hey everybody it's Jason freed from 37 signals and today I'm going to walk you through the card table card table is a brand new feature we just shipped in Basecamp for about a week or so ago and it's our take on kanban now if you're familiar with kanban you'll recognize some of this if you're not this will be all new but if you are familiar you're going to see some new things because kanban as it is is fine but we have some new Innovations we've layered on top of it to make it considerably better and more practical in a number of different ways so I'll walk you through that let's just get into it so first things first um con or card table is now added to every base camp account if you're using Basecamp 4 which used to be called Basecamp 3. so if you have three you have four now and to um turn it on you just go into a project here's a project I picked you go up here you go to change tools and from here you scroll down to the tools you aren't using section and you'll see card table so I'm just going to turn card table on for this particular project you can rename it as well if you want to and go back here now here we have card tables just been added to this project so I'm gonna go in here and I'm going to add a few sample cards in a second and then sort of walk you through some fake scenarios but just to give you a sense of how it works and then we'll look at some actual card tables and actual projects we have set up in our actual account to show you some real use cases so first structurally now if you're used to kanban you're probably used to seeing columns and we have some columns down here and we it defaults to figuring it out and in progress two columns you can add more columns by clicking the plus icon here we also have a column called done which is a default column which is not quite a column but it's a more like a bucket we'll talk about that in a minute but the big change you're going to see initially especially if you're used to kanban is that there's actually a row at the top so we've got columns which is what kanban typically is but we have a row at the top which we call Triage when you add a card to the card table it defaults to the triage section why is this here well in a lot of kanban setups you'd start by adding something to a column and then you'd move a card through account through the columns as you know a workflow or a process the thing is is that the way we see it is that the columns should be the actual workflow and before you decide if you want to do something or not it shouldn't live in the workflow there's a prior stage of the workflow which is consideration do we even want to bring this into the workflow or not bring this into the process or not and that's why we have a section at the top called triage so let me just add some quick cards here I'm just going to name them one two three four five just so we have something to play with here again we'll go through an actual account and uh show you what that actually looks like but you're going to add Foods five cards all right so we've got one two three four five these cards start in triage now if you go into a card you'll see who added it and you can assign it to people so like in this case let's say I'll just sign it to Jason zoomdars I can pick a due date and I can add additional details screenshots pictures text links whatever you want whatever is important I'll hit save and if you go back here now you'll see that this is the triage column and these are the items I just added if you go back to the card table you'll see them show up right here now to bring something into a flow into the workflow you just drag it down into one of the columns and now it's in the column I'll drag a few more in here just to kind of show you how that works right there we go and as you move across you just simply can drag things across and they move across columns right very typical kanban except that everything initially starts out in triage now let me just add another card here um let me talk about some of the other Innovations here besides triage now there's also this idea that when you're considering whether or not you want to bring something down into a workflow sometimes you go yes and that's when you drag something down other times you're like ah not now this is actually the way you think about it like not now or maybe never but not now and so we have a special spot over here in triage called not now so if you if you're looking at something and you're like uh we're probably not gonna do this right now I just moved to not now you'll see by the way you can drag things across or you can just select something from menu so now it's a not now okay and now it's out of the triage section and it's now you'll see one not now if I click on this there it is not now so this is a place to put stuff without losing it that you don't really want to do right now you want to take out of consideration you can always bring it back if you want but it doesn't have to live into live in a column down below and it doesn't have to go away completely you can of course archive stuff if you do want to get out of the way but not now is a really nice thing you can do from triage now let's walk through a couple little other details here so every card has this little a silhouette of a person and a little plus so if you see something in triage and you're like oh I'll take that I'll do that you just hit that and it puts your avatar on it and auto assigns it to you from within a card you can always click on that you'll see it's assigned to me and you can assign it to other people as well but um at the sort of card table macro view you can just click this little thing and give yourself that assignment so it's a really nice fast way to do that you can also decide that you might want to watch the triage section in case someone adds something to triage and you want to be alerted if that's the case you just go over to here and say watch this column your face will show up here now it says watching any number of people can watch triage or watch any individual column as well and whenever something new is added to that column removed into that column you're going to get a notification so it's a really nice way to stay on top of things without having to keep you know coming back and looking all right down here we've got the two columns you can change the color of columns if you'd like that's a really easy thing to do you can add another column so we'll call this like almost done right add a column and now we've got the almost done column you can of course reorder columns as well if you want to do that I'll put this again at the end and you can of course move things through the process here now let me talk about a few of the other things that are new here so typically in kanban uh well something back even forget kanban for a second I'll get into that in a second but people are doing work and sometimes you're blocked on something or something has to pause or you have to put something on hold for a number of different reasons maybe you have to look something up maybe you got to involve someone else maybe a Project's been put on hold maybe someone's going to be out of town there may be a million maybes right now with traditional kanban what people would do is they'd make another column called blocked and they'd move that item to a blocked column in our opinion block is not part of the workflow it's a state it's a status it's not uh something that deserves its own column because then when you move things to that column you sort of take them out of context now you're mixing a bunch of things from a bunch of different places into a blocked column so we came up with this idea called on hold so in any column you can say enable on hold and now there's a little section at the bottom of a column called on hold in this case there's nothing on hold if I drag this card down into on hold it moves down to on hold it's a little bit dimmer and it stays down at the bottom of the column so if you have a bunch of stuff in a particular column you know anything that's on hold will stay at the bottom it means whatever you want it to mean you can of course add a comment to it you can explain what it means when it's on hold but mentally you know that this is still in this phase or in this stage but we're not actively pursuing it for some reason and I don't have to take it out of the column and lose the context I just move it to the bottom and call it on hold so you can turn that on or off for any column which is really nice also each column itself has a what we call a Perma which is a dedicated page which you can send this link to this page to anyone else and all those cards are now represented on this Perma you can also add a comment um about the column itself not about individual cards but about the column itself which is something you can do on these permas you can also of course watch this column if you want so if anything happens in the figuring it out column you're going to get a notification um and you can of course trash things and archive things as well it's really a handy way to uh to get rid of stuff you don't want or put things on hold that are you're going to get back to later or things are going to you know kind of happen again once some blocker has been removed so structurally you've got triage cards are added to triage at the top you've got columns you've got on hold you've got not now and you've got done so not now done in triage and on hold are particularly new ideas that are unique to our implementation of kanban which of course we call card table now you can also rename the card table you can rename the columns you can do that here you can disable on hold you can change the colors you can stop watching and all those things but structurally that's how it works now when you go back to the project you're going to see a representation so in this case I've got figuring it out in progress almost done done if you go back here you're going to see the same columns in the same order you're going to see Little Numbers I'm showing you how many items are in each column and the colors are also going to be represented so from far away you get a visual representation of what you're about to dive into which is true in base camp in general this is a collection of documents and files with folders and you see all those miniature versions of that campfire chat message board you're always seeing a miniature version of what you're going to see when you go inside it's more like a window into the specific world that you're about to go into now this is not a particularly great example because I Just Whipped it up really fast so let's look at some real examples of how we're using card table at 37 signals so I'm going to go into the Basecamp web project which is where um well people who work on the web version of Basecamp hangout do work that sort of thing and you'll see here we have two card tables one's called Bugs one's called quick wins and let's walk into Quick wins first so quick wins quick wins is a collection of small things small improvements we can do that people can pick off if they have some extra time right so we work on the six week cycle uh time frame and sometimes projects End early we also have a two-week cooldown in between cycles and sometimes people have some extra time they want to pick something off or they're waiting on something they've got an hour what are some of the quick wins we can grab so this is where we're keeping these so we have suggestions that pop in here and anyone can have these suggestions um things that we're actually considering or still need a little bit of shaping so a little bit more definition are moved down into here and then we can move them through the process as we go and then of course we keep track of what's done over here you'll see in this case there are five people watching this board or this this card table so anytime a suggestion is added um these five people will find out let's just click on a card to show you what something looks out looks like when it's a bit more fleshed out so here's who added it here's where it is um here's some details so this came from a customer request and help Scout this will link to the actual ticket in help Scout and then down below we've got some comments back and forth some pictures that we're sharing and people are discussing that sort of thing down below so let's go back here again um here's another example of uh of that right discussion on a card that sort of thing so let's go back one more level here to the bugs card table people have often asked us how do you guys manage bugs using Basecamp well here's one way we're doing it which is we have a card table set up called bugs and we keep track of those here so anytime there's a new bug that's reported it can be added to the triage people can then move it down into what's called steps to reproduce um and once that's reproduced we can move into contenders then move it into what's either called designer top five or programmer top five I know there's actually six this is the number in the top five we live in an imperfect world that happens sometimes um but we sort of Shuffle these into the top fives so if anyone again wants to pick off some bugs pick from one of the top fives if you're a designer these are things the designers can handle on their own these are things that programmers can handle on their own that sort of thing as well this is also a good use case for on hold so let's look at that let's look at this one here so comments disappeared from an instance of a recurring event that was rescheduled so here's all the details that are required to help explain what this is in Haas put this in so she put this in she put all the links in place here and then there's some back and forth very little back and forth but it looks like maybe this patch fixed it so can you ask the customer to check and so we're kind of waiting on them to sort of get back to us which is why it was moved to on hold right it's not fixed necessarily it's not done but it has to sit here until we get some more information and so again rather than moving it out into another column called blocked or waiting on or something it stays where it was but it just goes down to the bottom in the on hold section you'll see in this case uh pratik has been assigned to this one um and if you hover over someone's name you'll see their name so a noob's been assigned to that one and again we have nine that were completed we've been tracking bugs much longer than this so we have literally you know hundreds or thousands of bugs that we fixed over the last 18 years in base camp but we recently started doing them in in the card table that's why you only see nine done of course we've fixed quite a few more than that but recently we've been using card table for this and we've got nine done um so that's a great way of looking at bugs they come in a triage if there's something we want to deal with we move them down and then move them through and then sort them in the proper column and then move them all the way through the done process one other project I'll show you is product strategy which has a few more card tables in it and this is where we keep track of some new ideas we might want to work on for base camp we move those through the process of shaping but first they get dumped here we consider them if we like them enough we'll bring them down and move them through the process and the same thing is true for hay hey ideas come up top we move them down bring them across the process and keep track of what's been done and also what we decided like we're not going to do that right now right um and there's some stuff in there which we can always change our mind on at some point so that is the card table it's a really wonderful simple Implement implementation of kanban um with a few extra details that are especially useful and practical that we think really kind of take this to the next level if you have any questions about it just hit me up in the comments down below and happy to get back to you and also if you want me to do another video on a specific piece of it just let me know and I'd be happy to do that as well thanks again for watching