White-label agile wall templates

A starter kit for your team’s physical wall-space

6 min readNov 18, 2018

In “Agile walls what are they good for?” I wrote about the value of physical “agile walls”.

However I often find a barrier to teams using them (and staying engaged with them) is the work needed to create and regularly update them.

So in the spirit of Alice Bartlett’s ‘A white-label slide deck’, I have created a set of white-label agile wall templates. Hopefully as a kind of starter kit to help get your physical wall-space up and running.

Getting started

If you want to jump straight in, the following link is to the
White-label agile wall templates on Google Slides

I have designed them in Google Slides because other than a web-browser you don’t need any other software to be able to use or customise the templates.

To edit the templates, you will need to “Make a copy” of my master google slides file. (Which might mean you need to create a google account if you don’t have one)

I know some of us are on locked-down computers behind particularly inflexible corporate IT policies. If so you can download a PDF of the templates should your IT department block google applications.

Templates overview

The following is a break down of V1 of my white-label agile wall templates.

I have deliberately not branded these with my name or that of Well (My current employer) because I know that sort of thing just serves to confuse or even annoy teams and their stakeholders.

They should all work nicely when printed at A4 or A3 and should work out of the box quite well on a greyscale printer.

Wall labels

Above is a set of wall labels that most of the design teams I’ve worked in have needed at one time or another. I’ve used these as column headings or just as labels for large sections of a wall.

Using the google slides template you can reword them. For example if you prefer “users” instead of “personas” or “In-progress” instead of “Doing” and so-on.

Your basic Kanban/Story Card

Hopefully a format you’re used to, if not, feel free to edit or adapt this design.

Out-of-the-box it allows for a title at the top, perhaps a bit of detail in the centre and has placeholder for people assigned to the card and the option to add a “size” for example “XL” if t-shirt sizing or perhaps a number for story points.

Hypothesis cards (handwritten)

I often work in teams that use some form of “Hypothesis Driven Design” (HDD) process. This template is for printed card templates you can use to quickly hand write them as part of workshops or group discussion (notice the cut line down the middle to separate).

Here are some good blog posts and slide-decks about the Hypothesis Driven Design process:

Hypothesis Driven Design by Andrew Duckworth
Everything is hypothesis driven design by Ben Holliday
Hypothesis Driven Design (Presentation) by Tom Morgan

Hypothesis Sheets

These are for higher level hypothesis that have been formulated by the team, it helps to type these up and print them larger (ideally A3) and place them above lower level hypotheses.

These are good for stakeholders and outsiders to see the general problems you and your team are looking to address.

Insight sheets

An insight sheet is to get visible the things you have uncovered that help you and your team make decisions or take action. I urge you to read Leisa Reichelt’s excellent post From Insights to Actions, or What should we do with this research? and this template will be fully explained.

Objectives and Key Results

If you are familiar with Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) then I have created some templates for printing them out big and clear for people to see. If you have not used OKRs yet, then this post

“Setting community goals using objectives and key results” by Ryan Hewitt (a previous colleague of mine) gives a great explanation and real world example.

I advise that they be printed and placed horizontally across the top of your wall (if you have the space) otherwise they stack in columns quite neatly.

Sprint Goals

If you work in ‘sprints’ then you should be setting clear and shared sprint goals. These templates are to make them easy to read and obvious. Quickly type them up and print them at the end of your planning session.

This might be a personal thing but these are important, I switch off if referring to these and they are on a scrap of paper in somebody else’s bad sharpie hand writing.

I’ve made them bright and readable with a clear heading.

Printing these should make it easier for people visiting your wall to see what you’re doing and are good to keep each other focussed in conversations as things to point at.

I tend to place these near the top of the wall, ideally below Objectives and Key Results but above the Kanban section part of the wall.

Using the Google Slides templates

Most of us are familiar with viewing Google Slides presentations but you may not have used the authoring aspect of the Google slides service, which is how you edit and use the white-label slides I’ve created.

Hopefully these are relatively straightforward to use, you might want to view thIs hastily recorded 5 minute screencast to get an audio-visual overview.

Screencast for using these templates in Google Slides

Creating a new card or sheet

In the Google Slides document, I have created some examples that you can edit or copy.

This might help you use those templates as intended but you can also use the New Slide button (CTRL + M) to create one from the underlying templates I’ve created.

Sometimes with some of my prepared examples it is easier to create a copy of the slide you want, you can do that by right clicking on the slide and clicking duplicate.