Organize your timelines and columns boards with swimlanes

Jake Sawyer

Updated July 10, 2025 17:37

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.

Adding swimlanes to your roadmap

Click the Board controls button in the header of any timeline or columns board.
Under Groups, click Add grouping.
Select which element you'd like to use as a swimlane for the roadmap.

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
SWIMLANE ELEMENT	Objective	Release	Initiative	Feature
Status	✅	✅	✅	✅
Owner	✅	✅	✅	✅
Health	✅	❌	✅	✅
Task	✅	✅	✅	✅
Team	✅	❌	✅	✅
Initiative	❌	❌	❌	✅
Component	❌	❌	❌	✅
Objective	❌	❌	✅	✅
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:

Click the Board controls button in the header of any timeline or columns board.
Under Groups, click Add grouping.
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.

Click the Board controls button in the header of any timeline or columns board.
Under Groups, click Add grouping.
Select the custom field you want and swimlanes will appear for each field value.

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.

Collapsing swimlanes

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

Hover over a swimlane 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 swimlanes.

Reordering swimlanes

You can reorder swimlanes by dragging them up or down on the board, by clicking the ••• More actions button beside the swimlane name on the board, or from within Board controls, under Groups.

Global vs local order

When you reorder a swimlane 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 swimlane 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 swimlaned by status (a type of data field). If you adjust the order of the swimlanes on one board, the other boards' swimlanes 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 swimlaned by product (a type of entity), and you adjust the order of the swimlanes on one of them, the other board's swimlanes 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 swimlane change. You've adjusted the global order.

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

Adding and hiding swimlanes manually

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

Use the eye icons beside each value to show or hide that swimlane 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 swimlane.

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