In Productboard, item status is a handy way to show an item's phase within the product development lifecycle. You can customize the statuses used by certain item types to align them more closely with your workflow.
The following item types have statuses:
In this article:
- What are item statuses?
- Customizing statuses
- Adding statuses
- Deleting statuses
- Custom status limitation regarding Jira integrations
- See also
What are item statuses?
Many item types have statuses, indicated by a colored icon that appears near the item's name. This is true basically everywhere you see the item, across most board types.
When you click on an item's status icon, you can choose a new status for that item.
Not all item types have the same default statuses, so you may want to add to or customize them to suit your workspace's needs.
Customizing statuses
You can customize the statuses of any item which has statuses. To do so:
- From the bottom of the Main menu, click Settings > Item customization.
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Click the statuses of the item type you wish to manage. This will open the status customization sidebar.
Note: Features and subfeatures share the same status list.
From the sidebar, you can do the following:
- Adjust the order by clicking and dragging the handle to the left of a status. This order is mirrored across the workspace.
- Adjust the color of a status by clicking its colored icon and choosing a new color.
- Adjust the name of a status by clicking on it, typing in a new one, and pressing Enter/Return on your keyboard.
- Adjust the progress percentage contributed by the status. You'll only see this option when editing feature statuses, as other item types aren't compatible with progress tracking. See Track your work progress for details.
- Delete the status by clicking the delete button on the right side.
- Click the magnifying glass to search through the statuses. Helpful if you have a lot of them.
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Create a new status by clicking the + Add status button. Give it a name and press Enter/Return on your keyboard, then manipulate it like any other status.
Adding statuses
From the status customization sidebar, you can add as many statuses as you like. Here are some best practices that you might find relevant as you consider the number and nature of statuses you might add to your workspace.
- You can't have more than one list of statuses for each item type, which means you should keep your statuses relatively high-level.
For example, if you have have two different product lines in your workspace with different gating criteria, you should build your status list to be maximally relevant to both of them, and use another tool like tasks or custom fields to differentiate their more unique phases. - Any board can be filtered to show items of a specific status, so consider which statuses would be most useful in building specific boards that answer narrow questions.
For example, if you have feature statuses called New idea and Candidate, you could then use filters to create one board that shows only new ideas and another board that shows only candidates. This is helpful when you're trying to fine-tune your plans and prioritizing what to build.
Here are a few custom feature statuses you might add to your workspace:
- New idea: For those features not yet vetted by the team or validated by other similar requests – you'll often want to filter these out during prioritization.
- Candidate: For feature ideas, you're actively tracking. These are in the running to be prioritized.
- Discovery: For feature ideas, you're currently researching, to ensure you understand the underlying user need you'd be solving. (See: product discovery)
- Announcement: Features that are done but waiting to be launched from a marketing standpoint.
- Won't do: For feature ideas you've discarded because they are not aligned with your product/strategy or are technologically infeasible. Still... maybe they'll seem more interesting a year from now.
Deleting statuses
When you click the Delete status button, you'll be asked to confirm the deletion. If the status you're trying to delete is currently assigned to at least one item, you'll be asked to reassign those items to a different status.
Select a new status from the dropdown and click Reassign and delete to confirm the deletion.
Custom status limitation regarding Jira integrations
When you sync initiatives between Productboard and Jira, only the default initiative statuses will map properly. Any custom statuses you create for initiatives in Productboard will not sync to Jira.
If your initiative statuses have been customized and no longer sync to Jira, you can restore sync functionality by restoring the statuses to their original names:
- "Upcoming"
- "In Progress"
- "Completed"
This limitation does not apply to features and subfeatures. Custom statuses for features and subfeatures will sync to Jira without issue.