Real-World Kanban

Do Less, Accomplish More with Lean Thinking

Real-World Kanban, Second Edition, by Mattias Skarin, is a concise but experience-rich book from The Pragmatic Bookshelf. The subtitle, Do Less, Accomplish More with Lean Thinking, captures the book’s central promise: organizations often do not need more activity, more meetings, or more frameworks. They need better visibility, better flow, and better choices about where to improve.

The book is not written as a generic Kanban tutorial. It is built around real-world examples, which Henrik Kniberg describes in the foreword as a series of expert-level game replays for Kanban implementations. That framing is accurate. The reader is not simply told what Kanban means; the reader watches organizations discover problems, introduce boards, adapt policies, and learn from the consequences.

The opening argument is that agile helped many organizations, but it also encouraged some of them to follow frameworks instead of learning how to improve. Skarin’s alternative is to look at work through the lens of flow. Where does value wait? Where do handoffs lose meaning? Where are teams overloaded? Where does work look finished on a plan but still fail in real use?

What the Book Really Is

This is a practical management and change-leadership book. Kanban boards are important, but they are not the whole subject. The deeper subject is how teams and leaders create transparency around work, use that transparency to make better decisions, and improve without pretending that one framework will solve every problem.

The book is also a case-study collection. It includes enterprise software development, change management, a derailing project, back-office work outside IT, capital markets, and remote work. The appendix then provides many board examples that readers can adapt for product development, software delivery, DevOps, release management, support, legal, sales, and roadmap work.

Target Audience and Context

The book is best for managers, business leaders, agile coaches, Scrum masters, product leaders, and operations teams. It is especially relevant for people who have inherited a messy system and need to improve it without waiting for ideal staffing, perfect architecture, or a full reorganization.

It will also help technical leaders who feel that Scrum, SAFe, or another method is not addressing the real bottlenecks in their organization. Skarin does not argue against agile; he argues against blind method compliance. His practical question is always: did the change actually improve flow and value delivery?

Structure and Learning Logic

Chapter 1 introduces Kanban through flow efficiency, manufacturing roots, and the six core Kanban practices for knowledge work. It explains that visualizing work, limiting WIP, managing flow, making policies explicit, strengthening feedback loops, and improving experimentally are the practical core of the method.

Chapters 2 through 6 are the heart of the book. The enterprise case focuses on time to market, shared language, product ideas, lead time, customer usage, and cross-department alignment. The change-management case shows how a board can help manage dependencies and reduce burnout. The derailed-project case shows how Kanban can restore trust by making real bottlenecks visible and focusing on quality. The back-office case demonstrates that Kanban is not limited to software. The capital-markets story shows a team adapting over thirteen years while using data and transparency to judge which practices are worth keeping.

Chapter 7 discusses remote-first Kanban, including digital boards, automation, real-time visibility, and the difficulty of hybrid meetings. The appendix is a practical visual library of Kanban board examples across many domains.

Main Themes / Core Content

Flow over Busyness

The book repeatedly shows that people can be extremely busy while value is stuck in queues, handoffs, approvals, testing, or waiting for specialist skills. Kanban’s first contribution is to make that waiting visible.

Transparency as a Leadership Tool

A good Kanban board makes status, blockers, priorities, and policies visible. This reduces the need to “sell the problem” because the problem becomes visible enough for people to discuss it.

WIP Limits and Finishing Discipline

The book treats limiting work in progress as a way to reduce overload, improve quality, and shift behavior from starting many things to finishing the most important things.

Feedback and Metrics

Lead time, throughput, customer usage, improvement pulses, and visual indicators help teams learn whether they are actually improving. Metrics are not treated as bureaucratic reporting, but as feedback for better decisions.

Change by Pull, Not Push

The leadership advice is to help teams solve problems instead of forcing change onto them. Small improvements, repeated often, are presented as more reliable than grand transformation theater.

Context over Framework Worship

The capital-markets chapter is especially clear on this point. The team tries Scrum and SAFe as experiments, keeps what works, discards waste, and returns to Kanban where it better fits the work.

Visual Style and Evidence

The cover shows a wall of sticky notes, which fits the book’s practical theme: Kanban is about making work visible. Early chapters include diagrams of flow efficiency, production signals, and knowledge-work boards. The page 17 diagram of product development flow makes waiting time visually obvious. The page 20 diagram summarizes the six core practices of Kanban in knowledge work.

The enterprise case includes photographs of physical boards and meetings, plus diagrams of end-to-end workflows. Page 28 shows a physical Kanban board being used in the workplace; page 30 shows the enterprise workflow from product idea to release and customer use. Later pages include charts comparing lead time and estimates, quality-focused boards in the project rescue case, and a broad appendix of board examples for product development, business operations, legal, support, sales, and roadmaps.

Strengths

The biggest strength is realism. The book does not present Kanban as a clean method applied in a perfect environment. It shows legacy systems, cross-department misunderstandings, pressure, technical debt, growth, support work, remote constraints, and shifting enterprise frameworks.

A second strength is the repeated link between visualization and leadership. Boards are not decorative; they create shared attention. They help leaders and teams see what to discuss, what to stop, and where to intervene.

A third strength is transferability. The back-office and capital-markets stories show that Kanban is not just a software-development practice. It applies wherever invisible knowledge work, demand variation, and prioritization problems exist.

Weaknesses or Limits

The book is not a step-by-step implementation manual. Readers who want exact recipes, templates, or tool instructions may need to supplement it with more detailed Kanban books.

Because each case study is short, some stories sacrifice depth for breadth. The benefit is pattern recognition; the trade-off is that the reader does not see every organizational detail behind each change.

Unusual or Distinctive Points

One distinctive point is the emphasis on product idea success rather than local team output. The enterprise board follows ideas through development and into customer usage, which keeps attention on value, not only delivery activity.

Another distinctive point is the argument that data and courage belong together. Teams need data to make waste visible, but leaders also need the courage to change policies, confront bottlenecks, and experiment.

What the Reader Actually Gains

The reader gains a practical way to think about organizational improvement: start with where you are, visualize the flow, limit overload, make policies explicit, measure lead time and outcomes, and improve experimentally with the people doing the work.

Final Judgment

Real-World Kanban, Second Edition is short, practical, and valuable for leaders who want to improve flow without adding unnecessary process. It is best read as a collection of patterns and field lessons. Its central value is not a perfect Kanban board design, but a better way of seeing and improving work.

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