TL;DR
Craft.io uses a flexible hierarchy to organize work from high-level planning through delivery. By understanding the role of Products, Epics, Features, and Stories, and aligning terminology with how your teams think, you create a backlog that is clear, scalable, and easy to operate.
Understanding your hierarchy
Before adding large numbers of items, it helps to understand how Craft.io organizes work.
By default, each Workspace includes a pre-defined hierarchy of
Products
Epics
Features
Stories
This hierarchy allows teams to plan at different levels while keeping everything connected.
💡Tip: You can rename these terms in your Workspace Settings to match your current ways of working, or you can also use Craft.io’s Guru™ terminology system to apply best-practice naming and structure where helpful.
How parent and child relationships work in Craft.io
Items in Craft.io are connected through parent-child relationships.
This means:
Higher-level items represent broader scope or intent
Lower-level items represent the work required to deliver that scope
Progress and status roll up through the hierarchy automatically
These relationships allow Craft.io to present consistent context across Backlog, Table views, Roadmaps, and Dashboards without duplicating data.
Products as the foundation of your backlog
In Craft.io, all working items belong to a Product.
The Product acts as a default parent that:
Keeps your backlog organized and easy to navigate
Makes filtering, grouping and reporting easier
Helps teams understand where work belongs at a glance
Teams often start with one or two Products when setting up a Workspace. This keeps things tidy early on and gives you room to refine your structure later.
Even if your organization does not think in terms of “products” internally, using Products in Craft.io provides a stable top-level structure for planning and visibility.
💡Tip: If you ever need to delete a Product, open the Product panel and use the three dots by the Product name to delete it.
Epics, Features, and Stories
Craft.io uses multiple item types to represent work at different levels of detail.
Epics represent large bodies of work. They are commonly used for planning, prioritization, and communicating direction.
Features sit under Epics and represent deliverable pieces of value. They help track progress and often connect planning to delivery.
Stories represent detailed delivery tasks. Some teams manage Stories directly in Craft.io, while others track them only in delivery tools and link their progress to Craft.io via integrations.
Using these levels together allows teams to plan strategically while maintaining clear visibility into delivery, without forcing unnecessary detail into early planning stages.
Choosing Terminology That Matches How Your Team Thinks
Different teams use different language - and that’s expected.
Craft.io allows you to rename item types in your workspace settings so the hierarchy matches your existing ways of working.
For example, some teams rename:
Epics → Initiatives
Features → Capabilities
Stories → Tasks
You can also use Craft.io’s Guru™ terminology system to apply best-practice naming and structure where helpful.
What’s Next?
Once your hierarchy and terminology are in place, the next step is learning how to organize and work with a growing backlog - using views, filters, custom fields, and dependencies.
👉 Checkout the next article in this collection: Organizing and Working with a Growing Backlog