How to set up stages and Client Review
Create a workflow that makes current status and client decisions easy to understand.
Stages are the columns work moves across. Designed well they answer where is this without anyone asking, and they give approvals an obvious home.
Open Stages from a project header
Stages are configured per project, so two projects in the same board can run different processes. Open the project you want to change and edit its stages there rather than looking for a global setting.
Keep stages based on real workflow states
A stage should describe what is physically happening, such as In production or Internal review. Avoid stages that describe feeling rather than state, like Urgent or Ongoing, because work never leaves them and the board stops being informative.
Add Client Review before the final Live stage
Give client decisions their own stage rather than treating them as a status on a task. A dedicated Client Review stage makes waiting-on-client work countable, which is what lets you prove where delay actually comes from.
Choose distinct stage colors
Colour is how people read a board at a glance. Keep colours clearly different from each other and reserve the strongest one for the stage that needs attention, usually whatever is blocked or awaiting a decision.
Move a test task through the workflow
Before the team uses it, push one task through every stage. This catches the two common problems immediately: a stage nobody can explain, and a missing step that everyone works around.
What success looks like
- Every stage names a real state, Client Review exists as its own stage, and a test task moved cleanly from first to last without anyone needing to invent a workaround.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Creating a stage for urgency rather than state, which fills up and never empties.
- Treating client sign-off as a checkbox instead of a stage, which hides how long decisions actually take.
- Adding so many stages that moving a task becomes a chore, so people stop updating the board.
Questions about this workflow
No. Stages are defined per project, so each process can match the work it describes.
Because it makes waiting on a client measurable. If that stage is consistently your longest, the constraint is the decision process rather than production.
Related how-tos
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