Zen is designed to be open-ended, so you can use it that way that’s most helpful for your team, and adjust how you work as you find new ways to become more efficient.

However, Zen’s flexibility can make it difficult to understand how to get started, so we thought it might be helpful to explain how we use Zen to work on Zen. This should give a couple of ideas on how Zen can be customized to fit the needs of individuals and teams.

Our workflow is customized into three phases we called prepare, develop, and deploy:

• Stories in the prepare phase are “on our radar”, and require research, definition, or specification, but no development/creative work has actually been done yet.
• Stories in the develop phase have work artifacts (code, design comps, etc.) in progress but are unfinished.
• Stories in the deploy phase represent completed work that is ready to go live, but stories aren’t considered “done” until they’re in the hands of our customers.

The develop phase has a work-in-progress (WIP) limit of 2. Since each of us can only work on a maximum of one story at a time, this minimizes waste associated with context switching.

We also have some guidelines for story cards:

• We use different colors to indicate classes of work. For example, value-adds for us are green, bugs are orange, and priority fixes are in red. Red stories trump the priority system, and move through our pipeline as fast as possible.
• We prioritize tasks using the Moscow Method: each task is defined as must, should, could, or would, in descending priority.
• We generally don’t estimate story sizes, but this space could be used for story points, hours, or t-shirt sizing (small, medium, and large).

Other ideas for story cards:

• You could use colors to group stories into batches representing their minimally-marketable features (MMF).
• You could use tags to group stories into MMFs, iterations, or due dates.

Every project has an editable details section on its homepage – as you become familiar with Zen and find the best way to use it to work, this is a good place to share the information with the team. This way someone that’s new to the project can understand how the team uses Zen in a quick glance.

We’re interested in the different ways our users have found to work with Zen, so let us know!