Role:
- Principal Product Designer
- Project Manager

Skills:
- Program Management
- Project Management
- Agile Framework
- Kanban Workflow
- Sprint Coordination

Tools:
- (final) Notion
- (initial) Clubhouse
- (alt) Basecamp
- (alt) Jira
- (alt) Trello
- Google Docs

Customer(s):
- Nstream (internal)

Agile Framework:
- Milestones
- Epics
- Stories
- Backlog
- To Dos
- Blocked
- Review
- Done

Developing a Company-wide Agile + Kanban Framework for a Silicon Valley Tech Startup

Establishing, developing and managing to a scalable Agile + Kanban program management workflow for an innovative tech Silicon Valley startup—aligning stakeholders, teams, tools, and timelines to accelerate delivery and drive innovation!

The Unmet Need: Scalable Vision to Velocity!

Recently, at a fast-paced Silicon Valley startup, I led the initiative to establish a company-wide Agile-Kanban program management workflow using Clubhouse (now Shortcut) and ultimately moving over to Notion. As the team scaled and projects grew in complexity, it became clear that we needed more than siloed task lists and ad hoc standups—we needed a unified operating rhythm. I implemented a structure that organized work into epics, milestones, and sprint-based stories, giving teams a shared language and a real-time view into progress, blockers, and priorities.

I set up and managed cross-functional Kanban boards that served as the central source of truth across design, engineering, product, and marketing. This system didn’t just streamline delivery; it created alignment. Teams could now forecast confidently, leadership gained clear visibility into resourcing and timelines, and we could pivot strategically without losing momentum. I also established Agile ceremonies—sprint planning, retros, and demos—to reinforce transparency, drive iteration, and build a stronger culture of ownership.

This foundation enabled us to move from reactive execution to proactive planning. As new teams onboarded and product lines evolved, the framework scaled with us. The system I built not only brought order to our rapid development cycles but also empowered the organization to move faster with far more clarity. Agile didn’t slow us down—it helped us accelerate with purpose.

the key steps for establishing a company-wide Agile Kanban workflow:

Audit existing workflows across all teams to identify gaps and align on goals.
Select and standardize a project management tool that supports Agile Kanban.
Define consistent workflow stages and customize swimlanes per team.
Create epics, milestones, and break work into actionable stories and tasks.
Set up cross-team boards to manage dependencies and shared deliverables.
Implement agile rituals like standups, reviews, and retrospectives.
Establish visibility and reporting dashboards for leadership and stakeholders.
Continuously refine the workflow based on team feedback and outcomes.

We began by establishing a clear Agile workflow definition, including epics, milestones, and story-level planning, customized to match our team's delivery cadence and cross-functional structure.

Establishing a Dynamic & Scalable Way of Working!

To transform scattered development efforts into a streamlined, goal-driven engine, I focused on establishing a scalable and transparent project management foundation that achieved the following:

Aligned development with monthly and client-driven milestones by establishing clear targets, timelines, and shared expectations across teams.
Built a continuous development pipeline that supported iteration, delivery, and real-time feedback without breaking flow.
Created consistent cadence and clarity in all dev efforts by introducing rituals like sprint planning, standups, and retrospectives tied to our kanban board.
Evaluated and implemented scalable project management tools such as Clubhouse (now Shortcut), Notion, and Jira to match the team’s evolving complexity and needs.

Structured Agile with Visual Kanban Workflow

Establishing a structured Agile Kanban workflow creates a clear and actionable roadmap for success by breaking down complex initiatives into manageable, trackable components. At the highest level, milestones act as strategic anchors—signaling key phases of development such as alpha, beta, and general release. Beneath each milestone, epics define broad feature areas or workstreams that align with product goals, allowing teams to focus their efforts within clear thematic boundaries.

User stories and tasks under each epic serve as the building blocks of daily execution, providing a granular view of progress and enabling continuous delivery. By organizing work this way, startups can map out long-term objectives while staying responsive to change. The visibility across teams—design, engineering, product, QA, and leadership—not only drives alignment, but also fosters ownership and accountability. A well-defined Agile Kanban system doesn’t just track work—it translates vision into velocity, turning ambitious roadmaps into steady, measurable momentum.

The ultimate goal was to accelerate our company's innovation and product vision to actual achievable velocity!

Obtaining ELT + Stakeholder Approval!

Once the baseline framework and flow was established next up was company leadership approval. This would be a formality as the executive leadership team (ELT) was involved from the very start!

We then agreed to and established a structured Agile framework across all teams, defining clear milestones, epics, stories, and tasks to break down complex product goals into manageable, actionable units. This allowed us to align on both the what and why of our roadmap. To complement that structure, I implemented a Kanban workflow to bring transparency to the how and where—helping the team visualize work in progress, surface blockers early, and maintain a smooth, focused delivery process.

I treated milestones as our north stars, epics as our shared missions, and stories as tactical steps toward those goals. I set up a living board that mirrored our development lifecycle—starting from backlog grooming, through prioritized to-do, in progress, review, blocked (as needed), and finally to done. This hybrid Agile + Kanban approach helped the team operate with clarity and confidence—combining long-term strategy with day-to-day velocity.

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Agile + Kanban ... The Team Says It's a Go!

Agile + Kanban Absolutely Changed the Way We Worked

A clear 7-bullet hierarchy of how we structured our Agile + Kanban workflow in Clubhouse (now Shortcut), and eventually Notion:

Milestones – High-level time-based goals (monthly or quarterly), each grouping multiple Epics
Epics – Strategic initiatives or features aligned with Milestones; collections of related Stories
Stories – Individual units of work or features, scoped to be completed within a sprint
Tasks – Sub-components of Stories, used to break down and assign granular work
Projects – Organizational groupings for teams, tech layers, or product areas
Labels – Cross-cutting tags used for sprint planning, themes, and product alignment
Workflow States – Kanban stages like Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Review, Blocked, and Done

Clubhouse was our program management tool of choice! The team was stoked and eager to work in a more efficient way company wide. See below for a graphic on how milestones, epics and stories relate in terms of hierarchy and how company functional departments and groups cross section in this framework.

Agile + Kanban Value:

- Clarity

- Alignment

- Velocity

- Visibility

- Adaptability
- Scalability

Where Agile Meets Working Teams

We began by establishing quarterly Milestones—high-level targets that aligned cross-functional teams around major business and product objectives. This approach allowed for bigger swings and innovation space early on, giving teams time to explore, experiment, and solve complex challenges. As our product velocity increased and our delivery cycles became more predictable, we transitioned to monthly Milestones to support faster iteration and tighter alignment with marketing, client delivery, and release planning.

From there, we created top-level Epics tied directly to each milestone. These epics represented key product or system goals—whether launching a new feature, supporting a major demo, or shipping critical backend improvements. Each epic was broken down into Stories (cards)—actionable tasks owned by individual contributors across engineering, design, and QA. As stories naturally expanded, we’d cluster 5+ related cards into new epics, ensuring clarity, momentum, and scoped delivery.

Value at the Cross Section of Framework & Teams!

Utilizing a Point Model to Enable Success!

At Nstream, we leveraged an Agile + Kanban hybrid workflow to bring clarity and velocity to our product innovation efforts. Within this system, Milestones represented our broader product or platform goals—typically defined monthly or quarterly—and were composed of multiple Epics. Each Epic outlined a distinct system-level initiative and was further broken down into actionable Stories (or cards). These Stories represented discrete features or development units and could be expanded or split into additional Stories as complexity increased. In cases where an Epic grew too large (usually 5+ stories), we would create new Epics to maintain clarity and delivery pace.

To drive progress, we operated on two-week Sprints, ensuring a consistent cadence of development and measurable outputs. Each Sprint consisted of a planned set of Stories from prioritized Epics, often filtered or labeled specifically for that Sprint cycle. We modeled Sprints using combinations of Labels, Epics, and Workflow states to keep our Kanban board lean but powerful. Our estimation process followed a Fibonacci scale (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8), providing teams with a relative measure of effort while still encouraging collaborative planning. A single developer could typically handle about 9 points per Sprint, giving us a reliable capacity benchmark to work from during planning.

It's a Fibonacci Scale For The Win!

While points are not literal hours, we used relative estimates to maintain alignment: 0 for <1 hour tasks, 1 for a few hours, 2 for a full day, 3 for a couple days, and 5 for about a week’s effort. An 8-point story was considered borderline too large and often signaled the need for breaking it down further. By aligning Milestones → Epics → Stories → Tasks, and tying those into a repeatable Sprint structure, we enabled teams to move with confidence—tracking progress in real-time while remaining flexible enough to shift priorities as needed. The combination of structure and agility was critical for sustaining innovation across engineering, product, and design functions.

A clear 7-bullet hierarchy of how we structured our Agile + Kanban workflow in Clubhouse (now Shortcut), and eventually Notion:

Milestones – High-level time-based goals (monthly or quarterly), each grouping multiple Epics
Epics – Strategic initiatives or features aligned with Milestones; collections of related Stories
Stories – Individual units of work or features, scoped to be completed within a sprint
Tasks – Sub-components of Stories, used to break down and assign granular work
Projects – Organizational groupings for teams, tech layers, or product areas
Labels – Cross-cutting tags used for sprint planning, themes, and product alignment
Workflow States – Kanban stages like Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Review, Blocked, and Done

Why Clubhouse (Shortcut) & Ultimately Notion?

A quick note on tool selection, and why we selected Clubhouse to start. We selected Clubhouse (now Shortcut) as our unified project management platform to support our Agile Kanban hybrid workflow. After evaluating options like Trello, Jira, and Basecamp, Clubhouse stood out as the ideal middle ground—combining the visual simplicity of Trello with the structure and reporting depth of Jira. Our goal was to implement a tool that could scale with our team, provide program-level clarity, and remain approachable for everyday use. Here's how we put it to work:

Gain insight into the full picture—program, project, and development levels
Clubhouse’s layered views gave us the ability to zoom in on daily sprint work or zoom out to monitor full-program roadmaps. This multi-tier visibility helped align leadership and execution teams without toggling between tools.
Set and prioritize milestones and epics with organizational clarity
Using Clubhouse's Milestones and Epics features, we established clear initiative ownership, prioritized key objectives, and aligned sprints with product and client deliverables—all while keeping goals transparent across the company.
Establish a continuous, visual development pipeline
Our Kanban-style workflow (Backlog → To-Do → In Progress → Review → Blocked → Done) enabled us to plan and track every step from concept to delivery, managing flow, surfacing blockers, and maintaining momentum across sprints.
Keep the process simple and focused
Clubhouse let us manage velocity without overcomplication—intuitive for new hires, yet powerful enough for complex coordination. By limiting backlog size and favoring small, shippable stories, we avoided scope creep and decision fatigue.
Maintain one system of record across the organization
From sprint boards to long-term planning, Clubhouse served as the single source of truth. Design, product, and engineering all worked from the same playbook—ensuring alignment, reducing redundancy, and improving collaboration.
Balance structure with agility—just enough process to stay fast
Clubhouse provided the sweet spot: more structured than Trello, but far less rigid than Jira. This allowed our teams to operate with autonomy while staying in sync, moving quickly without sacrificing strategic oversight.

Visual Workflow & Simplicity, with Reporting Depth!

Ultimately, we transitioned to Notion for its flexibility in combining documentation, tasks, and project planning in one unified workspace—allowing us to fully integrate our design thinking process with development workflows and cross-functional collaboration.

All screenshots are from Notion and are specific to managing across all software design and development efforts company wide. Specifically these screenshots are regarding frontend design and development workflow, sprint design, and kanban workflow management for clarity and reduced visual complexity.

Sprint Value:

- Iterative "Pipeline"
- Focus & Clarity

- Team Alignment

- Predictable Velocity

- Fast Iteration

- Prioritized Delivery

- Continuous Improvement

- Cross-Team Sync

The Way We Work: Starter Cards & Sprints

At Nstream, sprints weren’t just a process—they were how we aligned product velocity with platform innovation. In a fast-moving startup building real-time, streaming data experiences for Fortune 500 clients, our 2-week Agile + Kanban sprints provided the structure we needed to balance long-term innovation with short-term delivery. We used sprints to drive hiring, frontend design system development, and mission-critical workstreams tied to both our core platform and client-facing solutions.

During a key growth window, we launched a sprint cycle focused on hiring and onboarding a frontend developer, redesigning our marketing site, and developing a new component-based design system in parallel. Each epic was broken down into clear, actionable stories—ranging from “Interview pipeline setup” to “Global style tokens” to “Streamlined onboarding experience for enterprise demo.” These were tracked across sprints and visualized in Clubhouse to ensure cross-functional coordination across engineering, design, marketing, and leadership.

Scaling Team, Product, and Platform Innovation

Because Nstream was also an innovation engine—building streaming, real-time web agent frameworks—sprint planning included architectural stories and experimental R&D tasks. We regularly combined platform innovation epics with client delivery milestones, enabling the team to advance our core technology while meeting enterprise-grade customer needs. Stories were converted into task-level work and assigned with points using the Fibonacci scale, making it easy to track effort and velocity across the team.

Starter Cards: Accelerating Iteration

Establishing starter cards for sprints and stories is a critical practice that anchors the entire Agile + Kanban workflow in clarity and momentum. At Nstream, we used this technique to kick off sprints with clear intent, allowing cross-functional teams—from frontend developers to marketing and design—to move in sync from day one.

By pre-populating each sprint with starter cards tied to specific user stories or system goals, we ensured that every contributor had a clear entry point into the work. These starter cards often included:

Defined objectives or outcomes
Contextual links or assets (e.g., Figma, Notion, customer feedback)
Initial task breakdowns or checklists
Assigned owners or placeholder assignees

This method helped accelerate onboarding for sprint participants, reduced ambiguity in scope, and enabled meaningful conversations during sprint planning and daily standups. Especially in a high-velocity, innovation-driven company like Nstream—where we were building new frontend components, customer-facing systems, and internal platform tools in parallel—starter cards acted as the scaffolding for scalable and collaborative execution. They allowed us to convert strategic stories into actionable tasks and bridge the gap between product vision and dev execution.

Sprints: The Fastest Path to Progress

Sprints were how we turned bold ideas into executable work. They allowed us to build new frameworks, onboard new hires, and ship high-impact client deliverables—all while staying aligned on priorities, pace, and team capacity.

At Nstream, sprints were more than just scheduling tools—they were the backbone of our iterative execution engine. Each two-week sprint was carefully orchestrated using a combination of Agile structure and Kanban transparency. By organizing our roadmap into milestones, then epics, and finally into detailed stories and tasks, we gave every team—engineering, marketing, design—a shared language and cadence for collaboration.

To kickstart each sprint, we introduced starter cards: thoughtfully framed story cards seeded with intent, clarity, and initial task breakdowns. These weren't just to-do items—they were momentum builders. Starter cards helped define the shape of the sprint, provided early traction for the team, and ensured no time was lost to ambiguity. Over time, these cards evolved into standardized patterns for how we translated product vision into actionable development work.

Faster to Release! Faster to Market!

One of the most impactful sprint arcs we executed was focused on the design and development of our core website and its underlying component library. This wasn’t just a marketing site—it was an evolving platform for our product narrative, engineering story, and technical proof points. We built it modularly, sprint by sprint, leveraging the same component-driven mindset we used in our product design. This allowed us to scale fast while maintaining design consistency and dev velocity.

As we progressed, we layered in hiring efforts as a parallel track within our sprint framework. Recruiting, onboarding, and syncing a front-end developer into our design system sprint work allowed us to scale without breaking rhythm. Sprint planning included both product design and team growth milestones—ensuring that new contributors could plug directly into the sprint workflow, guided by our established framework of epics, stories, and visualized workflows in Clubhouse.

See screenshots below for examples of both the L to R Kanban workflow and an actual website design elated work item (card).

Outcomes: Scalable Vision to Velocity!

By implementing an Agile + Kanban workflow across design, development, and cross-functional teams, we transformed the way work flowed through the organization. From visibility and velocity to coordination and clarity, this framework gave us the structure to scale, the tools to ship, and the culture to continuously improve. The impact was felt across the entire lifecycle—from sprint planning and execution to hiring, onboarding, and launching a scalable component-driven website platform.

Key Wins:

Cross-Team Alignment — Unified product, design, marketing, and engineering under one agile operating rhythm.
Faster Delivery Cycles — Increased velocity and confidence through 2-week sprints and visualized Kanban flow.
Component Library Kickstart — Built and shipped a modular, reusable web component system to accelerate future dev.
Scalable Sprint Planning — Introduced starter cards, story pointing, and predictable sprint cadences across teams.
Seamless Hiring Integration — Onboarded new front-end developers directly into an active sprint structure with zero slowdown.
Visibility & Accountability — Used Clubhouse (now Shortcut) to maintain transparency and ensure nothing slipped through the cracks.
Culture of Continuous Improvement — Embedded retrospectives, flow reviews, and backlog grooming into our ongoing rhythm.

If I had to do it all over again, I absolutely would. Establishing an Agile + Kanban framework at Nstream wasn’t just a process decision—it was a cultural shift that empowered us to move with speed, clarity, and purpose. It gave us the structure to innovate boldly, the discipline to deliver consistently, and the flexibility to adapt as we scaled. Most importantly, it allowed us to meet the dual challenge of pioneering new software platforms while delivering real-time, high-value solutions to Fortune 500 clients—on time, on scope, and with impact.

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Role: - Principal Product Designer - Project Manager

Skills: - Program Management - Project Management - Agile Framework - Kanban Workflow - Sprint Coordination

Tools: - (final) Notion - (initial) Clubhouse - (alt) Basecamp - (alt) Jira - (alt) Trello - Google Docs

Customer(s): - Nstream (internal)

Agile Framework: - Milestones - Epics - Stories - Backlog - To Dos - Blocked - Review - Done