How we use Labels for the product management of Shortcut + how it all fits together

Note: This is the final post in a series of four posts on how we use Shortcut for the Product Management of Shortcut. For other posts in the series check out the links at the end of the post!

This is the last post in our series of posts on how we use Shortcut at Shortcut! I hope you’ve found it enlightening - or at least interesting - as you explore how to use your project management tool of choice for managing your software product.

In this post, we’re going to wrap up with a quick look at how we use labels, before showing how all the things we’ve discussed in this series fit together.

How Shortcut uses labels:

We use labels to group similar stories that have a similar theme.

Some considerations:

• Labels can cross projects and teams
• Can be applied to Epics or Stories
• A story/epic can have multiple labels
• A story may have a general label (ex: Export) as well as a specific epic (ex: Export V1)

Labels are a great way to add more specific story groupings within an epic or project. For example, in our Integrations project in our Unsolved User Problem Team, we tag stories with specific integration types like “Slack,” “GitHub”, “Zendesk” so that we can look at all requests across a particular kind of integration.

Labels are not typically time specific (i.e., they don’t have start and end dates). Some teams do, however, use labels to track sprints/iteration, or track releases.

Fitting it all together:

If you’re still following, thanks for sticking with me! To illustrate how all of the things we’ve discussed in this series comes together, below is a diagram of how a couple of actual Stories might look and move within the system we use here.

The above diagram is a simplification of a robust system, but it captures (more-or-less) the organization and flow of most of the work that we do on the Shortcut product. As you can see, as Stories move from a Project in the Unsolved User Problems Story Workflow, into a specific Epic, and assigned to a specific Project in the Engineering team, they get more specific in nature. In addition to the Title and Workflow state changing, the Story would, ideally, also include acceptance criteria and/or more relevant details on the scope of that work.

How is your team using Shortcut? Is it similar to our structure or something entirely different? We’d love to hear about it on Twitter.

How we use Shortcut for the product management of Shortcut series:

1. Intro and how we use Organizations & Workspaces
2. How we use Story Workflows & Projects
3. How we use Milestones & Epics
4. How we use Labels and how it all fits together (this post)