Reading the Board What the numerals, bars and bricks on a card actually mean.

Cards carry three marks instead of words. Once you know them you can read a column at a glance, but none of them announce themselves.

Points are Roman numerals

Story points show as I, II, III, V, VIII.

That is 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8: a Fibonacci scale, where the gaps widen deliberately because estimates get less precise as work gets bigger. There is no IV, and that is not an oversight. The jump from III to V exists so nobody argues about a four.

A point off the scale shows as its own number rather than a numeral.

Priority is a set of bars

Four ascending bars, filled from the left. One filled is low, four is critical. It reads as intensity rather than a rating, which is the point: bars compare at a glance down a column in a way that words do not.

Status is three bricks

Three small blocks, coloured by where the work sits.

Colour	Status
Grey	To do
Purple	In progress
Teal	In review
Green	Done

There is no red anywhere on the board. That is deliberate. Red reads as alarm, and a board is a working surface, not an alert. Something being late is information, not an emergency, and colouring it as one makes people stop reading the colours.

The same brick shape carries through to the roadmap, so a segment on the timeline and a card on the board are speaking the same language.

Why bother learning it

Because the board is scanned far more often than it is read. Marks survive being glanced at from across a room in a standup; a column of words does not.