Organize items into groups (or swimlanes)

Jake Sawyer

Updated March 18, 2026 12:48

Pricing banner: The following capabilities are available on all Productboard plans.

Groups help you visualize categories of items horizontally. If you're building a roadmap, you might call them swimlanes (though the word 'swimlane' doesn't actually appear in Productboard).

Groups can be added to grids, timelines, and columns boards. Grouping, like filtering, is board-specific, meaning one board's grouping does not affect another board's grouping.

Adding groups to grids, timelines, and columns boards

Groups can be added to grids, timelines, and columns boards. To do so:

Click the Board controls button in the header.
Under Groups, click Add grouping.
Select which element you'd like to use as a group for the roadmap. There are many options for grouping, including custom dropdown fields.
Click Apply when you're done.

You can add up to two levels of groups to a single board. See Nesting groups below.

Group option eligibility

The choices you have for which elements to group by will change depending on the main item of your board. The main item is whichever item is listed first in the Items section in Board controls.

For example, if your main item type is Initiative, you can't group your board by product, because initiatives can't be assigned to products. Features, however, can be assigned to products, so if your main item type is Feature, you can group your board by product.

The following table describes which main items can be grouped by which elements:

CAN GROUP BY	MAIN ITEM TYPE
CAN GROUP BY	Objective	Release	Initiative	Feature	Component (Grid only)	Product (Grid only)
Status	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	❌
Owner	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Health	✅	❌	✅	✅	❌	❌
Task	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Team	✅	❌	✅	✅	❌	❌
Initiative	❌	❌	❌	✅	❌	❌
Component	❌	❌	❌	✅	❌	❌
Objective	❌	❌	✅	✅	❌	❌
Product	❌	❌	❌	✅	❌	❌
Release	❌	❌	✅	✅	❌	❌
Single-select Custom field	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Multi-select Custom field	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Member Custom field	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅

Note: Here are a few things to remember regarding group option eligibility:

The four universal grouping elements are task, owner, custom single/multi-select field, and custom member field.

When a board is grouped by status, it’s grouped by the status of your main item type.

Timelines and columns boards can have neither products nor components set as their main item, but you can still group features on those boards by product or component.

A product group will not appear on a timeline board until at least one of its features meets the timeline's inclusion criteria. For example, in a release plan or sprint plan timeline, a product will show up as a group once one of its features is assigned to one of the selected releases.

Collapsing groups

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

Hover over a group and click on the chevron.
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 groups, but doing so won't affect anyone else's view.

Reordering groups

You can reorder groups from within Board controls by dragging on the dotted handles, or by dragging the groups up or down on the board directly, or by clicking the ••• More actions button beside the group name on the board (timelines and columns boards only).

Global vs local order

When you reorder a group that's based on the values of a data field (like status), that order remains local, which means it won't affect the order of that field's values anywhere else in your workspace.

However, when you reorder a group that's based on an entity (releases, objectives, initiatives, products, components, or features), you're adjusting the global order for that entity type, meaning the order of items of that type will change in every other globally-ordered location—grids and columns boards (but not timelines), certain menus, and so on.

Example: Say you have two boards grouped by status (a type of data field). If you adjust the order of the groups on one board, the other boards' groups will be unaffected, as will the order of the statuses in the filter menu and in your workspace settings. You've adjusted the local order.

But if you have two boards grouped by product (a type of entity), and you adjust the order of the groups on one of them, the other board's groups will be adjusted the same way, and if you were to open the filter menu or a grid board with products on it, you'd see that the products have been rearranged to match your group change. You've adjusted the global order.

Note: The above logic applies to adjusting the order of columns on a columns board as well.

Nesting groups

You can add up to two groupings on a single board. The second grouping you add will nest beneath the first. This can 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 lowest-level groups.

Adding and hiding groups manually

From Board controls > Groups, you can hide groups to reduce clutter, or add empty groups to make it easier to assign items to them.

Use the eye icons beside each value to show or hide that group on your board. This functions independently from any filters you've set.

You can also hide groups from the board itself by clicking Hide grouping beside the name of the group (timelines and columns boards only).

Note: Only top-level groups can be hidden at this time.

How grouping works behind the scenes

The selected grouping is applied to all the items on your board. In this example, you can only see features and subfeatures in the release column that are assigned to that specific release.

When a grouping is not supported by a particular item type on the board, the entity is treated as not matching, but it’s not excluded entirely. This provides a more consistent and intuitive experience—especially when multiple groupings are applied—by ensuring unsupported entities are still visible under the "Not assigned" group.

Grouping is applied only to the closest instance of a recursive entity type. For example, objectives are recursive entity types because you can have one objective be a child of another objective, which in turn can be the child of a third objective, and so on. In this case, a linked feature is considered to belong to the objective directly assigned to it, but not to that objective’s ancestor objectives.

Extending context by showing indirectly linked items

Seeing only those items that belong to a group is the desired behavior in most use cases, like release planning or sprint planning, where you group initiatives, features, or subfeatures by releases.

But there are other scenarios where you might want to extend the context and see child items that don’t belong to the group. A good example for that is strategic planning where you group initiatives and features by objectives. When you link an initiative to an objective but don’t want to manually link all of its features, you can still surface them in the objective’s column. Simply uncheck the Hide indirectly linked items control, and you’ll see those child items—even if they aren’t directly linked—providing additional context.

This extended context doesn’t apply to the “Not assigned” column. If a child item is assigned to a grouping criteria, it’s not included in the “Not assigned” group as a contextual child item.

Hierarchies with mandatory relationships, like the product hierarchy, are considered direct relationships, so Hide indirectly linked items doesn’t have an effect on their visualization.

The default state of this checkbox depends on the board configuration because it represents different use cases where different settings are expected:

Hide indirectly linked items is checked by default for grouping by releases.
Hide indirectly linked items is unchecked by default for grouping by attributes or other supported item types.

Grouping Transitivity

Grouping transitivity determines whether the main item should be grouped only by direct relationships or also by indirect ones. This is configurable with the Hide indirectly linked items settings too.

For example, grouping features and subfeatures by releases with Hide indirectly linked items checked only shows features that are assigned directly to the release. But if you deselect the checkbox, it will also show features that are assigned indirectly to that release via their relationship with a linked initiative.