Hi Rachel,
Kanban follows a ‘pull system’ to move work through development process rather than planning the work in timeboxed iterations. As there are only a certain number of slots available for each column on the Kanban board, the team pulls work from the previous stage whenever they find an empty slot on the board. In this way the team restricts/limits the amount of work in progress (WIP) which in turn improves productivity and increases the visibility of issues and bottlenecks. The limit for WIP is determined based on the team’s capacity.
Hope this helps.