Carol Munar

Product Designer

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Mari

From PRD to Kanban Board — Without a Single Meeting

Year June 2026 · Hackathon
Industry AI · Productivity
Scope UX & UI Designer
Mari — Context Input screen with Notion link field and Team Context panel

Problem

Teams don't struggle to have ideas. They struggle to agree on what to build first and who owns what — and they waste hours in planning sessions that could have been a document.

A PRD exists. The team is assembled. The roles are known. And yet the first 90 minutes of every sprint cycle are spent in a room negotiating priority and arguing over assignment. Nothing in that room requires the room.

At a Cursor-organized hackathon, a five-person team set out to eliminate that meeting entirely.

The Brief

Go from a PRD to a prioritized, assigned Kanban board without a single meeting.

Solution

I owned the full UX and UI — from flow definition to final screens. I worked alongside the developer to shape what the AI agents would expose to the user at each step, and made the key decisions on how much control to give users versus how much to let the agents handle.

Key Decisions

The PRD is the starting point, not a form.

Most planning tools begin with an empty board or a template. We started with a document. The Context Input screen accepts a Notion link or a file upload — and the team panel sits right beside it, already populated with names, roles, and availability. The brief exists. The people exist. The tool's job is to connect them, not make you recreate everything from scratch.

Make the AI reasoning visible while it works.

During analysis, the agent doesn't just show a spinner. It narrates what it's doing — "Extracting goals, constraints, and scope. Keeping only what is supported by your input." This was a deliberate trust decision. An AI that hands you a finished plan with no trace of its logic is one you'll second-guess or override by default. Showing the agent's thinking in real time makes the output feel earned rather than arbitrary.

Assign by role and availability, not by name.

The Team Context panel shows who's active and who isn't — David Kim is on PTO and toggled off. The AI maps tasks to available team members based on their function (Frontend, Backend, Design), not to whoever's name you typed in. Assignment decisions made without availability context get renegotiated in Slack an hour later. Building availability into the input layer removes that loop entirely.

Mari — Design iterations
Mari — Assignment view
Mari — Priority matrix
Mari — Kanban board output

Impact

Metric Before After
Planning session length 90 min < 2 min
People required to kick off Full team 1 person
Meetings needed At least 1 0

The full flow — from PRD link to populated board — ran in under two minutes during the demo. The product compressed what normally takes a 90-minute planning session into something a single person can trigger alone, asynchronously.

Mari wasn't named as a feature. It was named as a standard: the kind of project manager who comes in, reads the room, knows who should own what, and gets everyone moving without drama. That's what the product tries to be.

Learnings

Transparency builds trust faster than a polished result.

Showing the AI's reasoning step by step made the output feel earned. A finished plan with no visible logic is one users will override by instinct — even when the plan is correct.

Start with what already exists.

The brief exists. The team is assembled. The roles are known. Great planning tools don't ask you to rebuild the context — they read it and move forward.

Availability is a design input, not an afterthought.

Building availability into the input layer removed the renegotiation loop that normally happens in Slack an hour after planning ends. Context that lives outside the tool always gets lost.