Case Study: Mapping Systeric

Mapping Antar walked an outside company. This one turns the same rule on us, because the tempting wrong answer is closer to home and harder to see: we have roles (PM, PD, PE) and we have clients (marked external), and the reflex is to give each its own board.

Hold onto the one sentence, in its fuller form: a board is one track, one coherent end-to-end flow. Usually that is a single persona’s journey; for an internal flow, a tight group can co-own it. The one question before any new board: is there a genuinely different track here, whose backbone fits no board you have, or just a new participant in one you already run? A new primary persona owning a new journey is the strongest sign of a new track. (Definitions live in the reference half of the Antar case study.)

The trap to refuse first: a role is not a board

The instinct is one board per function: a PM board, a PD board, a PE board. It feels organised. It is the proliferation trap wearing a job title instead of a logo.

Run the question. Does a PD own a different end-to-end flow from a PE, or do they both travel one delivery track and own different stretches of it? A piece of work has a single path, from intake to shipped to learned. The PM shapes and plans it, the PD designs it, the PE builds it, and they all review it. That is one track with handoffs, not three tracks.

Give each role a board and you clone the same backbone three times. You maintain “Review” and “Ship” in three places, and a designer’s work hides from the engineer’s path even though they are the same piece of work. The honest model is the one the canonical doc already uses for Back Office: a single internal track that a tight group co-owns, each role leading the activities that are theirs. PM, PD and PE are not three boards, and not one owner with two helpers. They are three co-owners of one delivery track.

The reminder from Antar holds here too: “a different person is involved” is never enough. A new board needs a new track, a flow whose backbone fits no board you have. Roles handing off inside one flow do not make new tracks.

By that test Systeric has three tracks, the same count Antar landed on: one owned by a single persona (Client), one co-owned by the team (Delivery), and one owned by a single persona (Lead).

Board 1: Client (primary persona: external)

The only fully external journey. The client never builds anything, so their columns are theirs alone: a need goes in, value comes back.

• Get Access: the client is invited into Glide and sees their own space and roadmap.
• Submit: they describe a need as a request, with enough context to act on.
• Track: they watch status and where their work sits, without having to ask.
• Collaborate: they answer questions, comment, and review designs as work proceeds.
• Accept: they see what shipped and sign it off.
• See Outcomes: they get the value delivered and what it changed, not just “done”.

Secondary personas: PM responds at Submit and Collaborate; PD and PE surface their work at Accept.

Board 2: Delivery (co-owned track: PM + PD + PE)

The team’s track turning a need into shipped, learned product. No single role walks it end to end, and that is fine: like Back Office in the canonical doc, this is an internal track that a tight group co-owns, each leading the activities that are theirs. This is the board that absorbs all the “should PD or PE get their own board” pressure, and the answer stays no.

• Intake: requests land, get deduped, and are accepted or declined.
• Shape: the problem is defined and written up as a brief with a success metric.
• Plan: the work is sized, story-mapped, and slotted into a cycle or release.
• Design: the solution is explored and specified (PD leads).
• Build: the solution is implemented (PE leads).
• Review: design critique, code review, and QA before it goes out.
• Ship: the change is released or deployed (PE leads).
• Learn: the outcome is measured and fed back into the next round.

Who leads where: PM leads Intake, Shape, Plan and Learn; PD leads Design and co-runs Review; PE leads Build, Ship and co-runs Review. The ✦ marks the lead at each activity. The one genuinely secondary persona here is the Client, who appears at Intake and signs off at Review or Ship, the same persona-pill idea from Antar.

Eight columns is on the long side. If reviews feel like a step inside shipping rather than a stop of their own, fold Review into Ship and run seven.

Board 3: Team Leadership (primary persona: Lead)

A distinct journey because its object is people, not work, and its columns share almost nothing with Delivery. The lead touches Delivery by monitoring it, but touching is not the test. Owning the separate journey of running and growing the team is.

• Set Direction: quarterly goals and what matters most are made explicit.
• Staff: people are matched to the work and allocated across it.
• Monitor: delivery health and updates are rolled up in one place.
• Coach (1:1s): regular 1:1s, feedback, and tracked follow-ups.
• Grow: capability development, tracked through the competency matrix.
• Report Up: progress and risk communicated to clients, stakeholders, and founders.

Secondary personas: PM, PD and PE appear as the people being led, at Monitor, Coach and Grow.

The three boards together

Three boards for working, one quarterly overview for seeing, the same shape Antar settled into. Read top to bottom and the personas separate cleanly: the client never builds, the team never sets its own direction, the lead never ships.

What we deliberately did not split

• No Designer board, no Engineer board. PD and PE co-own the Delivery track and lead the activities that are theirs; they do not own separate tracks. Their work shows as stories under the activities they lead, on the one board where the whole flow lives.
• No board per client. Every external travels the same Client journey, so it is one board, with “which client” as a persona or a feature flag, never a board, even at ten logos.
• No separate Discovery and Delivery boards. Discovery is the left half of one continuous work path. A different cadence is not a different owner, so Intake through Learn stays one board.

How this evolves, and the calls worth revisiting

These three are deliberate, not permanent. Three places where a fourth board could one day earn its keep, with the default answer staying no until the new journey is named:

1. Design as a track, not a step. Today design is an activity on Delivery. If we ever run design as an independent discovery track with a designer owning it end to end, it earns a board. Until then it is a pill.
2. People and Growth leaving Leadership. Growth sits as an initiative on the Leadership board. When the competency work becomes a full journey of its own, it can split out. Not before.
3. Who wears the Lead hat. Even if one person is both PM and Lead, Leadership stays a separate board. A journey is defined by its shape, not by which human walks it, and one person can own two boards. A goal can touch two journeys; an initiative should only span both when the same problem and solution genuinely hold on each, as in One Initiative, Several Boards. Absent that, keep it one initiative per board, the way Antar split Courier from Customer.

Next: Quarterly Roadmap Planning