This article will allow you to easily and efficiently track key statuses, dates, changes and the overall progress of your assortments as they proceed through the development cycle 🌈

Pre-Backbone, you might have managed your work in progress or development tracking documents in excel or google sheets and maybe it looked something like this:

These trackers can be helpful in giving everyone visibility to the progress of your current developments and assist in keeping teams and vendor partners accountable to certain timelines however google sheets and excel workbooks quickly become static as you update or change information within your tech pack system.

We'll need to ensure we have the correct fields and values set up in our Admin panel first so that we can accurately track our products throughout the development process.

From the Admin Panel, select “Control Panel” to access our Custom Fields

If you haven’t explored your admin section yet, you will notice that Backbone provides all our customers with 35 of the most commonly used custom fields to get you started, however remember all these attributes can be customized to match your business’s nomenclature and tracking needs.

Before creating or changing an existing field we recommend creating a custom field divider to help organize your WIP or Tracking data:

Next, if we're trying to match the sample tracker we saw at the beginning of the article we still need to add some fields for:

To create a new custom field:

Now that all of the fields are set up, we can move into step two and create our tracker.

From our global dashboard we are going to navigate into our Item View Module to create our tracker. If this is your first time in the module you will notice it is empty. To create your first view or tracker:

Backbone’s configuration method allows customer to build reports based on the attributes that they assign to their products record. Using this method, means that as values change or you continue to add new products that meet this set criteria the report will dynamically update so you won’t ever have to rerun this report unlike tracking in Sheets or Excel

Once our criteria is set we will select “generate view”, and confirm it has now created a report with all our products.

In order to begin customizing your report, you will navigate to the “Display” button on the right hand side of your report. This will open your “Display Settings” Drawer and allow you to pick and choose what custom fields you would like to display in your tracker - anything you ✅ here becomes the columns in the table view.

A good start for a development track would be to check any or all of these fields:

These will be listed under subsections according to the custom field dividers we made earlier!

Pro Tip: If you already put everything under your Development Tracking divider - you can just check the box next to the divider within the display settings to check all boxes at once!

Once you have added all our necessary fields you can close the display settings.

At this point the table will be almost identical to something we might have in google sheets however these fields are dynamically connected to our product records.

This means that if information is changed within the product record in Backbone that information is automatically reflected here and vice versa. We can update information from within our tracker and it will be reflected in our product record.

For example: If I update a product’s 2nd Proto Receive Date, then click the product image on the left hand side of the screen - you can see that information dynamically updates in the product summary.

Pro Tip: This is a great place to make bulk updates as well, you can click and drag the corner of cell to update multiple “2nd Proto Received” Dates all at once.

If you would like to customize or refine this report further there are a few more tools you have available to you:

Now that the tracker is set up let’s talk about how to use this in you and your team's daily workflow.

Once you go into sampling with your product we recommend using this view as your starting point when you come into Backbone versus the Product Library. Think of this as a “Saved View” so you can first get an overview of all your product’s statuses and their progress, see if there are gaps in the information or if anything is missing or if anything is tracking late.

From there you can begin to jump into your product record from the item view by again selecting the image on the left hand side. This will open your product into a new tab and you can begin making any necessary updates to the product such as measuring your samples, adding your revisions, updating your images and generating new tech packs.

Speaking of tech packs, you can bulk share tech packs out of your item views by selecting the checkbox on the left hand side of your product and selecting “Share Tech Pack.” This will automatically select your most recently generated tech pack.

Additionally, Item Views are created at a user level, meaning unless you share them with your colleagues you will be the only one who can see this specific report. To help standardize the way you and the team are tracking your development we recommend sharing this report with your colleagues. You can do this by selecting the share icon in the top right corner and searching the users you would like to add to the tracker. Once added your colleagues will be able to see the report in their Item View Library.

This tracker can also be exported and shared with external collaborators or non backbone users such as vendors, sales, marketing or operation teams. This can be done by using the three dot overflow menu and selecting download CSV.

By creating and using a Development Tracker within Backbone you and your team can avoid duplicating information in multiple locations while also ensuring complete visibility across all development team members.