Core concepts

Coco Kanban has a small number of building blocks. Learn these seven and the whole product opens up. Everything else — reports, automation, AI — is built on top of them.

The spine: Workspace → Project → Work item

Three containers, nested. This is the part you must get right; the rest is optional.

Workspace — your organisation. One workspace per company or department. Members, billing, integrations and workspace-wide settings live here. Its slug appears in every URL: /acme/…. Most people only ever belong to one.

Project — a body of work inside a workspace: a product, a team, a workstream. A project owns its own members, states, labels and settings, and it decides which features it uses. Projects are Private (invite only) or Public (anyone in the workspace except guests can join).

Work item — a single unit of work. A task, a bug, a story, a chore. Every work item belongs to exactly one project and gets an ID from the project's prefix: MOB-1, MOB-2, API-17. This is the atom. Everything else in the product is a way of grouping, filtering, scheduling or reporting on work items.

The rule that explains most of the product: a work item lives in one project, and one project only. Cycles, modules and views don't own work items — they point at them.

The organisers: Cycles and Modules

Both group work items. They answer different questions.

Cycle — when. A cycle is a sprint: a start date, an end date, and the set of work you intend to complete between them. A project runs one cycle at a time; when it ends, unfinished items can be transferred to the next one. Cycles give you burn-down and burn-up charts, because they have a deadline to burn down towards.

Module — what. A module is a deliverable: "Checkout redesign", "iOS launch", "Q3 migration". It has a lead, members, an optional target date, and a status (Backlog, Planned, In progress, Paused, Completed, Cancelled). It runs for as long as it needs to.

A work item can be in one cycle and in one or more modules at the same time. That's the point: the cycle says "this fortnight", the module says "part of the checkout work". A single sprint typically pulls items from several modules.

Rule of thumb: if you'd describe it with a date range, it's a cycle. If you'd describe it with a noun, it's a module.

The lenses: Views and Layouts

A layout is how a list of work items is drawn on screen. There are five: List, Board (kanban), Spreadsheet, Calendar and Timeline (Gantt). Switching layout changes nothing about your data — it's the same items, drawn differently.

On top of the layout you apply filters (only what's mine, only urgent), grouping (by state, assignee, priority, label, cycle, module…), sorting, and which properties are shown.

A view is that whole combination — layout + filters + grouping + sorting — saved with a name so you can come back to it, and shared with your project. "My open bugs", "Everything due this week", "Unassigned urgent work".

There are also built-in workspace-level views — All work items, Assigned, Created, Subscribed — which cut across every project you can see.

The workspace of words: Pages

A page is a rich document that lives next to your work: a spec, meeting notes, a runbook, a decision record. Pages have a full editor (headings, lists, tables, code blocks, callouts, images) and can be public to the project or private to you.

Pages are where the why goes. Work items are the what.

The vocabulary: States and Labels

States are the stages a work item moves through — the columns on your board. Every project starts with five: Backlog, Todo, In Progress, Done, Cancelled. You can rename them and add your own.

Each state belongs to one of five state groups, and the groups are what the product actually reasons about:

Group	Means	Used for
Backlog	Not scheduled	Excluded from "started" progress
Unstarted	Scheduled, not begun	Burn-down "pending"
Started	In flight	Burn-down "in progress"
Completed	Done	Counts as complete everywhere
Cancelled	Dropped	Counts as closed, not done

So if you add a state called "In Review", put it in the Started group and every chart, cycle progress bar and report will treat it correctly.

Labels are free-form tags — frontend, tech-debt, customer-request. They're defined per project, a work item can have as many as you like, and they filter and group like any other property. Use states for where work is, labels for what work is about.

How it fits together

Workspace  (acme)
└── Project  (Mobile App, prefix MOB)
    ├── States      Backlog · Todo · In Progress · Done · Cancelled
    ├── Labels      bug · frontend · tech-debt
    ├── Work items  MOB-1, MOB-2, MOB-3 …
    │                └── sub-items, comments, attachments, links
    ├── Cycles      Sprint 12  (2 Jun – 16 Jun)   ← work items, by date
    ├── Modules     Checkout redesign             ← work items, by deliverable
    ├── Views       "My open bugs"                ← saved filters + layout
    └── Pages       "Checkout spec"

A work item, then, is typically: in the Todo state, labelled frontend, assigned to you, in Sprint 12, part of the Checkout redesign module, and showing up in your saved view My open bugs.

Glossary

Workspace — top-level container for an organisation. Owns members and billing.
Project — a body of work in a workspace. Owns its own states, labels and members.
Project ID / prefix — the short code (max 10 characters) that prefixes every work item ID in a project. Set at creation; permanent.
Work item — a single task, bug or story. The atomic unit.
Sub-item — a work item nested under a parent work item.
State — the stage a work item is in. Maps to one of five state groups.
State group — backlog / unstarted / started / completed / cancelled. What charts and progress bars actually use.
Label — a free-form tag on a work item, defined per project.
Priority — Urgent, High, Medium, Low or None.
Estimate — a size value on a work item, if the project has estimates enabled.
Cycle — a time-boxed sprint with a start and end date. One active per project.
Module — a named deliverable with a lead and a status. Long-running.
Layout — List, Board, Spreadsheet, Calendar or Timeline.
View — a saved layout + filters + grouping, shared with the project.
Page — a rich document inside a project.
Intake — an optional inbox of incoming work items awaiting triage.
Draft — a work item you started creating but didn't finish. Kept at the workspace level.

Quickstart — do all of this in ten minutes.
Projects · Work items · Cycles · Modules · Views & layouts · Pages