Create custom fields to associate numerical values, text, URLs, or workspace members with each feature.
This can be especially helpful for capturing reference information on your board, like the URL for a feature's design mockups, what team is working on the feature, or which designer or developer has been assigned to it.
In many cases, you'll also be able to filter your board by these fields and their values!
In this article:
- Adding new custom fields
- Types of custom fields
- Visualizing custom fields as a column
- Visualizing custom fields on a roadmap
- Bulk editing custom field values
- Associating a custom field with specific item types
- See also
Adding new custom fields
Only admins and makers can create new custom fields. There are two ways to do so:
Option 1:
- From the Main menu, click Settings > Custom fields.
- Click Create in the top right corner and select the type of custom field you want to create.
Option 2:
- On any grid board, click Add columns.
- Click Create new and select the type of custom field you want to create.
Types of custom fields
There are several types of custom fields:
Use the project member custom field to assign features to a colleague who is a fellow member of your Productboard workspace. Use this to track who is responsible for a feature's design, development, documentation, marketing, or product management (though the native owner field typically signifies this instead).
Dropdown custom fields are great for selecting predefined values such as investment categories (e.g., growth, retention, or technical improvements), marketing launch tier, work type (e.g., hypothesis, feature, improvement, bug, issue, need, delight), and platform support (e.g., iOS, Android, web app).
Display the projected revenue for a feature, the reach (number of users impacted), Fibonacci numbers (complexity), a custom prioritization score, t-shirt size estimate, or other KPIs.
Ask teams who interact with your customers every day (sales, support, and CX) to force-rank feature candidates and record their rankings before sorting or filtering.
Display small notes, URLs, the name of the team working on a feature, names of additional stakeholders, and so on.
Precede your URLs with http:// or https:// so the custom text column displays a URL launcher, letting you navigate in one click.
Use custom description fields to display long formatted text such as description, acceptance criteria, and release notes. Click the field to open a full editor window.
This differs from an item's actual Description field, which you access by clicking the feature directly.
Use custom date fields for a lot of different use cases:
- Add go-to-market activity dates to your features, such as a sales enablement date or press release date.
- Highlight key milestone dates (Alpha, Beta, GA, etc.) on initiatives or features.
- Track your tasks' due dates.
- With multiple date fields, compare the committed target date to the actual release timeline.
Note: Custom date fields aren't represented on roadmaps and can't display milestones on timeline or columns boards.
Visualizing custom fields as a column
You can add a custom field to your grid board like so:
- Click Add columns.
- Find the custom field(s) you want to visualize and toggle them on. (Use the search bar to find them faster.)
Note: Some fields may not appear when you look for them. This happens when your board is filtered to show item types which have not been associated with the custom fields you're looking for. See Associating a custom field with specific item types below for details.
Visualizing custom fields on a roadmap
Custom fields (and other field types) can be visualized on roadmap cards by adding them as attributes. See Customize your roadmaps with card attributes for details.
Bulk editing custom field values
You can edit the custom field values of up to 1,000 items at a time. To do so:
- Open a grid.
- Click the checkboxes beside each feature name to add it to your bulk selection.
- When you're happy with your selection, click Edit on the toolbar at the bottom of your screen to open the bulk edit sidebar.
- Use the bulk edit sidebar to make your changes. You can edit any type of custom field this way except Description fields.
- Once you've made your changes, click Save.
Associating a custom field with specific item types
Custom fields can be associated with specific item types to help manage the amount of noise in your workspace. Associating a custom field with an item type limits the places where that field will appear and also shows users when the field should be used.
You can edit field assignments from Settings > Custom fields. Click on a field to open its sidebar and scroll down to the Assigned item types section.
In the example below, the custom dropdown field Domain is only associated with structural items like products and components, as well as work items like initiatives, features and subfeatures. It will not appear in the detail sidebars for items of any other type.
Note: By default, custom fields aren't assigned to any item type. When you create a new custom field, make sure to assign it to at least one item type, or you won't be able to use it!