I was on the phone recently with Stacy, a dev team manager. During our conversation, I shared the concept of using relative card positioning, or stack ranking, to show the priority of items of a queue on a kanban board. Personally, I have used this tactic very successfully in the past as it provides visual cues to both the doers that need to know what’s next, as well as to the requestors of work who want to know when we’ll get to their item. When I finished explaining, Stacy said, “Yes, we’ve tried that in the past but we don’t do it anymore. The problem was that requestors got upset that their item was number five in our queue.”
