Use kanman without a tracker | kanman documentation

You do not need Jira, GitHub Issues or GitLab issues to work with kanman. An AI team can keep its stories on its own kanman board: columns, stories with acceptance criteria, comments and history all live in the team. You can connect a tracker later and link the stories you already have.

Choose the kanman board

When you set up an AI team, the first step lists kanman board (no external tracker) next to your Jira, GitHub and GitLab connections. It is there even when the workspace has no connection yet. Pick it, and the team’s stories live on the team’s own board.

The team gets kanman’s six default columns, one per role, without a setup step:

Role	Meaning
Backlog	Stories that exist but are not ready to build
Refining	Stories kanman is clarifying
Ready	Stories that should be worked on next, by a developer or by kanman
In progress	Someone is working on the story
Review	A change is open and being checked
Done	Finished

Each story has its own page with the acceptance criteria and a Comments tab with comments and history.

Repositories are optional

With the kanman board, the Repositories step is optional:

Without a repository, developers work on the stories themselves, also from their own Claude Code, and kanman needs no git connection. Your code stays in your checkout. See Use kanman from Claude Code or Codex. The Setup card on the new team’s board then shows Claude Code connected as a step and leads you to the team’s Claude Code settings.
With repositories and a connection to your code host (GitHub or GitLab), kanman can also work on Ready stories itself, in addition to developers working from Claude Code.

You can add repositories later under Team > Repositories.

The dry run

There is no tracker to read, so the Dry run step does not analyze open issues. Instead it explains how stories reach your kanman board: through Intake, by moving a story to Ready, and by a developer or kanman picking it up.

How stories get onto the board

Stories come from your conversation with kanman:

Choose the team on the chip of the message box (or press N on the team’s board) and describe a requirement in your own words.
kanman drafts stories, each with acceptance criteria, and shows them as a card. Reject drafts you do not want, or click Open review to edit them; Write requirements kanman can finish helps with the wording.
Click Add N stories to the board, for example Add 3 stories to the board. The stories land in Backlog. Their keys come from the initials of the project name, for example PAYME-1 for a project called “Pay Me”.
Move a story to Ready when it should be worked on.

Model access

kanman needs model access to draft and review stories. Either:

add your own provider key under Workspace settings > Model access (Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure OpenAI or Amazon Bedrock) and choose Use your own key for the team, or
use kanman’s billing where it is offered for your team (Pay through kanman).

What providers receive is described in What model providers see. Plans: https://kanman.ai/en/#pricing.

Connect a tracker later

When your company adopts Jira, GitHub Issues or GitLab issues, you can move the team over without losing anything:

Open Team > Repositories. Its Tracker line shows kanman is your tracker.
Click Connect a tracker. Owners and admins can do this.
Pick a tracker connection and the project. If the workspace has no tracker connection yet, add one first: see Connect GitHub or Connect Jira and GitLab.
Map the tracker’s statuses to the team’s columns. kanman starts from your current columns.
Click Connect. The section shows the connected tracker with Link existing stories open: kanman looks through the tracker’s open issues (up to 1,000) and proposes matches by the same key, the same title or a similar title. Pairs with the same key or title are ticked already; tick similar ones yourself. Confirm the pairs you want to link.

You can link stories again later, for example after the team wrote stories while the tracker was disconnected: open Team > Repositories and, on the Tracker line, click Find matching issues under Link existing stories. Or ask kanman in the team’s chat: “link our stories to Jira” opens the same list.

Nothing is duplicated. Linked stories follow the tracker from then on: title, description and status come from the issue. Stories you leave unlinked stay kanman stories on the board.