I’m delighted to welcome Yuri Kudyn, Yuri Lapin, and Filip Tomaszewski to today’s conversation. These are the brilliant minds behind Release Management‘s Advanced Kanban Boards (AKB), a tool that fundamentally changes how teams work with Jira.
What makes their work particularly valuable is how it solves a problem nearly every Kanban practitioner faces: Jira is non-negotiable, but it lacks the features true Kanban implementation requires. The combination of AKB and Nave’s Kanban Analytics Suite creates what I consider the complete Kanban solution for Jira, enabling the policies and practices teams need without forcing them to abandon their existing toolchain.
I’m excited to explore how AKB helps teams visualize end-to-end flow, apply work-in-progress limits effectively, and maintain the human-centered focus that makes Kanban powerful.
Seeing the Complete Picture
“In Kanban, it’s very important to see everything from idea to completion,” Yuri Kudyn explained. “Only then can we see how value is created, identify bottlenecks, and build a truly efficient flow.”
The problem? Most teams cut their flow into pieces. Product management gets one board. Engineering gets another. Marketing gets a third. Each board looks manageable, but the full picture disappears.
Yuri Lapin shared a telling example: “We had a client with separate boards for each function. Everything looked fine inside each board, but backlogs kept growing and time in the backlog kept increasing. They never saw it because they didn’t have one single view of value creation.”
Creating one massive Jira board sounds like the solution, but anyone who has tried knows it becomes unusable. Columns stretch endlessly across the screen.
AKB solves this problem. Teams can zoom in and out, collapse or expand any column, and save custom views for different roles. DevOps engineers see only deployment columns. Testers see testing stages. Product managers see requirements preparation. Everyone works on the same board but focuses on what matters to them.
“We can pre-define views and save a lot of time,” Yuri explained. “No more clicking around constantly.”
Column groups take this further. Teams can group columns by function (like all engineering steps) and apply policies to the entire group, not just individual columns. The board stays readable while showing the complete flow from idea to production.
WIP Limits That Support Your Maturity Level
Here is where AKB truly delivers on the Kanban promise. In my opinion, a Kanban board cannot be called a Kanban board if there are no WIP limits on it.
AKB provides WIP limits at multiple levels, which perfectly supports teams at different stages of their journey.
For teams just starting with flow management, personal WIP limits help individuals avoid overload. “We can assign a work in progress limit to each team member,” Yuri noted, “so we can spot who is overloaded and who is not.”
As teams mature, column-level limits keep work moving. But the real power comes with column groups, especially when combined with doing and done separation.
“We can apply work in progress limits not only to certain work like architecture review or code review, but to the whole engineering function,” Yuri explained. “And we can see how our people are busy.”
This matters because done columns are parking lots. Work sits there waiting. Without limits on these queues, they become black holes. AKB lets teams mark columns as active or waiting, then automatically calculates efficiency scores based on where work actually spends its time.
Swimlanes add another dimension. Teams can allocate capacity by work type, dedicating 70% to strategic initiatives and 30% to maintenance, for example. Each swimlane gets its own WIP limit, ensuring the team stays aligned with business strategy while managing day-to-day work.
Keeping Work Moving and Visible
Blockers kill flow. AKB makes them impossible to ignore.
Beyond Jira’s basic flagging capability, AKB lets teams specify impediment reasons using custom fields. Hovering over the flag shows the reason immediately, no clicking required. Over time, teams can analyze which blockers happen most often and eliminate root causes.
Dependencies get the same treatment. Visual links on the board show connections between work items, with different colors for different link types. Critical blockers appear in red. A special window tracks dependencies outside the team, separating internal and external coordination needs.
But here is what really impressed me: health indicators.
Teams set thresholds for acceptable time in each column. Instead of mentally tracking dozens of variables, a simple color-coded indicator shows green (all good), yellow (warning), or red (problem).
“We see that the aging limit for the whole flow is exceeded,” Yuri demonstrated. “Also on column groups, we’re developing more than expected. We have more returns than expected. Efficiency is low. Such indicators show items where we need to pay attention.”
Returns between columns are particularly insidious. Work might not violate WIP limits or stay too long in any one column, but ping-ponging back and forth destroys efficiency. AKB tracks how many times each item returns and flags excessive movement.
Finally, AKB makes process policies accessible where teams actually work. Instead of burying definitions of done in Confluence pages no one reads, teams add them directly to columns, column groups, or the entire board. Hover over any column to see its exit criteria and agreements.
“Information should be easily accessible,” Yuri emphasized. “We believe in information radiators, not information refrigerators. You don’t need to open it and look inside.”
If you’d like to explore Advanced Kanban Boards, you can find it in the Atlassian Marketplace.
For deeper discussions or to book a demo, visit their website and use the “Book a Demo” option. Mention “NAVE” in the description to access the special offer and get tailored guidance on your specific use case. The team will discuss how to solve your problems based on their experience with other clients and their Agile and Kanban consulting background.
AKB makes Jira work the way teams need it to work. Combined with Nave’s analytics, teams finally get the complete picture: how work flows, where it gets stuck, and what to do about it.
I wish you a productive day, and I’ll see you next week, same time and place, for more managerial insights. Bye for now!
