Boards
Boards are Kanban boards that live in your team channels. Each department can run its work on them: support tickets, the sales pipeline, hiring, invoice approvals, content, contracts, bugs. People and agents work the same cards, and you can watch it all from the channel.
A channel can hold several boards. #support might have Tickets and Bugs, and #sales might have Pipeline and Renewals. They show up as tabs at the top of the channel.
Cards
Every card has a key like SUP-42, a column, an owner (a person or an agent),
a priority, an optional due date, and any fields the board defines (customer,
amount, close date, ...).
A card keeps its own history:
- Thread. Each card has a thread in its channel. Replies there are the card's conversation.
- History. Moves, assignments, field changes and agent runs are recorded on the card. A message anywhere in the workspace that mentions the card's key links to it. Private-channel messages are linked but stay hidden from people who can't see that channel.
Open a card to see both, side by side with the board. When an agent picks up a card, it reads this history first, so it knows what was already tried, who promised what, and who owns it.
Columns
Each column has a category (backlog, active, waiting, review, done, or dismissed), which is how Shogo knows what "open" and "finished" mean on any board. Columns can also have:
- SLA hours. Cards that sit in the column longer than this are flagged as breaching. Cards past 80% of it are flagged as at risk.
- WIP limit. The board warns when a column holds more cards than this.
- An agent. Cards moved into the column are handed to that agent.
Boards can require human review. On those, agents can move cards up to a review column, but only a person can close them. Approvals, legal review and hiring boards use this.
My work and channel activity
My work lists every open card assigned to you, across all boards. A channel's activity feed shows card moves and finishes next to its messages, so you can follow a department without opening each board.
Setting up with the workspace agent
Ask the workspace agent in plain words: "Set up support and engineering so bug reports flow to engineering", or "Make #finance private and add a Collections board". It creates the channels, boards, department agents and triggers for you.
It can start from templates:
| Kind | Templates |
|---|---|
| Companies | SaaS startup, agency, e-commerce, nonprofit, freelancer, local services |
| Departments | Support, sales, marketing, engineering, people, finance, operations, legal |
| Boards | Support tickets, bug triage, engineering problems, sales pipeline, renewals, hiring candidates, onboarding checklist, finance approvals, collections, content calendar, campaigns, vendor requests, legal review, OKRs |
A department template brings its channel (People, Finance and Legal are private), its boards, a department agent with an hourly heartbeat, and anything it needs to run. For example, People adds a trigger that opens an onboarding card when someone joins the workspace. Integrations a department relies on (Zendesk, HubSpot, GitHub, ...) are listed for you to connect by hand.
The setup is written to shogo-system.yaml and applied with system_apply,
so it's reviewable and safe to run again: applying a template that's already
in place changes nothing.
Department agents
Department agents work their boards on every heartbeat. They triage new cards, chase cards that are breaching their SLA or going stale, and hand bugs to engineering by moving the card to the Bugs board. Each one follows its department's rules. For example, the finance agent never changes vendor bank details, and the support agent never promises refunds.
The workspace agent, with company operations on, sweeps every board on its heartbeat, posts a daily digest in each department channel, and posts a weekly summary in #general.
What an agent can do on boards is set by its capabilities:
- Boards lets it read and work cards.
- Board management lets it create and change boards, columns and templates.
- Company operations adds the heartbeat sweeps and digests.
- Problems turns error reports into deduplicated problem cards.
Triggers
A trigger can turn an event into a card: a new member joining, a new support ticket, a failed payment. Repeats of the same event update the open card instead of opening a new one.