How ClickUp Uses Sprint Boards for Agile Product Development

Zeb Evans, the CEO and Founder of ClickUp, said in an interview. 

What started as a simple internal workflow for us turned into an image that powers how we build ClickUp every single day. 

Every week, product, design, and engineering teams work on a single source of truth. This shared board is where everything is visible: the progress, blockers, and what we’re shipping. 

Then those boards feed straight into our Dashboards, so things like velocity and release readiness show up minus the detective work! 

Using our own system has taught us a lot about how teams and Agile processes work.

So I want to show you what we’ve learned. 

Below, I share how ClickUp uses sprint boards for Agile product development. 

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What Are Sprint Boards in ClickUp?

A sprint board is a visual view of sprint work, organized into stages like To do, In progress, Review, and Done. In ClickUp, most teams build sprint boards using Board View, then layer in sprint settings like dates, points, spillover, and reporting.

To effectively manage Sprints in ClickUp, you can visually represent tasks, subtasks, effort estimations, and other related details on the Kanban-style Board View.

It allows you to view, organize, and manage all tasks within a sprint while integrating key sprint settings, including duration, start and end dates, points or time estimates, spillover, and reporting.

Overview of sprint board functionality

A quick overview of what ClickUp’s Sprint Board can do:

Customizable workflows and columns for Agile teams

One thing we love about building in ClickUp is knowing that every Agile team (including ours!) has its own quirks, rituals, and ‘this is how we do it’ rules. 

That’s actually why ClickUp for Agile Teams exists.

Inside that setup, we get instant access to the two views Agile teams practically live in:

• ClickUp Table View for the spreadsheet-style clarity we need when sorting through sprint tasks, estimates, owners, and dependencies
• ClickUp Board View for that clean drag-and-drop flow where we can move work from To Do to Doing to Done without breaking our stride

Within the workspace, you can rename columns, rearrange stages, add steps like Review or QA, or keep it wildly simple.

Integration with tasks, backlogs, and goals

Sprint boards in ClickUp become more powerful when you connect them with the rest of your workspace. 

ClickUp Tasks help break high-level work into subtasks, nesting layers when the effort spans multiple components, and keeping in-depth context.

From there, ClickUp lets you map your sprint to a specific backlog list. This serves as a single source of upcoming work.

What’s even better is that each backlog item includes an option to add it directly to the active sprint. If your team is planning several stories at once, you can batch those selections and drop them in with one move.

All of this ties into your broader goals in ClickUp. You can connect sprint tasks to the goals they support, track progress as work moves across the board, and see how each sprint contributes to the bigger picture.

🚀 ClickUp Advantage: ClickUp AI helps you manage Tasks. Here’s how: 

• Summarize task activity: Ask AI to outline the activity happening in this task’s description and comments
• Ask questions about your task: AI will suggest several questions about your task that it can answer
• Progress update: Ask AI to catch you up on this task’s activity
• Find tasks that are stuck: AI identifies all tasks in a location that haven’t had updates or discussions for a specified time period

Real-time updates and collaboration features

Sprint Boards come to life when the conversations that shape them happen in the same place.

Enter: ClickUp Chat 

Your cross-functional teams can talk through priorities, refine ideas, or share quick decisions long before anything gets dragged across a board.

ClickUp Chat’s SyncUps take it to another level. During sprint planning, someone can start a SyncUp right inside the channel and share their screen to walk through backlog items or the current sprint.

For bigger ideas or mid-sprint adjustments, ClickUp Whiteboards is the place to discuss them with your team. 

Sketch a quick flow, map dependencies, or refine a story as a group. When something is ready to become work, it turns into a task right from the board (talk about ease!).

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Benefits of Using Sprint Boards for Agile Development

Let’s dig into the benefits of using sprint boards for Agile project management 👇

✅ Improved sprint planning and prioritization

When we plan a sprint on a board, our software development teams get a high-level view of what’s going on. We can see the big, small, and absolutely non-negotiable tasks for the ongoing sprint. 

Visualizing work as cards helps stack-rank priorities and spot where we’re overloading the development team. By the time we lock in the sprint, we know exactly what we’re saying yes to and what we’re parking for later.

✅ Enhanced team visibility and accountability

We love that a glance at the board tells us who’s doing what and how the sprint is shaping up. Every card has an owner and a status, so there’s no ‘I thought you were on that’ moment. 

In standups, we just walk the board from left to right and talk about movement. People naturally take ownership because their work is right there for everyone to see. This keeps our Agile teams aligned (minus the feeling of heavy-handed tracking).

✅ Faster identification of blockers and bottlenecks

Boards make stuck work pretty obvious to the whole team at once. When cards stop moving or stack up in the same column, we know there’s a bottleneck—reviews, QA, requirements, whatever that may be. 

We can jump straight to those cards, read the comments, and unblock things as fast as they start becoming a threat. This is where sprint boards really shine for Agile software development teams working on complex Agile projects.

✅ Streamlined delivery and better sprint predictability

With a well-maintained sprint board, delivery never feels like a mad rush at the end of every week. We can see work flowing across the board steadily, which helps us smooth out spikes and avoid last-minute pileups.

And because every task is tracked, we start to notice real patterns in how the team delivers (how much we usually finish, how long things take, and where we tend to slow down).

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How ClickUp Teams Use Sprint Boards Effectively

Let’s now zoom in on how we actually use sprint boards at ClickUp:

Step 1: Set up your sprint board

Before we can start tracking burndown charts or debating velocity in retros, we need a solid home for our sprints. First things first, this is how you can turn on ‘Sprints’ on ClickUp (if you cannot see it already):

• Open our Workspace settings
• Go to App Center

• Find and enable the Sprints ClickApp

• Choose the Spaces where we want sprints to be active

• In the sidebar or inside a Space, click the ‘+’ button

• Select Sprint Folder to create a new folder

We now have a Sprint Folder that knows each List inside it is a sprint, with dates, reports, and Agile-specific settings ready to go.

🚀 ClickUp Advantage: One of the best productivity boosts we’ve given ourselves is letting ClickUp Automations take over all the repetitive sprint admin work.

With these automation switches, we can:

• Auto-mark a sprint as done the moment it hits the end date (goodbye, forgotten sprints)
• Create the next sprint instantly, so our team always has the next cycle ready to go
• Move incomplete tasks to your backlog list

Step 2: Populate sprints with prioritized tasks

Now that our sprint board is set up, we need to decide what actually goes into a sprint. From here, we first groom our backlog outside the sprint:

• Use a Backlog list to hold all ideas, bugs, and upcoming work

• Add details like descriptions, acceptance criteria, and links
• Apply Priority, Story Points, and Type (feature, bug, chore)

Then we pull the best work into the sprint. A simple way to think about it:

• Start with the highest priority items that are clearly defined
• Look at our team capacity using ClickUp Time Estimates or past velocity, so we do not overload the sprint
• Move or assign those tasks to the current Sprint List so they show up on our sprint board

Watch this video to get the most out of AI Fields:

🔊 Hear it from a ClickUp user, who is a software engineer:

Step 3: Monitor sprint progress in real time

Once the sprint starts, our job is basically to babysit the work in the best possible way. We want to see what is moving, what is stuck, and whether we are still on track to finish what we promised.

On the sprint board, we keep our current Sprint List in Board view and watch tasks flow from To Do to Done. During standups, we literally walk the board together, talk through what moved, and call out anything sitting too long in In Progress or Review.

Then we zoom out with Sprint Dashboard cards, which give us the bigger picture behind the board. 

Sprint cards sit on ClickUp Dashboards and pull data directly from our Sprint Folder, so we can report on and visualize sprint progress accurately.

In a nutshell, this is what my team cannot go without 👇

• Sprint Burndown to see how much effort is left and whether we are burning down at a healthy pace or drifting off the ideal line

• Sprint Burnup to make scope creep impossible to hide, since it compares total work vs completed work as the sprint goes on

• Track total work versus completed work to reveal scope changes with the ClickUp Sprint Burnup
• Sprint Velocity to look across multiple sprints and understand our actual pace before we plan the next one

• Sprint Task Report when we want a say-do view of the sprint, showing what we committed to, what got added or removed, and what did not get finished

We use Dashboards to measure Agile metrics. 

ClickUp Dashboards can be created for both internal and external stakeholders. They can be customized at a team level and for a high-level view. 

With AI Cards, anyone can get a quick summary of the key action items. 

Step 4: Conduct sprint reviews and retrospectives

By the time we hit the end of a sprint, we have two different conversations to run:

• A sprint review about what we shipped
• A retrospective about how we worked, and how we want to improve next time

And we make sure to treat them as separate moments, even if they happen back-to-back.

In the sprint review, we usually:

• Filter our Sprint List or board to Done items and walk through what we actually delivered
• Invite stakeholders to react, ask questions, and give feedback right in task comments

• Update the backlog based on what we learned, so the next sprint begins from an enhanced project roadmap POV

The end of a sprint is where all the learning happens, and it is very easy for that learning to evaporate into random notes and chat threads. But the ClickUp Retrospectives Template helps our team run consistent, structured retros every time!

Get free template

In this template:

• Keep every retro in one Doc, with a tab for each session, so we can scroll back through past sprints and see how our team has evolved
• Capture a clear summary, what went well, what did not go well, and concrete next steps
• Use @mentions and assigned comments to loop in the right people, turn follow-ups into tasks, and make sure improvements show up in the next sprint

Step 5: Adjust future sprints based on analytics

The Sprint Task Report is where we pause for a second and look in the mirror. It lays our original commitment next to what happened, and tracks every scope change along the way, so we can see the full story of the sprint.

The report shows five key tiles, and each one tells a different part of the story:

Since each tile is clickable, we can drill into the exact tasks behind those numbers and see which owners, types of work, or epics are driving the patterns.

From there, we tweak our next sprint:

• If Committed is always much bigger than Completed, we dial down our initial load or break big items into smaller tasks
• If Added keeps spiking, we tighten our rules for mid-sprint work or reserve an explicit buffer
• If the same kind of work keeps showing up in Remaining, we rethink how we estimate or prioritize that category

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Real-World Examples of Sprint Board Usage

With the process in place, it helps to see how sprint boards function inside Agile product environments. So let’s walk through a few examples:

ClickUp’s software development and product managers 

Our engineers and product managers at ClickUp plan epics in ClickUp to prioritize work, improve visibility, and collaborate.

Teams are organized into squads, each having a dedicated Folder. Each squad Folder contains Lists for backlog items, bugs, and Sprints. 

Epics and user stories exist in the squad’s feature Lists, product roadmap Lists, and Sprint Lists thanks to the flexibility of Tasks in Multiple Lists.

SaaS development team managing feature releases

Yggdrasil Gaming is a game development company that switched to ClickUp to manage its engineering work. After moving development into ClickUp, they cut development-specific costs by about 30% and increased productivity by 37%.

Long story short:

• Their engineering teams manage game development in ClickUp, using it as the central place to plan and track work on new titles and features
• Sprint-style boards let them move work from planning to implementation to release, while keeping product, engineering, and leadership aligned on progress and scope

Marketing team running campaign sprints with deadlines and approvals

Marketing teams have just as much chaos as engineering… sometimes more. A useful real-world example is Santander, whose marketing org shifted from long, rigid campaign planning to tight, two-week Scrum cycles. It gives them room to test ideas fast and make smarter decisions as results come in.

Their sprint board helps them:

• See all campaign assets in one place through grounded Agile methodologies
• Move work through stages like drafting, design, review, and launch
• Shift budgets and priorities mid-sprint based on what is actually performing

Product design team iterating UI and UX updates within sprint cycles

Designers love structure just as much as they love creative chaos, and Google’s UX teams are a good example of balancing both. They use design sprints as a focused, time-boxed workflow to iterate on UI and UX ideas as fast as humanly possible.

A typical design sprint for them flows like this:

• Map the problem as a team
• Sketch and explore multiple UX approaches
• Prototype the best idea
• Test it with real users
• Decide what moves forward into the product

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Common Mistakes When Using Sprint Boards

Here are a few sneaky, under-the-radar mistakes we see teams make on sprint boards ⬇️

Misaligned swimlanes

It’s surprisingly easy for swimlanes to drift away from how work moves through the team. When the board stops matching reality, people often start hopping lanes or ignoring them entirely.

Hidden blocked work

Blocked tasks love to hide in places no one checks, like sub-tasks or the middle of a cluttered column. When that happens, a slowdown feels sudden even though the work stalled ages ago.

Excessive micro-tasks

Some teams slice work so thinly that the board starts looking like confetti. As a result, it sometimes becomes harder to see the big picture than to do the work.

Quiet ownership gaps

Cards occasionally sit in active columns without a clear owner, silently waiting for someone to magically pick them up. More often than not, everyone assumes someone else is on it.

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Ship Faster, Stress Less, and Build Better with ClickUp Sprint Boards

When we run our software development projects inside ClickUp, everything just falls where it’s supposed to fall. Our Agile scrum board becomes the single place where ideas turn into tasks, tasks turn into progress, and progress turns into shipped features. And the best part isn’t even that. It’s that we don’t waste time guessing where things are or who’s doing what.

Sprint Boards give us a clear, living picture of our task management so we can move work across stages, unblock teammates quickly, and stay focused on what delivers value. Pair that with ClickUp Automations, Docs, Dashboards, and AI… and suddenly our software development processes feel a whole lot lighter.

We plan smarter, review faster, and ship with way more confidence. Sign up for ClickUp and see how far your team can go when your sprints finally flow.

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