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Created by Guest
Created on Jun 4, 2015
Merged idea

This idea has been merged into another idea. To comment or vote on this idea, please visit APP-I-756 Allow custom fields on Initiatives.

Deeper level of product>initiative>feature hierarchy Merged

Hi,

We're trying to organize our product backlog based on the following structure

  1. Product Line
    1. Product (a product that could be built and maintained for years)
      1. Feature / Component (a feature that could be built and maintained for a year or a few months)
        1. Epic / MMF (one or a few sprint effort that is released to market, it is valuable and can be announced)
          1. User Story (smaller than a sprint cycle, can be tested and demonstrated, contributes to the MMF)

 

We've been trying to use Initiative as Epic/MMF and Feature as User Story

Pros.

  • can prioritize stories
  • can provide visibility on when story will occur (what sprint)

Cons

  • Epic (Inititative) level is quite limited, no meta-data
  • no abiity to prioritize epics
  • no visual view of when epic's begin or expected to end.
  • no out-of-the box way to group epics into features
    • we could use goals for that, but i would rather use goals for business and strategic goals
    • we could create a custom field named product feature, but we would not have a clear view of progress / status.

 

We also got some products that used Initiatives as Features/Components, used Features as Epics, and Requirements as User stories

Pros. 

  • You can see when they end (we slot them to the release when they are expected to end)
  • You can see high level status of features (initiatives).

Cons.

  • no visual for epic (story) progress
  • hard to prioritize epics
  • can't see when it starts, just when expected to end - and this is bad as epic could be too big to estimate.

 

What Do We Want?

Any plan to either make initiative hierarchical, or add another element in between product and initiative (for product/component)

Any plan to add visualization that enables to prioritize initiatives (epics) and to show their progress and how they fall into released?

  • Suzanne Vaughan
    Reply
    |
    Jul 11, 2015

    Hi -- you both want meta data for Initiatives so they can truly be used as Epics. I am going to merge this feature request with https://big.ideas.aha.io/ideas/APP-I-756

  • Matt Lavallee
    Reply
    |
    Jul 9, 2015

    I agree. We are using initiatives to summarize epics across releases, and it is difficult to produce an "executive" roadmap for epic progress, such as illustrating the use cases and number of features for that use case included in a given release, without actually listing the features themselves.