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5 benefits of an online whiteboard over the one on the wall

If you’ve worked in an office, you’ve met the whiteboard that says DO NOT ERASE.

The handwriting belongs to someone who left two reorgs ago. The diagram underneath is load-bearing, probably. Nobody remembers what the arrow in the middle means. Nobody will erase it either, because the sign was very clear.

That board is the best planning tool most teams ever had. It’s brilliant for the hour you’re standing at it. After that it’s a museum with one exhibit, and the museum is closed to anyone who isn’t in the building.

This post first ran in 2021, when teams were moving everything online at once. The reasons an online whiteboard helps have outlasted the reason people went looking. Here are five things the board on the wall can’t do. Each comes with a catch, because none of them happen just because somebody bought a tool.

If you’re already sold and need to pick one, skip to how to choose an online whiteboard.

1. The people who aren’t in the room can still hold a marker

Two people at an outdoor café table sharing one sticker-covered laptop
Two people, one laptop, no whiteboard. Judging by the stickers, strong opinions about tooling.

A wall board has one audience: whoever is standing in front of it. Everyone else gets a photo in Slack, taken at an angle, with a glare spot right where the important part was.

Remote collaboration means teams working toward the same goal from different places, often in real time, through tools they share. An online whiteboard is the shared place. Sticky notes and connections go up while everyone watches, and they’re still there tomorrow for the person in another time zone.

A shared board won’t fix a bad meeting, though. It just makes the bad meeting searchable, and somebody still has to run the session.

2. You can see the whole project at once

Project planning with several people is a game of telephone. One person whispers a sentence, it goes around the circle, and what comes out the other end has nothing to do with what went in. Every handoff and every status update loses a little.

Putting the work where everyone can see it is the fix. When the plan is visual, people spot the risks and see who’s on what without having to ask. Decisions get faster when everyone is looking at the same picture instead of five different memories of it.

The picture only helps if where things sit means something. Boxes and arrows you could shuffle without changing the meaning are decoration. We wrote more about that line between diagrams and maps in text is for machines, maps are for us. On a user story map, left to right is what the user does in order and top to bottom is priority, so moving a card changes the plan.

3. Everything lives in one place

A teammate shared the file last week. It’s in an email, or in Slack, or in a Google Drive folder three levels deep, and you’ll find it right after the meeting where you needed it. Every tool built to connect a team adds one more place for things to hide.

An online whiteboard can be the place the conversation and the work sit together. In CardBoard, a card carries its own description, acceptance criteria, comments, and file attachments. You can drag an image onto the canvas as an image sticker, including that angled photo of the wall board, so it finally lives next to the work it describes.

One place only works if it’s the place. If half the team keeps the real decisions in a thread somewhere else, the board becomes a very nice-looking archive of the decisions you didn’t make.

4. The quiet people get a turn

One person pointing at sticky notes on a wall while four teammates sit at their laptops
One person at the wall, four at their laptops. Guess whose ideas made it onto the wall.

In a meeting, the loudest person gets the marker. It’s hard to hear everyone in a big group, harder with introverts in the room, and harder still when some people are on a video call with a two-second delay. The best ideas aren’t reserved for the loudest speakers. They just usually lose to them.

An online whiteboard lets people contribute without interrupting. Everyone can add their own sticky notes at once, so a brainstorm isn’t one person transcribing. On CardBoard, reactions let people signal “I’m in” or “this needs discussion” on any card, and comments let them make the longer case. An @-mention in a comment notifies the person it’s for. Someone who missed the meeting can catch up on the board and add their thoughts afterward.

We learned the catch on this one ourselves. CardBoard used to have a formal voting mode that opened, closed, and declared a winner. We replaced it with reactions, because the ceremony turned out to be more workflow than teams wanted. For a hard decision, use a structured board like a prioritization matrix instead of counting thumbs.

5. You can look at the problem from more than one angle

A spreadsheet is great for data. It’s less great when you need a persona, or a mind map, or a picture of where the market has a gap. So you add another tool, and another, and the project gets more complicated than the product.

An online whiteboard can hold every stage of the work. A project might go through:

  1. A mind map to get every idea on the table
  2. An opportunity canvas to find the gap worth solving
  3. A persona, to be specific about who you’re solving it for
  4. A user story map to break the solution into releases
  5. A 4 Ls retrospective to learn what to do better next time

In CardBoard each of those is its own map type, chosen when you create the board. They sit in the same workspace, and cards can be copied between boards.

Of course, five boards is five boards. Keep the ones that are still true and retire the rest, or you’ll have built a DO NOT ERASE sign with a search bar.

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