Before you bring in your full planning structure, adding a small set of items helps you get familiar with Craft in a clear, low-pressure way. A starter backlog lets you see:
How the hierarchy behaves
How items display across different views
How roadmaps update as soon as items have timeframes or fields
How Products, statuses, and dates keep work organized
This gives you a working environment immediately, without needing to configure everything upfront.
Understand your hierarchy and terminology
Craft uses a simple and flexible hierarchy that works for many types of product teams:
Products are containers, acting as a default parent to your Epics
Epics represent larger bodies of work
Features break an Epic into smaller pieces
Stories represent delivery tasks
Teams often adapt this structure to fit their own language or to line up with their development tools. Examples include:
Using “Initiatives” instead of Epics
Using “Tickets” instead of Stories
Aligning naming to match Jira or Azure DevOps structures
💡Tip: If your team uses different words for these levels, you can rename item types in Workspace Settings. Most teams customize names to match their existing language, but you can also use Craft’s Guru terminology system
Read more on the Craft.io Data Model here
Define your products
Products act as containers that help you organise your work, including your Epics, Features and Stories.
For example:
Product: Mobile App
Product: Data Platform
Product: Internal Tools
💡Pro tip: All working items in Craft.io need a parent Product, so it's best to create a few at the start of your evaluation. You can easily create and delete them, or move your work items around as you go!
Add your first Epic
An Epic represents a meaningful, high-level piece of work.
To create one:
Open your workspace
Select Add Item
Choose Epic
Select a parent Product
Give it a short, clear name
Example Epics:
New onboarding flow
Search box redesign
AI insights builder
Add Features under your Epic
Features help you break down your Epic into smaller pieces of work.
To create one:
Open the Epic
Select Add Feature
Name the Feature
Example Features:
New welcome screen
Faster search indexing
Data validation rules
💡Pro tip: Two or three Features per Epic is enough to see how structure and views behave.
Add details to bring your items to life
Once your backlog items exist, adding a few key details helps Craft display them clearly across views, roadmaps, and planning tools.
Start by filling in fields that support planning and ownership, such as status, timeframe or quarter, dates, priority, and assignee. These fields power how items appear in Table, Kanban, Timeline, and Swimlanes views, turning a simple list into a usable plan.
💡 Tip: Use the item panel to update dates, ownership, and custom fields without leaving your current view. You can also explore Guru™ templates to quickly add consistent structure and context to new items.
What comes next?
Now that you have a small backlog in place, you can start exploring how Craft displays your work across different views. This will help you understand how planning, prioritization, and timelines come together.
Need more guidance? 🙋 Our LIVE support team (at the bottom right corner of your screen) replies to ANY question!