Organize your New roadmaps (timelines and columns boards) with swimlanes

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You use roadmaps to tell stories about your products, and most stories have chapters. Here's how to use swimlanes on timelines and columns boards to help you communicate your plans to stakeholders with clarity. 

Note: This article covers New board swimlanes only. For information about swimlanes on Legacy roadmaps, see Organize your Legacy roadmaps with swimlanes.

In this article:

Relevant to new boards only

Adding swimlanes to your roadmap

  1. Click the Groupby.svg Group by button in the header of any timeline or columns board.
  2. Select which element you'd like to use as a swimlane for the roadmap. 

gimp-swimlane-1.gif

Note: A product will not appear on your timeline until at least one of its features meets the roadmap's inclusion criteria. For example, in a Release plan or Sprint plan roadmap, a product will show up as a swimlane once one of its features is assigned to one of the selected releases.

The following elements are available as swimlanes on timelines and columns boards:

SWIMLANE ELEMENT MAIN ITEM TYPE
Objective Release Initiative Feature
Status
Owner
Team
Initiative
Bottom level-component
Product
Release
Single-select Custom field
Multi-select Custom field
Member Custom field

Product swimlanes

Product swimlanes are generated automatically from your product hierarchy. To create a new product in your roadmap, you'll need to create a new product in your features hierarchy first.

To add Product swimlanes:

  1. Click Groupby.svg Group by.

  2. Under Group by, select Product. You'll see your products appear as swimlanes on your roadmap.

Custom field swimlanes

If you've created custom dropdown fields, you can organize your roadmap by those field values.

  1. Click Groupby.svg Group by.

  2. Near the bottom of the Group By menu, there is a section of custom field swimlanes. You can select between Member, Single-select, and Multi-select.

  3. Select the custom field you want and swimlanes will appear for each field value.

swimlane-4.gif

Nesting swimlanes

It is possible to nest swimlanes up to two levels. This should provide deeper categorization, better visualization of complex deliverables, and a new level of storytelling. For example:

  • Group by status and team to get a multi-team overview of the status of ongoing initiatives
  • Group by team and owner (or custom field member) to understand what initiatives are driven per each team member
  • Group by custom field (representing, for example, Investment buckets such as retention and growth) and team to understand where you are investing
  • Group by product and component to visualize your product hierarchy on the roadmap
Note: For now, it is only possible to drag items between the lower-level swimlanes.

swimlane-2.gif

Collapsing swimlanes

Sometimes you need to temporarily hide a swimlane. To do that:

  1. Hover over a swimlane and click on the chevron.
  2. The collapsed state is saved only for you and will stay on the roadmap even after a refresh.
Note: Contributors and viewers are able to collapse and expand swimlanes. This is the only modification they are able to make, and will only change their view of the roadmap.
Note: For now, it is only possible to collapse swimlanes on timeline boards.

gimp-swimlane-6.gif

See also

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