READ TIME: 4 MIN | CHANGE FLAG: MARKET / PARADIGMS
The Done card
Thanks to Claude and Notion, my whole business runs on a wicked Kanban. Everything that's worth anything shuffles through Upcoming, In progress, and Done.
When a card hits done, it's out of my filtered view, so I just don't see it. And every week, Claude archives Done cards, and I never look at them again.
Michelle Green says she thinks in boards. She's the Director of Product at Cohley (a content marketing platform that matches brands with UGC creators), and she designs everything following the customer experience.
"We try to think everything in flows... I've always focused on the next best action in terms of outcomes. When you are trying to get a specific outcome, what is the thing prior to that? Think about a Kanban board going left to right."
I loved the Kanban analogy as soon as she said it. It's the most visual way I've heard anyone describe lifecycle design: identify the outcome, walk backward, then put the next best action exactly where the customer is waiting.
Then – as I moved the "editing her episode" task card from Upcoming to In Progress, I found the caveat:
Boards are linear. Cards move left to right. And when they hit done, they get deleted.
This is fine for cards. Once done, tasks (usually) stay done. But people? People are fluid. An account that hits "done" a year prior can slide backward into any earlier column – and we won't see it, because we deleted the card the day they reached Time to Value.
Onboarding ends. The lifecycle doesn't.
Cohley has spent the past year embedding AI everywhere: creator matching from natural-language briefs, automated asset checks, onboarding that builds your brand knowledge as you go. New brands get a stunning workflow from day one.
But the five-year accounts? They're duplicating briefs they wrote in 2021, which means the AI is vetting their content against requirements from 2021.
In board terms: those accounts finished onboarding half a decade ago. Card moved to done, card got deleted.
Then the product changed. And every one of these accounts suddenly slid back to a column nobody's looked at since 2021. No board shows this slide backward, so the accounts sit there – getting worse results from a better product.
Why churn looks sudden (but isn't)
Churn hits your dashboard as an event — a declined renewal, a cancellation email, a line in the weekly report.
Lightning strike.
But the customer rarely experiences their decision to let you go as an event. They experience it as a progression: months of sliding through columns you don't see. Getting less value than they think. Hitting more walls than before. Quietly re-evaluating.
Churn only feels sudden to you because your instrumentation doesn't pick up the done column – nor movement out of it.
Rebuilding the board so cards can move left
Try these 2 quick mental changes to turn a board appropriate for tasks into a board appropriate for accounts:
Cards never delete. No Done column. Maybe a pause. Maybe a Done for now. When the account hits time-to-value, it parks in Done for now – visibly – and you expect it to move.
Add the backward columns. You only need a few: platform-blind (using new features vs. missing them), value-mismatch (getting less than they could or ready for more), re-evaluating (decreasing usage, support tickets, crisis accounts). I like to use the 9 Change Flags.
That alone is most of the fix because the slide becomes movement you're tracking – not a surprise you catch.
For a company Cohley's age, the best growth lives in the existing base (usually in exactly the accounts that make you work a little harder). A card sliding left is a warning – and we can catch it if we rethink how we view our usage data.
In the episode
The board is just one tiny topic in our episode; the full thing has lots more.
There's Finn, Cohley's sparkly AI fish, catching rogue Nike swooshes in the backgrounds of creator kitchens.
There's the customer review that asked for a feature Cohley already shipped – twice.
There's the top-down budget shift pushing brands to move creator-economy money into AI line items, and what that does to a renewal.
And there's the experiment we'd build first. It catches a minute of attention nobody's using – and it's pretty slick. Worth hearing the full thing instead of reading this tiny tease.
Watch Episode 2 on your favorite platform via this handy link or the icons below.