The origin story — from LeanKit at Chef to Visiban
In 2014 I was the pod leader for the strategic east (US) accounts at Chef Software. The company had a LeanKit license for engineering and I decided to reuse the company wide license to employ agile techniques to selling.
The setup was straightforward: one swimlane per customer, columns for the backlog, to do, doing & done. Every morning the pod spent five minutes in the application. The goal wasn’t a status meeting — it was a pull signal. Which cards were stuck? Who needed help moving something forward? Had we dropped a commitment to a customer?
It worked. We closed the quota for the year in seven months.
The thing that made it work
Looking back, the key wasn’t the columns or the swimlanes. It was the analytics and audit trail.
When a card sat in the same column for two weeks, you could see that. When it moved, you knew who moved it and when. When a deal stalled, the history told you where it stalled and why. There was no ambiguity and no he-said-she-said. The board was the record.
Five-minute standups are only useful if everyone is looking at accurate, current information. The audit trail made that possible.
The decade-long search
After Chef I spent the better part of ten years trying to recreate that experience at other companies. None of the tools I tried quite got there.
Trello was the natural first stop. Simple, visual, fast. But no swimlanes in the sense I needed — I wanted rows that represented customers or projects, not just labels. And no audit trail. Cards just existed in columns with no history of how they got there.
Asana was probably the closest. Flexible enough to model the swimlane structure I wanted, and it had decent activity tracking. The blocker was per-seat pricing. Once you want your whole team to see the board — not just the people doing the work, but the stakeholders observing it — the cost model stops making sense.
Monday.com hit the same wall. The product was fine. The pricing penalized breadth of adoption, which is exactly the wrong incentive when you want a board that the whole organization can see.
Smartsheet felt like a spreadsheet that had decided to be a board. The setup was painful and the UI never got out of the way. Still no meaningful audit trail. Further, the product felt clunky; like something Microsoft would have put out in the 1990s.
Jira is an engineering tool that occasionally gets used for other things. I’ve never seen it successfully adopted org-wide. The UI assumes you’re comfortable with backlogs and sprint planning and epics and subtasks. For a sales or operations team, that’s a lot of ceremony for what should be a simple drag.
GitLab Issues with a board view was actually effective once you got past the Markdown entry point. The MR integration was genuinely useful. But the workflow was too rigid and the swimlane model wasn’t there.
The gap that never closed across any of these: there was no tool that could answer “where has this card been, who moved it, and why did it stall?”
Deciding to build it
At some point I stopped looking and started specifying. What would the right tool actually do?
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Swimlane rows for customers or projects
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Column stages for the pipeline
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A complete, searchable movement history on every card
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Real-time sync so everyone is looking at the same thing
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Self-hosted so your customer data stays on your infrastructure
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No per-seat licensing — if someone needs to see the board, they can see the board
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An analytics view that answered the questions the daily standup raised: where are things stalling, which cards haven’t moved in too long, where is the work actually piling up
That became Visiban.
Building it
I built Visiban as a solo project using Claude Code — Anthropic’s CLI for agentic software engineering. I’ll write a separate post about that experience in more depth, but the short version is: the stack I had in mind (Django + React, WebSockets for real-time, PostgreSQL for the audit trail) came together faster than I expected, with production-quality code from the start.
The project took about six weeks from first commit to v1.0.0. It’s fully open-source under the Apache 2.0 license. You can self-host it with Docker Compose in under ten minutes.
If you ran a LeanKit board in a previous life, or if you’ve spent years wishing Trello had an audit trail — Visiban might be exactly what you’ve been looking for too.