Prioritize your work and manage your backlog with Priority and Severity Fields

Check out the follow-up to our basic Custom Fields release with two new opinionated fields - Priority and Severity Fields! The Priority Field should be used to filter and sort Stories in order of priority. The Severity Field should be used to filter and sort Stories in order of Severity.

These new basic Custom Fields will help provide additional categorization of your work. Our goal with Custom Fields is to provide enough structure to organize, but also enough flexibility to let you represent your work and processes in Shortcut the way you like to work in real life. Learn how to get your Custom Fields set up over at our Help Center.

Field Definitions and Default Field Values for Priority and Severity

These Fields show up in your Workspace on:

• Story Cards
• Individual Stories

Filter by Fields on the:

• Stories Page
• Report Page
• Epic Detail Page
• Teams Page
• Status Page
• Story Tables - new!

Reminder: Custom Fields are configured at the Workspace level and can be enabled or disabled for the Workspace.

Priority Field to help you sort your most important to least important work

Priority indicates the importance of a specific Story relative to other Stories. The Priority Field should be used to filter and sort Stories in order of priority.

The Priority Field can support up to 5 values. Each value has a specifically designed icon to ensure you can quickly see and understand the Priority based on the icon alone. Each value can be renamed and disabled or enabled, but you cannot change the order of the values or icons.

There is purposefully no changing the icon or colors to help maintain the order of the icons. Here are your options for Priority Fields:

Priority Field Use Cases

• Backlog Management: Organize your backlog by assigning a Priority to your Stories so you (+ your team + eng +, etc.) know what Stories are most important.
• View and Sort by Priority: Once you've added Priority to a Story, you can sort by the Priority Field in a Story Table to see Stories in ascending or descending order.
• Surface the Highest Priority Stories: Create a Space filtered for the Highest Priority Stories for the most important Stories at your fingertips.

Severity Field to help you sort your most important bugs

Severity indicates the impact of a specific bug relative to other bugs. The Severity Field should be used to filter and sort Stories in order of Severity. This will help you visually see "How bad is it?" when looking at a Bug Story.

Once Severity is enabled, the Field will only show up and appear on Bug-type Stories.

Please note that the Severity Field (like Priority) has five values out of the box. You can not change the number of values, but you can only toggle each value on and off - there is no reordering.

There is purposefully no changing the icon or colors to help maintain the order of the icons. Here are your options:

Severity Field Use Cases

Bug Triage

• Consistently mark and communicate the level of impact a Bug has on your system
• Combine with Priority to truly understand+manage your bug backlog

Bug Reporting

• Reporting on SLAs based on different Severity Levels of Bugs
• Look at Cycle Time Lead time to measure performance

Transition to Priority and Severity Fields instead of Labels for more structure

If you are currently using Labels to mark priority and severity here are some helpful tips for transitioning

1. Setup Priority and Severity and enable them
2. Go to the Labels Page
3. Search for the Labels you want to "convert"
4. Bulk edit them

Note: We enforce a 500 item limit on the bulk edit right now.

Custom Fields FAQs

What is the difference between basic and advanced Custom Fields?

Basic Custom Fields are Shortcut defined. While the Custom Field name and description cannot be changed, the values associated with Fields can be changed. Basic Custom Fields were developed to help our customers move away from Projects.

Advanced Custom Fields allows you to define Field names and values to fit your process.

Who will have access to basic Custom Fields?

All plans will have access to the following Fields:

• Technical Area
• Skill Set
• Product Area
• Severity
• Priority

Who will have access to advanced Custom Fields?

Business and Enterprise Plans. If you would like to upgrade, you can head to the Custom Field setting page.

How are Custom Fields different from Labels?

Custom Fields help you establish a more structured process in your Workspace. Because Fields and their values are controlled by your Admin, there is more structure to Fields over Labels.

Labels are great because anyone in your organization can create them, but they lack the structure of Fields. You should use Labels as a lightweight but unstructured way to organize your work.