ABOUT

Hi, I'm Pablo.

I've spent my career building tools for software teams. I founded Plastic SCM, a version control system used by game studios and engineering teams around the world, and grew it until it was acquired by Unity. Since then I've helped Activision with version control, and I advise Inspiration-Q and Diversion. I live in Valladolid, Spain. Now I'm building kanbanwall. You can find the rest of my story on LinkedIn.

Why kanbanwall

This isn't new to me. At Plastic SCM we ran Scrum for 13 years and more than 300 sprints before moving to kanban. With strict WIP limits and one simple rule (green if a task is under 5 days old, red otherwise), we cut our average cycle time in half, from 7.52 to 3.66 days. I wrote about how we delivered tasks twice as fast and recorded how we did kanban:

Our board lived on Miro, a generic whiteboard: a drawing of a board. It had no WIP limits and no stats, its counters never updated themselves, and it knew nothing about Jira or any other issue tracker, so everything it showed was kept up by hand. Kanban is about flow: how long work takes from start to done, and a board that has to be told what happened is always a little behind.

So on kanbanwall every card counts its own days and crumples a little more each day it stays open, each group of steps holds its WIP limit, and the stats come straight from the board. You can see a stuck task from across the room without opening a chart.

It stays in step with Jira, Linear and GitHub both ways, your pipeline moves a card when its pull request merges or deploys, and your AI agents read and move cards through MCP and the API, because that is how teams work now.

And because teams are people, the board has faces on it: glasses, hats, a bit of personality. I believe beautiful software is inspiring and a joy to use. It boosts creativity, and it makes you a little happier, more productive and more focused, where grey, boring software does nothing for your mood. I hope kanbanwall gets there, and makes every interaction as pleasant as it can be. The serious part is all there, the counter, the limits, the stats, but none of it sticks unless you find some fun in putting a hat or a moustache on somebody's photo.

kanbanwall is the board I wish we'd had back then.

What I promise

• Your data is yours. Every card and its whole history can be read through the API at any time, and if you ask, we'll send you all of it.
• Viewers and AI agents are always free.

If you want to talk about kanban, flow, or the product, write to me at subscriptions@kanbanwall.ai, or find me on LinkedIn and on X at @psluaces.

— Pablo Santos