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 include 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 status order by clicking on the arrows next to the status name.

Each status is set up under one of these categories:

• Open

• In Progress

• Done

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

For example, 'In Design' and 'Dev in Progress' statuses can both be part of the In Progress status category.

Note: The 'Completed' Status doesn't have a category and can't be deleted.

After you define your product status workflow, and given that you've integrated your Craft.io instance with your devtool instance, you can define status automation rules: how the dev status affects the Craft.io status.

Read more about How to automate Status update from your Dev tool.

As the item status is essential data for the product management work, it is visible in all Craft.io views - Table, Kanban, Swimlane, Timeline, etc.

To give an item a new status, just click on its status field and select one from the dropdown.

By default, the views above show only active items. Items set to 'Completed' will be hidden throughout the system. To view these items - add a 'Status' filter to any view, and click 'Select All' to include 'Completed' in the list of statuses displayed.

The progress of an item is calculated based on how many of its direct child items are set to status Done.

For example, an Epic with 2 Features set to Done and 1 Feature set to In progress, will show 66% completion in the Progress field.

The progress of a Quarter is calculated based on how many of its items are set to status Done.
In the Table, Swimlane, and Kanban views, when you group by Quarter, you can click on the icon shown below to view the Quarter's progress based on the Status categories.

In addition, in all views that are grouped by Quarter, you can click on the name of the quarter to view advanced Quarter progress tracking.

Read more about How to track your item's deployment progress.

Next up: Learn how to define Status Automation Rules.