In this article we will walk you through the different types of fields that are available in the platform, that can help you customize the tool to tell your story more coherently and better reflect your product strategy.
Predefined fields
Every Item in Craft.io includes a set of predefined fields.
These properties help you categorize and prioritize your work, and can be set either inside the properties panel of any item or in a customized Table View:
Status: Select the current status of the item ( statuses workflow can be defined in the Workspace Settings).
Assignee: Assign a team member or a team to work on each item. The assignment is from a product management perspective, rather than a development cycle.
Release: Assign a release for the item, which will determine the time cadence in which this item will be developed.
Sprint: Assign the sprint in which this item will be worked on.
Time Estimate: Define the amount of time (W:D:H:M) you estimate it will take to work on this item.
Dates: Define the dates during which the item will be worked on.
Dev Assignee: When integrated with a Dev tool, this field will update and visualize who from the development team is assigned to this work item.
Dev Status: The status of the corresponding issue in a dev tool that has been synced to the workspace (Jira, AzureDevOps etc.).
Custom Fields
In addition to the above fields, you can set up your own custom fields.
Custom fields are designed to serve many different purposes- from organizing your data by segments, specifying feature value and/or effort, creating prioritization schemes to visualizing original vs. actual release dates.
Custom fields are also very handy when wanting to add wireframes or prototypes from external tools, by utilizing the Link custom field.
As another level of customization, you can choose which item types will include this field. For example, stories do not require specifying who is the customer who requested for the enhancement to be added, as this will usually be on an Epic/Feature level.
You can add new custom fields directly from the Table View:
You can also create and manage custom fields from the 'Workspace Settings' -> 'Custom fields' page (to get there, click on the 'Settings' button in the bottom left toolbar and select 'Workspace Settings' from the menu):
Custom field types
The following field types are available:
Number: A numeric field - for example: Business Value.
Date: A Date field - for example: Target Date.
Single-Selection: A field that includes a predefined list, with a numerical representation that can also be applied for each value. This type of field will allow selecting only a single value per item- for example: Priority, Region.
Note- Each Single Selection field can have a set default value, that will be automatically selected for every new item that is being added.
Multi Selection: A field that includes a predefined list but will allow selecting multiple values per item.
Team Member: A field that enables assigning a team member (from the Team Manager list) to a specific item.
Formula: A calculated field, shows the score of selected numeric or selection fields according to their specific weight. To learn more about formula fields, visit this article.
Link: a text field that turns into a hyperlink, to associate links with items, to help your design team participate in the product process- for example: Figma, Invision, and Adobe XD.
Text (single line): A free text field - for example: Comments.
Text (multi-line): A free text field that allows you to add additional description fields to an item, with a max of 255 characters. For example: Acceptance Criteria, Executive Summary, Release Notes.
This type of field supports rich text formatting and can be mapped and synced to correlating multi-line fields in selected Dev tools.
Tip: You can control the order of fields or values listed in your selection fields by dragging and dropping values into position in the workspace settings.
Guru custom fields
Guru Fields are field presets you can add to your workspace that encapsulate industry best practices. You can find Guru fields that are related to world-known prioritization methodologies, capacity planning and segmentation.
In addition, for Single Selection custom fields you can find unique Guru fields, such as RAG, magnitude and T-shirt size, which can help you save valuable time to implement practices you've used before onboarding with Craft.io.
Viewing and using custom fields
Your custom fields will appear across your product in the following places:
Item Properties Panel - Only for the selected Item types.
Table View - You can have your custom fields appear as columns by choosing them from the “+Column” drop-down.
When you customize your views, each can contain a different set of custom fields as it will serve a different purpose in your product lifecycle. For example, a Table view for prioritization purposes may include value/effort fields along with customer and strategic value, while a Dev progress view will include custom fields that are related to progress tracking and assignees.