Dashboards are becoming more and more popular as a collaboration environment in software development, product development and many other areas of business and personal life. (personalkanban for example).

In software development adoption of agile methodologies ended up with domination of scrum (90000+ certified scrum masters). For the past few years there is a growing interest for Kanban method. Kanban method is not software development specific and can be applied to all aspects of life. Scrum-kanban hybrid “scrumban” is also becoming popular.
Kanban vs Scrum

“Kanban board” either physical or electronic, is the main tool of kanban method.

“lean” (lean startup, lean management) is another term/approach that calls for better visualisation and sharing of top level activities. A dashboard containing a snapshot of a startup’s state is called “lean canvas”.

Kanban system principles are simple and therefore attractive
– start from where you are now
– limit work in progress
– visualise your work
etc…

This Google Trends chart shows growing interest to Kanban board software

The Market Place

The project collaboration space has 500 over tools, including offering from all major software vendors. There are a few very good software development specific tools developed by Atlassian, VersionOne, Rally Software.
Many of those software dev tools have introduced kanban board in a recent few years, as a part of their agile development tool set.

We have looked at 100s of project management/collaboration tools and we can see that over the past year they all added their dashboards, and even made it featured on a home page: breeze, leankit, targetprocess, scrumwise, etc. meaning that dashboard is becomming a strong selling tool, and everytingh from now on starts to revolve around dashboards & drag and drop cards.

There are also specific dashboards focused on kanban method. Many of popular ones have “kanban” keyword in them: kanbantool, kanbanize. Although those are not a billion dollar businesses, they are all have a very strong client base which is growing.

High PPC bids for Kanban related keywords is also the most recent phenomena. While competition for organic listings is relatively low (compared to,say “project collaboration” and related terms) showing that this is a recent trend.

The most notable success story is Trello with over 1m users in 2 years after launch.
“Trello. Organize anything, together”

The reason for such popularity is because it can truly used to “organise anything” for example: How to Create an Editorial Calendar Using Trello (and Why You Need One)

The Techcrunch article heading is “Joel Spolsky’s Trello Is A Simple Workflow And List Manager For Groups”

Kanbanchi is the only fully-featured dashboard app fully integrated with Google Apps yet despite that Google Apps are widely used across businesses, schools and individuals.