In Productboard, feature status is a handy way to show a feature's phase within the product development lifecycle. Subfeatures and features share the same status flow.
In this article:
- What are feature statuses?
- Customizing statuses
- Deleting statuses
- Custom status examples
- Legacy status customization options
- Grouping by status ignores subfeature status
- See also
What are feature statuses?
Every feature and subfeature has a status, indicated by a colored square or circle the appear near the entity's name. This is true basically everywhere you see the entity, across most board types.
Most boards can also be filtered by status, which lets you narrow down the scope of a board for better focus on a specific stage of your workflow.
For example, you might decide only to show candidates on your board but not new ideas. This could be helpful when you're trying to fine-tune your plans after prioritizing what to build.
Filtering by status includes features and subfeatures; however, filtering by status shows all features or subfeatures of that status. A feature with a status not included in the filter may still appear if one or more of its subfeatures have the filtered status. (See below where the board has been filtered for the yellow status of In progress.)
Customizing statuses
- At the top of the Main menu, click Workspace menu > Settings.
- Scroll down to the Status Customization Section.
From here, you can add, delete, or rename status values. There are two basic statuses (called Candidate and Launched) that you can rename but cannot delete.
Note: Subfeatures and features share the same list of statuses. A subfeature's status is independent of the status of its parent feature, so a feature could have the status 'In progress' while its subfeatures still have the status 'Discovery'.
Deleting statuses
From the status customization menu, you can click on the X beside a status to delete it, but there may be existing features and subfeatures currently marked with that status. If so, you'll be prompted to indicate which status these features and subfeatures should be reassigned to.
Custom status examples
Here are a few custom 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.
Legacy status customization options
You may see three other columns in your status customization section.
Mark as completed tells a feature with that status to contribute to the progress of its parent entity. See Tracking progress on roadmaps for details.
Show on roadmap and Show on feature board allow you to indicate that features with those statuses should be automatically hidden from those respective boards. In the below example, features with the Released status will immediately disappear from any roadmap. This can be helpful for keeping your boards uncluttered. You can always render these statuses visible by using a board's filters.
Grouping by status ignores subfeature status
Note that when the Features board is grouped By status, this applies to features. Subfeatures of a different status will still be displayed beneath their parent features regardless.