In this article, we’ve gathered the most frequently asked questions related to structuring your work and teams within a Craft.io Workspace.
Do I need multiple workspaces?
One Workspace in Craft.io typically houses an entire product management team. Multiple Workspaces should only be considered when you need to reflect very independent lines of business within your organization, and specifically where there’s no need for unified prioritization or dependency management across these lines of business.
How many Products can I create inside a Craft.io Workspace?
A single workspace can house an unlimited number of Craft.io Products. Each PM can decide to filter their views to focus on the Product and Epics most relevant to them.
How do I best reflect my company’s Product hierarchy or structure in Craft.io?
The best place to start is by reviewing our data model so that you can understand our organizational layers, how they interact and their intended purpose.
Here’s a quick overview:
In Craft.io, a Product is a high-level organizational layer, representing a large aspect of your end-users’ customer experience (e.g., Analytics) or a group of components (e.g., Integrations). Each Workspace can have a number of Products and while it varies by organization, a product manager will typically be responsible for one or more Craft.io Products. Each product manager can filter their views to focus on the Products relevant to their role.
Sitting beneath a Product are Epics, reflecting larger aspects of your Product’s capability (e.g., Filter Enhancements). These Epics are further broken down into Features, reflecting smaller and more manageable building blocks (e.g., Multi-select of items). In Agile terminology, Epics typically map to Epics, while Features map to User Stories.
Looking at this bottom-up and deciding how your existing features and epics aggregate up within your organization can be a useful way to help think through the best setup within Craft.io.
An additional consideration in your setup will be integrations to development tools. Very often, product managers will be transitioning from a project focused approach where their product goals are delivered across multiple dev tool projects. Craft.io can help here by allowing you to maintain a product-centric view while pushing items into specific dev tool projects as required.
To sum up:
Multiple workspaces are typically not recommended for product management teams unless the work in question is very separate and there’s no requirement for unified prioritization, planning and dependency management.
Products in Craft.io help you organize your Epics and Features. Look at your existing work, specifically your equivalents of Epics and Features and decide how many organizing layers you will need.
A product manager will typically be responsible for one or more Products in Craft.io and their views can be filtered to just those Products.
When it comes to dev tool integrations, you have the flexibility to maintain a product-centric view while being able to push items from a Craft.io Product to specific dev tool Projects or instances.
Each company’s needs will be different so if you’re unsure of how to best structure your Workspace in Craft.io, please reach out to our Customer Success team who will be happy to help you through the decision.
What’s the best way to organize our teams?
Organizing your team structure is easy in Craft.io. By default, when you sign up to Craft.io, we’ve included a default set of teams that reflect a simple functional organizational structure, containing functions like Product Management, UX and R&D.
As an alternative to grouping teams based on organizational function, you can decide to group members into multi-disciplinary Teams (also known as Squads, Units or Scrum teams) where each Craft.io Team contains a mix of individual skill sets like Product Management, Design, Development, and QA.
One important consideration when deciding how to organize your teams will be workflow: teams organized based on function (the default set-up in Craft.io) can have function-specific workflows, whereas multi-disciplinary teams will need to have broader, less granular workflows set up. For more information on workflows, see the next FAQ below.
You can rename existing teams, add new teams, add specific members to a team and set specific permissions for each of them under the Team Manager screen accessed via the left sidebar.
Read more in our article Managing Your Teams.
Can I create individual workflows for different teams?
Craft.io allows you to have a dedicated workflow for each Team and each Team’s workflow can be customized. For example, your UX team can manage a workflow of ‘Discovery, Wireframe, Prototype and Done’ which will help that team track the progress of assigned items through a very targeted workflow.
To view and edit a workflow, visit Planning > Manage Features and select ‘Group by: Workflow’ and ‘View as: Kaban’. Toggle the ‘assignment’ dropdown to hone in on a specific person or team, then edit as required.
Workflow is an important consideration when deciding how to structure your Teams in Craft.io. In the case that you require separate workflows for each function, e.g. UX, Legal, Marketing, then set up a team for each function and create custom workflows for each team. Otherwise, create multi-disciplinary teams with a single, unified workflow.
Read more on how to set up workflows in our Using Workflow for Task Management article.
Who should I invite to Craft.io and what permissions should they receive?
We’ve created a dedicated article to help you think through setting up new team members in Craft.io. Once new team members register as users, you can direct them to this useful onboarding article introducing them to the fundamentals of Craft.io.
Feel free to contact us at support@craft.io if you have any additional questions.