Kanban Metrics

Kanban metrics help you see how work really flows so you can make better decisions about capacity, priorities, and improvement, instead of managing by gut feel or hope. Used well, they also support healthier, more humane systems by reducing uncertainty and stress rather than increasing pressure.​

What are Kanban metrics?

Kanban metrics are simple measures that describe how work moves through your system over time. The most common are:​

• Work‑in‑progress (WIP) – how many items are currently in play.
• Cycle time – how long it takes to complete an item once you start it.
• Lead time – how long it takes from request to completion.
• Throughput – how many items you finish per unit of time (for example, per week).​

Together, these metrics help you answer questions such as “How long does work really take?”, “How much can we safely commit to?”, and “Where does work slow down?”.​

Work‑in‑progress (WIP)

What it is

WIP is the number of work items that are started but not yet finished, across or within specific stages of your board.​

Why it matters

Too much WIP leads to multitasking, context‑switching, and long waits for everything; lowering WIP usually reduces stress and shortens cycle times.​

How to use it

• Track how many items sit in key columns (for example, In Progress, In Review).
• Compare actual WIP to your explicit WIP limits.
• Use moments when WIP spikes as signals to reflect: what pulled you into overload, and what could you change next time?​

Cycle time

What it is

Cycle time is how long it takes to complete a work item from the moment it enters an “in progress” state to the moment it reaches “done.”​

Why it matters

Knowing your typical cycle time helps you make more realistic promises and spot when an item is taking unusually long, which may signal a blockage or hidden complexity.​

How to use it

• Measure cycle time for each completed item over a period (for example, several weeks).
• Look at the distribution—not just the average—to understand typical and worst‑case durations.
• Use this to set expectations (“Most work like this finishes in about X days”) and to investigate outliers.​

Lead time

What it is

Lead time is how long it takes from the moment someone requests something (or it enters your Options/Requested column) until it is finished.​

Why it matters

Lead time reflects the full customer or stakeholder experience, including waiting before work starts; it is often what people care about most.​

How to use it

• Measure from request to done, including time waiting in queues such as Options or Backlog.
• Compare lead time across different types of work or request sources.
• Use long lead times as prompts to examine how work is selected and how much is sitting in queues.​

Throughput

What it is

Throughput is how many work items your system completes in a given time period, such as per week or per month.​

Why it matters

Throughput helps you understand your actual delivery capacity and make more grounded decisions about how much to take on.​

How to use it

• Count completed items over regular intervals (for example, by week).
• Look for trends and variability—are there long stretches of very low or very high throughput?
• Use throughput together with WIP and cycle time to understand how changes in your system affect delivery.​

Work item age

What it is

Work item age is how long a work item has been in progress right now—time since it entered an “in progress” state.​

Why it matters

Work item age gives you an early warning for stuck work, so you can intervene before items become extreme outliers in cycle time.​

How to use it

• Regularly look at the oldest items in progress and ask what they need to move, be split, or be de‑scoped.
• Combine age with WIP and blockers to prioritize unblocking and finishing over starting new work.​

How these metrics fit together

In a reasonably stable system, WIP, cycle time, and throughput are linked: changing one affects the others.​

• Reducing WIP often lowers cycle time and makes throughput more predictable.
• Increasing WIP without adding capacity usually lengthens cycle time and makes throughput more erratic.
• Lead time reflects both how much sits in queues and how quickly in‑progress work flows.
• Blockers and work item age highlight where the system’s constraints and frictions really are.​

Instead of chasing a single “magic metric,” Kanban encourages you to look at the relationships between them and use that to guide experiments.

Subjective well‑being: the human metric

In humane systems, the state of the people doing the work is as important as the state of the work itself. Subjective well‑being—how people feel about their workload, agency, and environment—is a critical signal for whether your Kanban system is sustainable.

You can treat well‑being as a regular, lightweight check alongside flow metrics by asking questions such as:

• How manageable does your workload feel right now?
• How often do you feel forced into unsustainable heroics or firefighting?
• How much influence do you feel you have over what you work on next?

Simple practices—like periodic check‑ins, brief surveys, or rating the week on a 1–5 “stress / clarity” scale—help teams see how changes in WIP, policies, and demand affect the human experience of work. Used together with WIP, lead time, cycle time, throughput, blockers, and work item age, subjective well‑being helps you design systems that support both reliable delivery and healthier lives.​

Using metrics to support, not pressure, people

Metrics can either improve subjective well‑being—or harm it—depending on how they are used.

Used poorly, metrics become tools for surveillance and pressure, increasing anxiety and encouraging gaming. Used well, they:​

• Reduce uncertainty by giving teams and stakeholders a realistic sense of how long things take.
• Support kinder conversations about capacity, trade‑offs, and what can be safely delayed.
• Help people see that problems often live in the system, not in individual effort.​

Linking metrics to humane practices—like Personal Kanban’s focus on visible choices and WIP limits—supports systems where people can do good work without burning out.​

Simple ways to visualize Kanban metrics

You do not need complex dashboards to start using metrics.

• Scatterplots of cycle time – each completed item as a point, showing how long it took; helpful for seeing variation and outliers.​
• Cumulative flow diagrams (CFDs) – stacked areas showing how many items are in each state over time; useful for spotting bottlenecks, growing queues, and changes in flow.​
• Basic charts of throughput and WIP over time – simple counts that highlight trends and instability.

Tools such as Kanban‑oriented platforms can generate these automatically as you move cards, but you can also start by tracking a few numbers manually.​

Getting started with metrics (without overwhelming yourself)

If your team is new to Kanban metrics, start small:

• Pick one or two metrics (often WIP and cycle time) to focus on first.
• Collect enough data to see patterns (several weeks, not just a few days).
• Use metrics as prompts for conversation: “What is this telling us about our system?” rather than “Who is at fault?”.​
• Add subjective well‑being checks so you can see how changes in the system feel to the people doing the work.​

As your practice matures, you can add more metrics or refine how you collect and visualize them.