Acumen TeamSimplifying Task Management with Kanban
In today’s fast-paced world, managing tasks and projects can quickly become overwhelming. That’s where Kanban comes in—a simple yet powerful visual project management tool designed to bring order to your workflow. Whether you’re working solo or as part of a team, Kanban helps you map out tasks in a way that makes progress easy to see, ensuring nothing is missed or overlooked.
The roots of Kanban date back to the late 1940s when it was first introduced by Toyota as a way to optimize production efficiency. Over time, this concept has evolved and been adapted across industries, from software development and marketing to education and personal productivity.
At its heart, Kanban is all about visualizing work. It uses cards to represent tasks, which are organized into columns based on their current status—such as “To Do,” “In Progress,” and “Done.” This simple structure enables you to see your entire workload at a glance, track what needs attention, and prioritize tasks based on progress or deadlines. The visual nature of Kanban makes it incredibly intuitive and flexible, allowing users to customize the board to fit their specific needs.
What sets Kanban apart from other project management tools is its inherent flexibility. Unlike more rigid systems, Kanban can be applied to workflows of all kinds, whether it’s a small personal project or a complex, multi-team operation.
How Kanban Works
Acumen’s Kanban board enhances the traditional Kanban method by offering advanced features, including AI-powered template generation. This optional feature allows you to instantly generate a customized board with predefined columns and tasks tailored to your project’s needs, saving time and effort. However, if you prefer, you can still manually set up your board by adding your own columns and tasks, giving you full control over the structure.
Once your board is set up, managing tasks is seamless. You can easily move tasks between columns like "To Do," "In Progress," and "Done" by dragging and dropping, ensuring your workflow stays organized and up-to-date.
Task Management Actions: Enhancing Your Workflow
Acumen’s Kanban board goes beyond simple task management by providing a range of features to ensure you can manage every detail of your workflow efficiently. You can attach files directly to a task, making it easy to keep relevant documents and resources in one place. Break down large tasks into smaller, more manageable subtasks to track progress step-by-step. Create labels to categorize and highlight priorities. Assign tasks to team members and set due dates to maintain accountability and keep your project on schedule. You can also add comments to tasks, ensuring that all relevant communication and feedback are captured in one place. All these options are seamlessly integrated to help you and your team stay organized and aligned.
Sort, Filter, and Group Options
Acumen’s Kanban board provides a dynamic way to view your tasks through sort,filter, and group options, making project management more intuitive. Easily sort tasks to organize them in the order that best suits your needs, helping you focus on what’s most relevant. If you need to drill down to specific details, apply filters to show only the tasks that matter, whether by due dates, labels, or assignees. For a more structured overview, group tasks by different categories to get a clear view of how work is distributed and progressing.
Behind the Scenes: Building Acumen’s Kanban Board
When we set out to build Acumen’s Kanban board, our goal was simple: create a user experience that’s smooth, responsive, and collaborative in real-time. To achieve this, we had to look beyond basic implementations and dig into custom solutions that would allow the board to function efficiently, especially under high user loads and collaborative environments. Here’s how we did it:
Handling File Uploads with Edgestore
File uploads are a key feature for many of our users, who often need to attach documents, images, or other assets to their Kanban tasks. Initially, we chose UploadThing as our file handling service. However, when we deployed it to production, we encountered unexpected issues that weren’t present during development. These issues made debugging extremely difficult, slowing down our workflow and affecting the overall user experience.
After troubleshooting and considering our options, we decided to switch to Edgestore. This change allowed us to resolve the production issues we were facing and gave us a more reliable, streamlined solution for handling file uploads. Since making the switch, we’ve seen improved stability and consistency, ensuring that users can upload and manage their files smoothly in both development and production environments.
Custom Notification Email Queue
To ensure users stay updated on important task changes and deadlines, we built a custom notification system that powers our email queue for push notifications. Whenever there’s a key action—like a task being assigned, moved, or marked complete—our system schedules an email notification to be sent at the right time. The queue is designed to handle various triggers while balancing performance, ensuring notifications are sent promptly without overwhelming the server. By building this system in-house, we gained full control over how notifications are scheduled, batched, and delivered, allowing us to maintain reliability and flexibility as the platform grows.
The diagram below provides an overview of our push notification system, highlighting how each component—such as the client app, API server, notification queue, and WebSocket server—interacts to process and deliver notifications efficiently in real-time.
Real-Time Collaboration with Custom WebSockets
At the heart of our real-time collaboration is a custom WebSocket server we built using FastAPI. We wanted to ensure that when a user moves a task or makes any updates on the Kanban board, everyone else in the team sees the changes instantly. Off-the-shelf solutions often fall short when it comes to scalability or fine-tuning behavior, so building our own WebSocket server allowed us to tightly control message flows, handle multiple concurrent connections, and fine-tune performance to meet our needs.
Creating Acumen’s Kanban board was all about refining the user experience and tackling challenges head-on to build a tool that truly supports productivity. We’re excited to see how it helps streamline your workflow.
— The Acumen Team