Key takeaways
Visualize dependencies: Quickly identify relationships and blockers between items.
Card customization: Show the fields and progress indicators that matter most.
Auto-stack & drag & drop: Keep items readable while maintaining control over positioning.
Color coding & legend: Convey information visually with flexible color options.
Date mapping with Jira & Azure DevOps: Keep your timeline in sync with development tools.
What is the timeline view?
The timeline view in Craft.io is a central tool for visual product planning and roadmapping. It helps teams translate strategy into a time-based plan, track dependencies, align stakeholders, and communicate progress across products, epics, and features.
By visualizing start and end dates, dependencies, and item relationships, the Timeline gives a clear picture of how work progresses over time and how it connects to other deliverables in your workspace or portfolio.
Accessing the timeline view
Click New view at the bottom of your workspace or portfolio.
Select Timeline view from the menu. A default timeline will open, ready to configure.
To use an existing timeline, select it from your list of views (or the Craft.io Guru).
Items without dates will not appear until start and end dates are set. We recommend using a date alignment automation rule to ensure items appear in the timeline view, or integrating dates with your development tool.
Navigating the timeline view
The timeline displays items along a horizontal time axis. You control the visible date range, the level of detail, and how items are grouped and ordered.
Zoom and date ranges
Use the calendar icon in the top-right corner of the Timeline to switch between zoom levels, and amend your date range via the calendar.
Zoom Level | What You See |
Weekly | The most detailed zoom level. Great for tactical sprint planning. |
Monthly | Items grouped by weeks. Overlapping work becomes visible. Good for release-level planning. |
Quarterly | Mid-level view ideal for cross-team planning and release coordination. |
Semi-Yearly | High-level strategic view. Smaller items may condense. Shows epics and major initiatives. |
Yearly | Broadest perspective for annual planning. Focuses on epics, initiatives, and long-term goals. |
Toggle the Auto-Fit option in your view settings to let the Timeline automatically adjust its resolution based on the date range you are viewing.
Item hierarchy
Items in Craft.io follow a parent-child structure, typically organized as Epic, Feature, and Story. The Timeline visualizes this hierarchy directly:
Expand and collapse: Use the small arrow next to parent items to show or hide children. Collapse items to present a high-level epic view for executives; expand them to review features and stories with delivery teams.
Visual grouping: When sorted by hierarchy, parent-child families are highlighted with a shaded background to reinforce the relationship.
Zoom interaction: High-level zoom levels (quarterly, yearly) tend to emphasize epics and initiatives, while detailed zoom levels (weekly, monthly) are useful for viewing features and stories.
If you'd like to display more than one item level in the timeline, make sure you've turned on Flexible Hierarchy, and that you are sorting by Hierarchy.
Organizing and filtering items
The timeline provides several mechanisms to slice, group, and filter your roadmap so you can get exactly the perspective you need.
Swimlanes
Swimlanes divide the timeline into horizontal lanes, each representing a grouping dimension such as teams, products, objectives, OKRs, or any multi-select custom field.
Items linked to multiple swimlane values (for example, a feature that supports two OKRs) appear in every relevant lane, ensuring visibility across goals.
Dragging an item from one swimlane to another will update its field value, and duplicate appearances are merged automatically.
OKR-based swimlanes are a powerful way to show executives how delivery work maps to strategic objectives.
Filters
Apply filters to narrow down items shown on the timeline based on fields such as status, priority, assignee, or custom fields.
Filters work alongside zoom and hierarchy to slice and dice your roadmap efficiently.
Drag and drop
Drag and drop lets you move and adjust items directly on the Timeline to quickly update schedules and see the impact on your roadmap.
Reschedule items: Drag an item horizontally to change its start and end dates. Dates update automatically as you move it.
Adjust duration: Resize an item by dragging its edges to extend or shorten its timeframe. Start and end dates adjust in real time.
Move between swimlanes: Drag items vertically to different swimlanes to update the grouping field, such as team or objective.
Sorting
Items can be sorted by hierarchy, rank, status, importance, or any other field. Sorting controls how items are arranged vertically on the Timeline:
Hierarchy sort: Groups items under their parents, making the epic-to-feature-to-story structure visible.
Field-based sort: Sort by status to highlight progress, or by importance to surface top-priority items.
Auto-stack
Each item normally occupies its own row on the Timeline. When viewing many items, this can create a long, scrollable view. Enable Auto-Stack (found in the Visualization section of view settings) to intelligently merge items that have non-overlapping dates and the same sort values into a single row. This helps you see the full picture at a glance, identify bottlenecks (such as too many items launching in the same week), and create cleaner presentations.
Even with Auto-Stack enabled, you can still drag and drop items to adjust dates, move them between swimlanes, or change their position within a stack. The Timeline updates stacking dynamically, keeping your view clear while reflecting your changes in real time.
Visualization settings
Card layout
Each item on the Timeline is represented as a card. Cards display the item name, progress percentage, and key field values at a glance.
Hover over a card to see detailed progress information, or click to open the full item properties panel.
Cards are editable inline, so you can update fields such as dates, status, or assignments directly from the Timeline without leaving the view.
Use the Layout to select what appears in each card
Color coding
Color is a central part of how the Timeline communicates information. Items can be colored by team, product, status, importance, or any custom field. Colors are configured per view, meaning you can set up one Timeline colored by team for cross-functional alignment and another colored by status for progress tracking.
A color legend bar appears at the top of the Timeline view. It explains what each color represents in the current configuration. The legend can be expanded or collapsed for a cleaner presentation. Hovering over a color in the legend allows Craft.io users to change the color assigned to all items in that group.
Managing item dependencies
One of the Timeline view’s greatest strengths is its ability to visualize dependencies between work items. Dependency lines connect items directly on the canvas, making it immediately clear how work relates and where scheduling risks exist.
Dependency types
Type | Meaning |
Related | Items are connected but can be executed in parallel. Indicates a logical relationship without a scheduling constraint. |
Blocked By | The item cannot begin until the blocking item is complete. This creates a hard scheduling dependency. |
Blocks | This item is blocking another item from starting. The reverse of Blocked By. |
Delay Warning | A visual alert that appears when a blocked item is scheduled to start before its blocker is complete. Flags scheduling conflicts. |
Showing item dependencies in the timeline
Showing or hiding dependencies can be useful when sharing a roadmap externally or presenting to audiences who do not need to see internal scheduling relationships.
Click View settings
Toggle on/off Present dependencies
For stakeholder presentations, hide dependencies for a cleaner visual. For internal planning sessions, keep them visible to surface conflicts early.
Adding and removing dependencies
It's possible to create item dependencies directly within the timeline view:
Navigate to the Dependencies tab within the item properties (or click the Dependencies icon if your card layout displays it).
Click + to search for and add an existing item, then select the dependency type.
To change or remove a dependency type, click the three dots within the dependency and select Change dependency type or Remove dependency
If Present dependencies is turned on via View settings, dependency lines will appear on the timeline immediately and update dynamically when dates change
Milestones
Milestones represent critical goals and deadlines on your Timeline, such as release dates, board meetings, conferences, or testing phases. They appear as flag markers in the timeline ruler, providing visual reference points for how work aligns with important dates.
Setting Up Milestones
Open the view settings and select which milestone fields to display (both custom and portfolio milestone fields are supported).
Hover over the Timeline ruler to reveal a ghost flag, then click to add a new milestone value.
Name the milestone, select a date, and assign it a color.
If you have the relevant role, you can edit any milestone at any time by adjusting its color, name, date, or other properties.
Milestones can also be used as swimlane groupings or as filters, so you can tailor the view to show only the milestones relevant to a given audience or planning session
Integration date mapping
If your engineering team works in Jira or Azure DevOps, you can synchronize item dates so the Timeline always reflects the most current schedule from your development tools.
Jira and Azure Dev Ops
Navigate to Settings → Integrations → Options → Field & Type Mapping
Map Start Date and End Date to the corresponding Jira and/or Azure DevOps date fields.
Once mapping is active, synced items will appear on the Timeline with their Jira dates, keeping your roadmap up to date automatically.
The timeline will maintain a single source of truth for item dates across both platforms. Be mindful that if date fields are integrated, changing dates in the Timeline view will change dates in the corresponding development tool.
Sharing, collaboration, and staying aligned
Once your Timeline is configured, it becomes a working communication tool, not just a planning artifact. Here's how to use it effectively across your team and stakeholders.
Sharing your timeline
You can share your Timeline view with both internal and external audiences either via direct export, or Live Share.
Collaboration
The Timeline is designed for active, ongoing collaboration rather than passive viewing.
Teams can comment directly on items to surface risks, blockers, or decisions.
Inline editing on cards allows updates to status, dates, or assignments without leaving the timeline.
Dependencies and milestones are visible to all collaborators, making it easier to coordinate across teams and resolve scheduling conflicts early.
Continuous alignment
A Timeline is only useful if it reflects reality. Build a habit of reviewing and updating your view regularly - after sprint reviews, quarterly planning sessions, or when priorities shift.
Use filters, swimlanes, and color coding to create purpose-built perspectives for different audiences: an executive view colored by strategic theme, a delivery view sorted by status, or a team view grouped by assigne
When integrated with Jira or Azure DevOps, your timeline becomes a single source of truth for delivery dates, helping ensure plans remain realistic and synchronized with execution, without manual inputs required.
What comes next?
Now that you're familiar with the Timeline view, here are a few ways to deepen how you use it:
Experiment with different swimlane groupings, color coding, and filters to find the view that best communicates your roadmap.
Add milestones for critical deadlines to visually anchor key events.
Review dependencies regularly to identify potential bottlenecks or blockers before they impact delivery.
Share the timeline with stakeholders frequently to maintain transparency and alignment across products, teams, and initiatives.
By leveraging these features, your Timeline view becomes a living roadmap, not just a static plan - a tool for planning, tracking, and communicating work clearly across your organization.
Need more guidance? 🙋 Our LIVE support team (at the bottom right corner of your screen) replies to ANY question!