Dependencies help teams understand how work items relate to each other, identify blockers, and manage scheduling risk across your roadmap.

Dependencies describe the relationships between work items. They let you define whether items are connected, one is blocking another, or work needs to finish before something else can start.

Dependencies exist at the item level, which means they follow the item across every view in Craft.io, including:

This ensures that dependency relationships remain visible regardless of how your team chooses to view or manage their roadmap.

Craft.io supports three core dependency types, each describing a different kind of relationship between two items:

Because dependencies are stored on the item, they can be surfaced in multiple views across Craft.io. Craft.io makes it easy to create and manage dependencies in all of your Workspace and Portfolio views.

The item properties panel is the central place to view, add, edit, or remove dependencies.

Here you can:

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Dependencies can be displayed as a column in Table view, making it easy to track blockers across many items at once.

The Timeline view provides the most visual representation of dependencies. Dependency lines connect items directly on the roadmap, making relationships and scheduling risks immediately visible.

To visualize dependency lines:

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Kanban and Swimlane views can display a dependency count icon on cards through the card layout settings. This allows teams to quickly understand whether an item has dependencies without leaving the board.

While these views do not display dependency lines like the Timeline view, the dependency data remains fully accessible through the item properties panel and layout.

Craft.io surfaces dependency status visually across all views.

Dependency icons change color depending on the item’s status.

This allows teams to identify blocked work at a glance.

When a blocking item is incomplete and scheduled to finish after the blocked item's end date, a delay warning appears in the Dependencies panel. This gives teams an early signal to reprioritize or adjust dates before a conflict impacts delivery.

The Timeline view provides additional visual signals for dependency conflicts.

A dotted line indicates the blocked item is scheduled to begin before its blocker finishes. These indicators update automatically as item dates change.

Keeping dependencies aligned between your planning tool and your development tool ensures that the relationships defined during roadmap planning are reflected where engineers do their day-to-day work.

For organizations with multiple workspaces, inter-workspace dependencies make cross-team relationships visible and manageable without leaving your own workspace:

Teams can see whether their items are:

This visibility helps teams coordinate delivery across larger organizations.

Creating or modifying cross-workspace dependencies requires portfolio-level permissions:

Users without these permissions can still view inter-workspace dependencies.

Inside a workspace, cross-workspace dependencies appear like any other dependency.

At the portfolio level:

This allows leadership teams to visualize cross-product dependencies on a single roadmap.

Now that you understand how dependencies work in Craft.io, you can start using them to improve planning and coordination across your roadmap.

Try the following:

When used consistently, dependencies transform your roadmap from a static plan into a collaborative planning tool that helps teams identify blockers early and deliver work more predictably.