Connect workspaces with item types and hierarchy in airfocus

Item types

When you create a new workspace, you can define the item type that will exist in that workspace. 

To change your workspace's item types, follow these steps:

1. Hover your cursor over a workspace from the navigation menu on the left side of the airfocus home page.
2. Click the three-dot icon that appears to the right of the workspace name.
3. Select Settings.
4. Click General at the top of the workspace settings.
5. Under "Item Type", click the dropdown to select an item type.

Product

Products are represented and managed as a whole in workspaces, or through a group of interconnected workspaces. However, if you are managing ideas for new products to build, you can select Product.

Initiative

An initiative is a project your team is undertaking and generally sits at the top of your product hierarchy as a parent item. Initiatives can be written as outcomes, experiments, or features once you have defined a solution. Initiatives group a set of opportunities and stories together so you can understand what and why you are working on things and links back to a set of objectives or goals to achieve.

Project

If your team is not familiar with the term "initiative", you can also just use the term project. Like initiatives, they group together other items and sit at the top of your product hierarchy as a parent item.

Feature

A feature is an aspect of your product that aims to solve a problem. In airfocus, features can be parent or child items and sit in the middle of your hierarchy:

• Parent item: Expressed as a potential initiative or project (building a feature in order to solve a specific problem).
• Child item: Located in your product backlog (as a potential solution to a problem).

Opportunity

An opportunity is a way to express items in your product backlog. By naming them opportunities, you open your team up to discovering how a potential problem might be solved, or if it's even worth solving in the first place.

In airfocus, opportunities can be parent or child items and sit in the middle of your hierarchy.

• They can be parent items to stories.
• They can be child items to initiatives or projects.

Idea

An idea (like an opportunity) is a way to express items in your product backlog. By naming them ideas, you open your team up to discovering how a potential problem might be solved, or if it's even worth solving in the first place. As with opportunities, they can be both parent and child items and sit in the middle of your hierarchy.

Epic

An epic is an item in your product backlog that can be broken down into a number of smaller stories. It is a term largely used in Agile. Opportunities, ideas, and experiments all often become epics once they reach your development team as a more structured piece of work with specific requirements. If you’d like to keep terminology similar to that of your development team, you can use this item type to define your product backlog. In airfocus, epics can be parent or child items and sit in the middle of your hierarchy.

• They can be parent items to stories.
• They can be child items to initiatives or projects.

Experiment

An experiment is a way to test if an idea or opportunity is viable, and allows your team to understand if you should proceed with solving the problem. Experiments can be both parent and child items:

• If using experiments as a way to express discovery on a roadmap item as a purely experiment-driven roadmap, then you can select this item type as a parent item.
• If using experiments as a way to express discovery on your backlog, then you can select this item type as a child item.

Story

User stories are an Agile technique of defining product functionality and requirements. They focus on telling a story for an action a user will take and what the expectation is when successful. They are expressed as child items within an airfocus product hierarchy.

Task

A task is a specific action your team undertakes as part of a larger piece of work. Tasks can be managed individually in a workspace, or as a child item of an initiative, opportunity, or story in your airfocus product hierarchy.

Feedback

Feedback can come from your team, stakeholders, or customers. They're a way to understand potential problems to solve and help support your product discovery work. In airfocus, feedback sits outside of the product hierarchy as you can connect them to items via the Insights app. Setting things up this way provides two benefits:

• Understand the impact of your feedback against your product items.
• Allows you to use the Insights score as a criteria in your prioritization framework.

Using different item types allows you to connect a group of workspaces that are interconnected through parent and child items, with each workspace containing its own set of unique custom fields, views, and even prioritization criteria.

Hierarchy

With different workspaces containing different item types, you can then connect them together through product hierarchy. With product hierarchy, you can decide how items relate to each other across your workspaces. Link parent and child items, select how everything maps together, and plan every level of your product development process. A parent workspace is that which sits above another workspace. For example, initiatives on your roadmap. A child workspace is that which sits below another workspace. For example, opportunities on your product backlog.

A workspace can be both a parent and a child at the same time if they sit in the middle of two workspaces, connecting your hierarchy across multiple levels. Below is a list of available item types in airfocus. A common hierarchy and item type setup might look like this:

There are two primary benefits of a product hierarchy in airfocus. With it, you can:

1. Create and visualize your own custom product hierarchy: 
   • Product management is about operating on different levels: from your roadmap to your backlog and tasks. All of these require different processes and workflows. With airfocus you can manage all of this according to your unique needs and visualize how everything connects together.
2. Organize your product, your way: 
   • With workspaces, product teams have the ability to create custom views, fields, and workflows for each hierarchy level. This provides endless possibilities for how things are connected and interact with each other.

Set up a product hierarchy

To set up a product hierarchy, follow these steps:

1. Hover your cursor over a workspace from the navigation menu on the left side of the airfocus home page.
2. Click the three-dot icon that appears to the right of the workspace name.
3. Select Settings.
4. Click Hierarchy at the top of your workspace settings.
5. Click Add parent workspace or Add child workspace.

When you select "Allow hierarchy relations within this workspace," you will be able to set up parent and child items from within the same workspace. Keep in mind, the recommended setup is to keep hierarchy levels in separate workspaces.

Once we’ve set up our hierarchy, we can add and remove parent and child items from the item panel. If you have access to all workspaces, you can access the parent or child items from within the item panel. This brings you to the linked item in a new tab.

If multiple parents or children workspaces exist above or below the current item or if they are linked to items in workspaces without item types defined, they will be displayed as "parents" and "children" on the item panel.

Visualize product hierarchy

To view all connected child items, toggle on "Child items" under "Display options":

On the board view

On the timeline view

When an item has child or parent items, the hierarchy icon will be displayed. 

Hover your cursor over the item to get details.

On the table view

Parent items as groups

You can even set your parent items as groups of your views by setting it up in your display options (temporary solution) or in the default display options (default setup for your view).

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