in Brief or Assembly where everyone can see it. That visible queue is the part of kanban for video editing I value most, because a queue that keeps growing is the board telling you to hire or push a date, which is a much better Monday conversation than a Thursday surprise. Internal review gets a limit of four for my lead, and With client gets no limit at all, since you can't control a client's inbox, but it does get an age rule, so any card sitting there past 48 hours gets a nudge.
What a card should hold, and what it should not
One card is one deliverable, and this is the rule people push back on the most. A launch with a 60-second hero film and six cutdowns can't live on one card, because the hero will be in Changes while two cutdowns are already approved, so the hero gets its own card and the cutdowns share one only while they move together, splitting the moment one of them gets different notes.
- One deliverable per card, named exactly like the file
- One owner, a named person rather than a department
- The date of the next handoff, not only the final deadline
- A link to the client brief or Playbook
- A link to the review card, with no pasted notes
What never goes on the card is the feedback itself, the files or copies of old versions, and I'm pretty sure that's where most teams go wrong, right. The moment someone pastes client notes into a card description you have two sources of truth, and within one round they disagree. I've gone into this in tracking cut approval status, but at the end of the day the card is a pointer, and a pointer is only as good as the place it points to.
Turning it into a reusable template
If you want this as a video production kanban template, it's an afternoon of setup in Trello, ClickUp, Asana or Notion. Make the eight columns in order, and if your tool has no WIP limit setting, write the number into the column name, so it reads In edit (max 12) for a team of six. Then add three fields to every card, the owner, the next handoff date and the review link, and save one filled dummy card as your template, so every new job starts with the same shape.
The review column is where every board goes stale
Your video editing workflow board says With client, right, but the actual review is happening in an email thread, a WhatsApp group or a comment on a Drive file, and the board can't see any of it. So the producer has no idea whether the client even watched it, and meanwhile the account lead may be the only person who heard the client say yes to MV2 in a voice note.
The catch here is versions, because when notes come back an editor will often make a new card for v2 so they can drag it into Changes without losing the old one. Suddenly one video is three cards in three columns, and the board says you have more work than you really do. Most kanban templates I've looked at stop at the column names and assume the review happens inside the card, which for a video it never does, since you can't leave a note on frame 1,412 of a card description.
The card says With client while notes land in email, WhatsApp and a Drive comment only one editor saw
One link holds MV1 to MV4, every timecoded note, and a status that matches the column
So the fix is pointing the review column at one place that holds the versions, the notes and the current status, and then the board card only has to answer who and by when. That's the thinking behind our multi-project review setup and the video production workflow we recommend, where review is a lane of its own.
Mirroring review stages with custom statuses in PlayPause
There's no kanban view in PlayPause and no automatic sync with your board, so the board stays in Trello, Asana, ClickUp or Notion for the planning side of creative project management, and PlayPause is the review lane each card links to. What makes that work is custom statuses, which are on every plan. I name them exactly like my review columns, Internal review, With client, Changes and Approved, so the video and the board use the same words.
Version stacks do the second half of the job. When an editor finishes a round of changes they upload MV2 onto the same card instead of making a new one, so MV1 through MV4 live in one stack and one board card maps to one PlayPause card for the whole life of the video. The notes live there too, as frame-accurate timestamped comments with threaded replies and @mentions, and the client leaves them from a browser link without an account, drawing on the frame when words won't do it, right.
What keeps the board fresh is that somebody sees movement without asking. Our Slack integration posts every comment to a channel, so whoever owns the board watches it and drags cards as notes arrive. The who-watched analytics show who opened a link, when and from which city, so before I chase a With client card at 48 hours I already know whether the client has opened it. And when a producer is out on a shoot, the mobile app lets them change a status from their phone, so an afternoon sign-off doesn't sit in With client until morning, you see what I mean here.
Slack, version stacks and who-watched analytics start on Creator, while side-by-side compare, which I lean on in Internal review to check MV3 against MV4, and Playbooks start on Agency. For a team of 3 to 15 editors the member count usually decides it, and clients never count as members because they comment straight from the link.
Common kanban mistakes in video teams
Most boards I've seen fail in the same handful of ways, and I've made every one of these myself. One card per project and one card per version already came up, so beyond those, the biggest is adding a column for every craft because a template had them, when the test is really simple, a column earns its place only if a different person owns the work in it.
Then there's moving a card to Approved on a verbal yes in a meeting, which I stopped allowing, because the one time you skip the review card is the time the client remembers the call differently, right. Updating the board only at the Monday standup is another, since by Wednesday it's a historical document. If you build in Notion, I've written about the Notion video production template, ClickUp teams can read the piece on ClickUp integrations for video, and past ten or so videos in flight, the way content ops teams track status is worth a read too.
Frequently asked questions
What columns should a kanban board for video production have?
I run eight, Brief, Assembly, In edit, Internal review, With client, Changes, Approved and Delivered, which is plenty for most teams of 3 to 15 editors. Add a column for colour or sound only if a different person owns that stage, right, otherwise it's just another place for a card to sit unnoticed. Keep Approved and Delivered separate too, since a sign-off and a correct master are different events.
Does PlayPause have a kanban board view?
No, and I'd rather be clear about it. PlayPause is the review lane your board links to, so you keep planning in the tool you already use, and each video in PlayPause carries a custom status named like your review columns, with every version and timecoded note stacked on that one card.
How many videos should one editor work on at once?
My rule is two cuts per editor across In edit and Changes combined, and I count revisions against the same limit because they use the same hours, right. Some editors on short-form social can handle a third, but I'd set the limit low and raise it only when cards are flowing, because a generous limit quietly turns back into five half-finished cuts and a late Friday for the whole team.
Can I use a video production kanban template in Notion or Trello?
I'd actually start with one, as long as you rename the columns to match your real stages and add a review link field on each card. The template handles planning well, but it can't hold frame-accurate notes or stacked versions, which is why I pair it with a review tool. If your team has a post supervisor, I've also covered post production supervisor responsibilities, including who should own the board.
If your review column has gone stale, set up custom statuses and version stacks in an afternoon and link your first card the same day. Every plan on our pricing page starts with a 7-day free trial, so run one real project through it before you decide anything.
So yeah. That's my way of saying it.
Saumyajit co-founded PlayPause after years watching review and approval quietly eat creative teams' deadlines. He writes about the workflow side of video, feedback, versioning, and getting to a clean sign-off.
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