Kanban
Japanese for signboard.
A simple card-based signal — born on the Toyota factory floor in the late 1940s.
A card travelled between stations.
When a station ran low, its kanban card moved upstream — a physical signal saying "make more now". No central scheduler. No waste. Just-in-time.
Then in the 2000s, software adopted the idea.
A "card" no longer means a physical car part. It means a task, a feature, a bug. The columns now read Up Next → In Progress → Done.
Same rule: don't start what you can't finish. Don't pile up work-in-progress.
Kaizen
改 (kai, change) + 善 (zen, good)
Change for better. Tiny improvements, every day, from everyone.
Brought into Western business by Masaaki Imai in 1986. Toyota assembly-line workers can stop the line to suggest a fix — that's kaizen in action.
Small compounds.
A 1% daily improvement gives you 37× the result in a year.
No need for a six-month "big rewrite." Just finish one slice, today, a little better than yesterday.
PDCA — the loop everyone uses.
Plan the slice. Do the work. Check if it actually worked. Act on what you learned, then plan the next one.
Walter Shewhart designed it at Bell Labs in the 1920s. Deming brought it to Japan after WWII. Toyota, NASA, agile teams, Six Sigma — same loop.
Hear it from the source.
Two short videos. Atlassian's coach on the kanban method, Toyota's culture of continuous improvement. Three minutes each.