Building features is a complex process that often involves many functions in the organization. Everyone from PMs and designers, to writers, developers and more, take part in this process. In some cases, different functions can be in charge of more than one step in the process. PMs, in addition to their core function (e.g. understanding the problem, writing specs and more) usually own and lead the process itself. They make sure that everyone collaborates effectively, connecting between the different functions, updating stakeholders, and basically pushing the features forward and making things happen.

Jira and other development tools have their own workflow. This workflow is focused on just one aspect of the process mainly developing and testing. As product managers, we know that there’s a lot more to building features than that: before development even starts there's spec writing and design, for example. But there’s also plenty to do after development is over - updating the help center, release notes, gradual deployment and A/B testing are just the tip of the iceberg.

Today in Craft.io we’re pleased to present a better way to create, control and own the product process using our new workflow & statuses functionalities. Statuses are now global in the sense they’re cross-teams; this replaces the previous Craft.io workflow, which was team related.

Defining statuses

Statuses are used to describe the different steps involved in building and improving your product. Statuses can be set for all of your working items - epics, stories and sub-stories. To define your process, just go to settings -> Workspace settings -> Workflow & Statuses. You can use Craft.io’s default workflow, or customize it according to your specific way of working. Each status belongs to one of four status categories - Open, In Progress, Done & Closed. Craft.io refers to these status categories throughout the system. 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 the various views and stats. You can add as many statuses as you like to the various status categories (for example, dev done and release notes written statuses can both be part of the Done status category), with the exception of Closed, which can never have more than one status associated with it.

Note: Closed status category replaces the former Craft.io released status, and is now part of the whole process.

As statuses are at the core of the product management work, they are reflected in the various views - Spec Editor, Table, Kanban & Strategic Roadmap. To give an item a new status, just click on its status and select one from the dropdown. There are many ways to visualize and utilize statuses - you can add a status column in the table, as well as group, filter and sort by status. Try grouping by status in a Kanban view. This will allow you to easily update the status of items by dragging them between the columns.

As mentioned above, status views refer to items as done if they’re in the Done or Closed status category. You can see the status of a set of items by selecting them all and then clicking on the status icon from the multi-select bar. In addition, each release now counts the number of done items in the same manner.

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 status to either To Do, In Progress, or Done. This status will also be added on the assignee image. The Assignee Progress status can also be referred to as a substatus 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 substatus 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.

We hope you enjoy Craft.io’s latest features! Jump into Craft.io and try them out for yourself.

And don't forget to give us your feedback and thoughts in our Craft.io Feedback Portal.