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 fields
- Associating a custom field with specific item types
- See also
Adding new custom fields
You can create new custom fields in two ways:
- From the Main menu, click More > Data > Custom fields.
- Click Create in the top right corner.
- From the Add columns sidebar on any features board or grid, click Custom fields, then Create custom field at the bottom of the panel.
Note: Option #2 is also how you go about adding an existing custom field to your board as a column. Just toggle it on using the slider to the right!
Either way, you'll see a dropdown menu that lists every type of custom field you can create. Pick one to get started.
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. This could be useful for keeping track of who is responsible for a feature with regard to design, development, documentation, marketing, or product management (though this will typically be signified using the native owner field).
You can use a single select or multi select dropdown field depending if you would like to allow single or multiple values to be selected.
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), platform support (e.g., iOS, Android, web app).
These fields also support any emoji you like!
Display the projected revenue for a feature, the reach (# 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, CX) to force-rank feature candidates and record their rankings before sorting/filtering.
Note: We recommend using a t-shirt sizing scale for this with a numeric field so that the allocation report can be calculated. Using a dropdown field uses cannot be used for this calculation.
Display small notes, URLs, the name of the team that is working on a feature, names of additional stakeholders, etc.
If you precede your URLs by http:// or https:// the custom text column will display a URL launcher to help you navigate in one click:
Use the Description Custom Field to display a long formatted text such as Description, Acceptance Criteria, and Release notes.
Use the Custom Date field for a lot of different use cases:
- Add the go-to-market activity dates to your features like sales enablement date or press release date.
- Highlights key milestone dates (Alpha, Beta, GA, etc.) on the initiatives or features.
- Track your tasks’ due dates.
- With multiple date fields you can compare the committed target date to the actual release timeline.
Note: Custom date fields are not yet represented on roadmaps and cannot be used to display milestones on timelines or columns boards.
Visualizing custom fields as a column
You can add a custom field to your board by clicking the Add columns button, then Custom fields, then toggling the slider beside an existing custom field.
Visualizing custom fields on a roadmap
Dropdown fields
- Click the
Configure button on the top right of the roadmap.
- Click on the
Labels section and select which Drop down the field you want to visualize
Project member fields
- Click the
- Click on the
People section and select which Custom Member field you want to visualize.
Bulk editing custom fields
Click the checkboxes beside each feature name to add it to your bulk selection. Shift-click to add multiple features at once. When you're happy with your selection, use the bulk edit sidebar to make your changes. You can edit any type of custom field this way except Description fields.
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.
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.