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Part 1 · Workspace

Part 2 · Your first project

  1. 10Create a project
  2. 11Shape your workflow
  3. 12People & visibility
  4. 13Fill the backlog
  5. 14Organise the backlog

Part 3 · Run a sprint

Part 4 · Explore Flow

Part 2 of 4

Your first project — set up the work

Your workspace is ready, so now you create your first project: choose how it runs, shape its workflow, decide who's in it, and fill its backlog with the work to be done.

10

Create a project

A project is a container for a body of work — its board, backlog and sprints all live inside it.

~3 min
Projects › New project
  1. Open Projects and click New project (Owners and Admins). Type a name — a short key like PROJ is filled in for you — and an optional description.
  2. Pick a board type: Scrum (plan work into fixed-length sprints) or Kanban (a continuous flow, no sprints). For Scrum, set the sprint duration in days (14 is the default).
  3. Choose a workflow template — one of your organisation's templates or a built-in one. Nothing is picked for you, so choose the one closest to how your team works.
  4. Set the visibility — Public, Team or Private (Step 12 explains them) — and click Create project. You land on the project's overview page.
💡The key is your shorthand — every work item is numbered from it, like PROJ-1, PROJ-2. Board type decides the rhythm: sprints if you plan in batches, Kanban if work just flows. Kanban projects have no Sprints or Retro pages. You become the project's Product Owner.
📦The project gets its own copy of the workflow, so changes to it never affect other projects. Free includes 3 projects, Starter 10, Business unlimited. You can switch between Scrum and Kanban later in Project settings › General, until more than one sprint has finished.
11

Shape your workflow

The stages your work moves through — from "to do" to "done" — and the rules for moving between them.

~8 min
Project settings › Workflow
  1. Inside your project, open Project settings from the left menu and go to the Workflow tab.
  2. Rename, add (Add stage), remove or drag to reorder the stages. Each stage belongs to a category — To Do, In Progress or Done. A typical set is To Do → In Progress → In Review → Done.
  3. Optional: set a WIP limit on a stage (the most items it should hold at once), and choose the transitions — which stages an item may move to from each one.
  4. Optional: add Entry rules to a stage — who may move items into it (chosen project roles and/or the assignee) and what must be true first, such as required fields, all subtasks done or all blockers done.
  5. Add a Definition of Done — the checklist an item should meet before it moves to Done. Flow asks for confirmation if something's unticked.
🧭Who can change it — the project's Scrum Master (or its Product Owner while there's no Scrum Master) and workspace Owners and Admins. A stage that still holds work items can't be removed until they're moved. Rules are optional: a stage without them works as normal.
12

People & visibility

Decide who can open the project, and who plays which role in it.

~5 min
Project settings › Visibility / People
  1. On the Visibility tab, choose who can open the project: Public (everyone in the organisation), Team (everyone in one team — pick which) or Private (only the people listed under People).
  2. On the People tab, set the project's roles: the Product Owner, the Scrum Masters, the Developers and the Stakeholders. For a Private project, this is also where you add people.
  3. Optional: on the Components tab, the Product Owner can list the parts of your product (e.g. "Payments", "Mobile app") and give each a lead. When someone creates a work item with that component and leaves Assignee empty, the lead becomes the assignee.
💡How access works — on a Public or Team project, everyone who can open it is a Developer by default (Stakeholders stay Stakeholders); on a Private project, only the people listed can open it. Workspace Owners and Admins can always open every project. Switching visibility never deletes anyone — hidden people and the team link sit dormant and come back if you switch back.
⚙️Also in Project settings — General (name, description, board type, Working day timezone, and a switch that lets Developers order the backlog and board), Repositories (GitHub) and — for workspace Owners and Admins only — Archive & delete. Project settings is only for the project's leads and workspace Owners/Admins.
13

Fill your backlog

The backlog is your master list of everything to be done. Start adding the work.

~10 min
Project › Backlog
  1. Open the Backlog and click Create work item.
  2. Pick a type: Epic (a big theme) · Story (a user-facing piece) · Task · Bug · Spike (a piece of research). Stories, tasks, bugs and spikes can sit under an epic — choose it as the Parent.
  3. Give it a clear title and choose an Assignee (picking a component with a lead fills this in for you). Priority, size, story points, sprint and more can be set now or later.
  4. Need smaller steps? Open a story, task, bug or spike and click Add subtask — a Subtask always belongs to one of those.
✏️Start rough — capture titles quickly now and flesh out the detail later. It's easier to shape a full list than to write each item perfectly the first time.
📥Moving from a spreadsheet or Jira? Use the backlog's ⋯ menu › Import CSV — either our CSV template or a Jira export (Jira imports are for the Product Owner, Scrum Master or an Admin). Export CSV sits in the same menu. Product Owners, Scrum Masters and Developers can create work items; Stakeholders can't, unless a custom role allows it.
14

Organise the backlog

Give your list shape — group, prioritise and estimate — so it's ready to pull work from.

~10 min
Project › Backlog
  1. Link to epics. Set each story or task's Parent to its epic, so big pieces of work stay together — the row shows the epic.
  2. Set priorities (Critical, High, Medium, Low) so what matters most stands out.
  3. Add estimates. Give stories story points — this feeds your velocity chart later.
  4. Drag to order. Arrange the list top-to-bottom in the order you'd tackle it. Ordering belongs to the Product Owner, Scrum Masters and Admins — Developers too, if the project's settings allow it.
  5. The Product Owner sets the Product Goal at the top of the backlog — the longer-term aim your sprints work towards.
💡A tidy backlog makes planning fast — when the top of your list is ordered and estimated, filling a sprint (or pulling the next Kanban card) takes minutes.
🔎Handy tools — Filters (type, priority, assignee, label, size, components and more) and saved Views (the Product Owner and Scrum Masters can share one with the whole project); tick several rows to move, assign or re-prioritise them together; add labels and components; and Clone an item with the copy button at the top of the open work item.