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
- Converting features into other entities
- 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.
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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 details 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.
- In the Health tab, you can view and post updates about whether the feature is on track or not. (Not all Productboard plans have this tab).
- 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'll find many other sections related to other fields and entity types that your feature might be associated with, including releases, objectives and integrations. You can view and edit each section's data as you like.
At the bottom, you'll see a Comments section, which lets you write messages, @-mention other users, and add reactions for quick feedback to your colleagues.
Converting features into other entities
If you realize that a feature idea would be better represented as a different item type, 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.
- (Plan-dependent) If you have access to initiatives, you can convert this feature into an initiative instead.
- Follow any on-screen prompts to complete the conversion.
You can also convert a feature into an initiative. See Initiative management in Productboard for details.
Note: You can't convert a feature into a subfeature if it has subfeatures beneath it (even archived subfeatures). Delete the subordinate subfeatures or move them beneath a different feature first.
To learn how to check for archived subfeatures, see Archive and unarchive items.