Product managers today have a wide variety of responsibilities. Whether it’s product planning and execution or defining a product’s vision and leading cross-functional teams, product managers are an essential part of their organization’s success.

One major responsibility product managers face on a day-to-day basis is how to best build and manage features. Building features includes working with designers, developers, and others – and these roles can all be in charge of more than one step in the process. Product managers are what make this process go – making sure that everyone collaborates effectively, all of the relevant stakeholders are updated, and features make their way to release.

Managing these workflows and processes is made easy in Craft.io with our Workflow & Statuses feature. The Status field in Craft.io is cross-team, per item, and available for your entire workspace, rather than team or team member-specific. This offers you a comprehensive way to create, control, and own the entire product workflow process.

You can set up the statuses through your Workspace settings (Workspace Settings > Workflow & Statuses).

From the Workflow & Statuses tab, define the statuses that you want to use for your product workflow. Statuses are used to describe the different steps involved in building and improving your product; and they can be set for all of your working items – Epics, Features and Sub-features.

You can use Craft.io’s default workflow, or customize it according to your specific way of working. You can edit the default statuses’ names by clicking on the pencil icon next to each status, as well as change their color by hovering over the colored circle next to their name. You can also edit the workflow, which means changing the statuses’ order by clicking on the errors next to the status name.

Each status is set up per category. Status categories are:

• Open

• In Progress

• Done

• Closed

For each category, you can add as many statuses as you want, by clicking '+ Add Status' button at the bottom of the screen.

For example, 'Dev done' and 'Deployed' statuses can both be part of the Done status category. The exception to this is Closed, which can only have the 'Completed' status associated with it.

Note: Items set to Closed will be hidden throughout the system (except for in the Strategic Roadmap), while items set to statuses belonging to the Done category will be referred to as Done items in various views and inside items' stats.

As statuses are at the core of the product management work, they are reflected in various views in Craft.io - Spec Editor, Table, Kanban & Strategic Roadmap.

These status updates can be made at both the Epic and Feature level. To give an item a new status, just click on its status field and select one from the dropdown.

For example - In the Spec editor, the status field will appear below the item's description:

There are many ways to visualize and utilize statuses - for example you can add a status column in the Table view, as well as group, filter and sort by status:

You can also view the status of each item that is presented on the Strategic Roadmap:

A core view we recommend using is Product Process (Inside "Track") which includes a Kanban board with Grouping by Status and Filtering Type by Epic. This view will allow you to easily manage your product workflow and update the status of items by dragging them between the columns:

Note: When you filter by status, it will always show your active items by default. Once you mark an item as Completed, it will no longer appear in any of your views. However, if you want to see Completed items also, you can add filter 'Status' and click on 'Select All' to see those items as well.

As mentioned above, items are counted as done if they’re in the 'Done' or 'Closed' status categories. You can see the status of a set of items by selecting them all and then clicking on the 'View Stats' button from the multi-select bar.

In addition, each Release counts the number of Done items in the same manner. You can see the number of Done items per a Release by clicking on the Release name from the Strategic Roadmap, or by going to the Release Summary and clicking on the 'Show More' button.

Another important input about an item’s progress is called the Assignee Progress. Once a task is assigned to a team member, they can mark their progress by setting the Assignee Progress field to either To Do, In Progress, or Done.

The Assignee Progress status can be referred to as a sub-status within a particular status. For example, if the item is In Design, and the UX designer assignee marks it as Done, then Done is a sub-status within the In Design status. This means that the product manager can review the UX work and promote the item on to the next status.

In order to edit the Assignee Progress, after assigning an item to a specific Team or Team member, simply click on the item's name to open the Properties panel, and then edit the Assignee Progress field (the default is "To do").

To help you filter and stay on track of the status of items for each assignee, you can use the Assigned to filter. To add this filter to Table/Kanban/Timeline view, click on ‘Filters’, then ‘Add Filter’ and select Assigned to. Then hover over the assignee name and additional menu will open with the Assignee Progress options: To do, In progress, Done. Now you can filter for each assignee the items that have not started, are in progress, or completed.

Next up: Learn how to define Status Automation Rules.