Talk to kanman

When you open your workspace, you land in a conversation with kanman. kanman is the teammate that writes your stories, builds them, checks them and tells you how it went. The conversation is the one place where you see what happened, answer what needs you and hand over new work.

What you see when you open it

• What happened since your last visit. New messages sit below a line that says how many are new, for example “4 new”. The conversation opens right there.
• What needs you. When kanman waits for you, a small pill at the top says so, for example “1 needs you”. Click it to jump to that message.
• Cards. kanman writes one or two sentences and puts the details into a card: a run with its stage, attempt and cost, the evidence of a run that reached review, a story, drafted stories, or a decision. Cards stay up to date while you read them.

General and your team chats

You have one conversation with kanman per place, like separate chats:

• General is the one conversation across all your teams. It opens when you open the workspace, centred on the screen, with nothing beside it. Ask what needs you, how things are going everywhere, or anything that is not about one team. The short “since yesterday” summary arrives here.
• Every team has its own chat. Everything about that team lands there: its runs, decisions, reports, incidents and setup. When you open a team’s chat, the conversation moves to the left and the team’s board opens beside it. On a phone the team’s chat fills the screen and the board button next to the chip opens the board from the bottom.

To switch, use the chip under the message box. It lists General and your teams, each with how many new messages it has and how many need you. A dot on the chip tells you that something happened in another chat. The chip is the only place to switch: the conversation decides what you see. You can also press G then T to open it from the keyboard, use the arrow keys and press Enter.

Your conversation is private. Other people in the workspace see the shared results (the board, runs, decisions and the audit log), not what you asked kanman.

Open a card

Click a card (a run, a story, a decision, a report or an incident) to open its page. On a large screen it opens beside the conversation, on a phone as a sheet from the bottom. Close, Escape or swiping the sheet down brings you back to the same place in the conversation. In a team’s chat, closing a page brings you back to the team’s board, never out of the team’s chat. See Tour of the app.

Answer a decision where you read it

When kanman needs your OK, for example on the plan of a story, the message carries a decision card with kanman’s recommendation and two to four options. Click an option, such as Approve plan. The card folds into one line (“You approved the plan”), the count on the decisions icon in the top bar goes down and the pill disappears. You can still answer the same decision in the Decisions inbox or on the run page; whichever you use first counts everywhere.

Ask kanman

Type into the box at the bottom and press Enter (on a phone, tap the send button). Shift+Enter starts a new line. While kanman answers, its reply appears word by word; Stop ends the answer early.

The chip on the left of the box says which chat you are in: General or a team. In a team’s chat, kanman answers about that team. The suggestions above the box are a quick way to start:

Press N anywhere in the app to jump to the box of the chat you are in.

Describe new work

Describe work in the team’s chat: paste a requirement, a bug report or a few sentences into the box and send it. kanman drafts stories and shows them as a card, one row per story:

1. Approve the drafts you want and Reject the others.
2. Click Write 2 stories (the number follows your choice). kanman writes them to your tracker and the card says “2 stories written”.
3. To edit acceptance criteria first, click Open review. The review page shows every criterion, the test plan and the Demonstrate steps; Back to the conversation brings you back to the card.

kanman drafts with what it knows about the team’s repository: the code host (GitHub or GitLab), the default branch, the package manager and lockfile, the frameworks and scripts in package.json, the CI system, the top-level folders and the start of the README, plus passages from the team’s documents if you added sources under Team settings > Context. So drafts use your package manager’s commands and propose changes for your CI (a .gitlab-ci.yml on GitLab, never GitHub Actions) instead of asking about them. If your workspace runs everything on its own runners, the runner reads these facts itself; your code never passes through kanman’s cloud.

Long requirements are always treated as work to draft, even when they mention words like “status”, “overview” or “priority” (for example a UI label you quote). Short questions and commands keep their meaning.

You can attach text files (Markdown, plain text, CSV, JSON or YAML) with the paperclip or by dropping them on the box. Their text is sent with your message.

This is how it looks: a requirement goes in, kanman drafts three stories, and approving them writes them to the tracker.

When a General conversation turns to one team

Conversations often start in General and then become work for one team, for example when you write down what a team should build. kanman notices and asks first, it never moves a conversation on its own: a card says Continue in Sandbox Team and quotes your request.

• Continue in Sandbox Team opens the team’s chat. It starts with “Started in General” and your request, and kanman carries on there, for example by drafting the stories. In General a line stays behind: “Continued in Sandbox Team”, with a link that takes you straight to the team’s chat. In the team’s chat, Back to General takes you to where it started.
• Stay here keeps the conversation in General.

You can also move a message yourself: point at one of your messages (on a phone it is always shown), open its menu ⋯ and choose Move to Sandbox Team. The team’s chat opens with your message in the box, ready to send or edit.

When your workspace runs on your own runners

If your workspace runs everything on its own runners, kanman’s answers that need a model come from your runner. When no runner is online, kanman says so in the message (“Your runners are offline, so I can’t answer yet”) and answers in the same message as soon as a runner picks it up. A small “via your runner” note shows which answers came from there. Status answers, explanations from run records and everything kanman tells you on its own never wait for a runner.

Link to a message

Every message has its own address in your workspace. Links from Slack or Microsoft Teams (“Open in kanman”) and search results open the chat the message belongs to (General or a team’s chat), scroll to it and highlight it briefly.