Streamline your setup with our updated Data Model

Streamline your Shortcut setup. Or dare we even say take a shortcut to a better setup? Let’s move on. Too much opportunity here to make “jokes” with our new name.

Our latest release includes two data model improvements that provide a more intuitive and structured model to organize around.

This release fulfills the initial promise of our Teams feature (which launched earlier this year) by elevating it to the central organizing force within Shortcut. We've also removed the friction from our Projects entity while maintaining the flexibility and value it provides.

Evolving our Data Model is more than just using more logical language to describe how things work. These are foundational changes that elevate the Shortcut experience. For customers, it provides a stronger foundation to setup and scale. For us at Shortcut, it lays the foundation for other highly-requested Team-based features, such as WIP Limits, Custom Fields, and more!

Shortcut customers have told us that Projects are a powerful way to categorize work, but create unnecessary confusion, complexity, and limitations. To remove this friction, we have made Projects optional. Projects can still be used as an additional means of categorization, but are no longer required.

Since Projects are optional, the Workflow field has been add to the Story dialog, so Stories are now added directly into a Workflow. 

How to use Projects going forward

Projects can be used as an additional categorization method to represent horizontal dimensions that span Teams, but this is not required.

Read our Guide to the Shortcut Data Model changes for more information and FAQs.

The new Teams-to-Workflow functionality lets you establish and automate the processes for each Team to track their work.

Teams can now be connected to one or multiple Workflows. These Workflows can be shared across your Workspace, or unique to a specific Team.

Within our Story dialog, when you assign a Story to a Team, it automatically moves into that Team's Workflow. The provides the guardrails and automation to ensure that your Team's work always goes through the right process.

If you have existing Teams....no action is needed! Existing Teams have been automatically connected to the Workflows where they have Stories today. Your current setup and daily flow should not be disrupted. You can view and update these Team-to-Workflow connections from both the Team and Workflow settings pages.

Not using Teams?....We recommend building-out Teams (learn more about Teams here). When creating a new Teams, you will be prompted to choose a Workflow to track the Team's work.

How to structure your Teams and Workflows

We cover this more extensively in our FAQ article, as we know this is a common question. To summarize:

Team Colors

As part of this evolution, Teams each now have a Color, which is displayed throughout the app for easier distinction between Teams.

The sidebar on Story cards are now color-coded by the Team colors. Project colors are still visible as a prominent badge on the Story cards. To start, we have randomly assigned your Teams colors, but these can be updated from your Team page.

If you want to learn more about optimizing your Shortcut setup, check out our guide for transitioning to the new Shortcut Data Model

You'll find answers to the most frequently asked questions about:

We're continuing to invest in improving our Data Model to provide simple and powerful paths to achieve your goals. Our Data Model vision post explains our next two changes in more detail.

Have even more questions, or are simply interested in learning what else we have in store for the future? Watch the full stream our September Release Event below: