Your hierarchy is the backbone of your Productboard workspace. Features live in your hierarchy and represent ideas you can plan, prioritize, and complete. Adding features to your hierarchy should be one of the first things you do when setting up Productboard for the first time, so here's how to do that.
In this article:
- Create a feature and define important fields
- Other ways to add features
- Viewing a feature's details
- See also
Create a feature and define important fields
You can create features from almost any board type, but here's the most straightforward way:
- From the Main menu, click Products > Product hierarchy.
- You'll see a list of your existing hierarchy entities. Hover over a product or component and click the
Add under button, then select Add feature from the dropdown.
- Give the feature a name and press Enter/Return on your keyboard to create another feature or click away to stop creating new features.
Other ways to add features
You don't have to build all your features manually. If you have a backlog outside of Productboard, you can probably import it. Here are a few different methods:
- Import features from a spreadsheet
- Import Jira issues into Productboard
- Use Zapier to automatically import features from a spreadsheet
Viewing a feature's details
Clicking on a feature anywhere in Productboard opens up the detail sidebar, which displays data about that feature. This sidebar contains a few tabs that show you different things.
- Under the Detail tab, you’ll see descriptions of your idea, any related subfeatures, and relevant files or attachments.
- By clicking on the Insights tab, you’ll see any insights linked to this feature.
- The Portal tab lets you surface this feature on your portal(s) and give it its own external-facing name and description.
If you scroll down the Detail tab, you can find Fields, Comments, and History.
- In the Fields section, you can see and edit all the data fields that are related to this feature.
- Use the Comments section to write messages, @-mention other users, and add reactions for quick feedback to your colleagues.
- Under History, you can find a log of all the activities that took place in that feature.
Converting features into components or subfeatures
Warning: This is only available on the Legacy experience (that means features boards or older roadmaps). It is not available on grids, timelines, column boards, or other parts of the New experience. If your workspace was created in 2025, you don't have access to the Legacy experience.
If you realize that a feature idea would be better represented as a component or a subfeature, you can convert it into that item type without having to recreate it.
- Click on the feature to open its sidebar.
- In the top right corner of the feature's Detail tab, click the ••• More actions button.
- Select Convert to component or Convert to subfeature from the dropdown menu.
Note: You can't convert a feature into a subfeature if it has subfeatures beneath it. Delete the subordinate subfeatures or move them beneath a different feature first.