As I’m evaluating Fibery, I’m missing some key features for product roadmapping that will keep me from migrating to it. This is mainly in regard to the Board view (aka swimlane, card), which I have found is significantly more consumable for stakeholders compared to a timeline view and is a critical feature needed to replace roadmapping tools.
BLUF
- As a Product Manager, I cannot migrate to Fiberly for roadmapping purposes because of limitations in the Board view
Tools to Reference:
- Roadmunk
- Coda
Features Missing:
- Cannot group by calculated values (see Coda)
- Cannot group by lookup fields via relations (see Coda) EDIT: This is incorrect, it seems my issue was trying to lookup a Text value and group on it (see screenshots in example follow-up post), which isn’t supported. So, limitation is actually "Cannot group by Text Values.
- Cannot group on dates (unless I create a Dates type and maintain it to include all dates)
- Cannot group on part of a date (assign a due day to a task, then show it grouped by Month+Year, Quarter+Year, Week+Year, etc) (See Roadmunk)
- Cannot group on one portion of a Date range (group by Month+Year of End Date) (See Roadmunk)
- Cannot assign things without dates to placeholders for presentation (See Roadmunk for Soon and Later status). Typically you want to group by some level of a date, but also show upcoming things that haven’t been assigned to a period of time yet
Example:
- Open the Fiberly OKR template/app
- Edit the Objectives type
- Add a field for “Date” with a type of Date and set as a Date Range
- Apply a date range to each Objective
- Edit the “Objectives by Quarter” view
- Click on the dropdown for “Column”
- See that you cannot group on the Date field you just setup (with roadmunk i can assign things like Epics to a Month, then can generate another view for Epics by Quarter, or Epics by Year that use the same field)
Value to Fibery:
- Clearer Value Compared to Notion: Provide additional differentiation compared to Notion. Notion already is behind Fibery on this type of view, but the nuance that you can group by some things but not all is hard to describe. You really need to say you can support grouping by all things, while Notion doesn’t
- Match Coda on Features: Coda can group by All The Things! Feature complete compared to Coda is where I think Fiberly should be at the very least. Seriously, try the Coda Card view. They made this capability generic, then they limit whether you can drag cards between the columns based on the column type (regular vs calculated).
- Ditch Your Roadmapping Apps: Treat dates as a configurable entity for presentation, rather than a dumb piece of text. Your OKR template is useless if I have to manage every level of date detail I want. See Roadmunk for how this should be done. Their approach enables you to maintain a date range field, then you can group the items by either the starting or end date, at any level you set.
Bottom Line
- Fiberly must support grouping by lookup fields that you could group on directly. This seems like an oversight and is an inconsistency in the product. Why can I group on a field when it is directly associated with an item, but when it comes in as a lookup I can’t?
- Fiberly must support grouping by every single field at a minimum to compete against general productivity tools (Notion, Coda, etc)
- Fiberly should support more flexible Date grouping, since you are a bit more focused on project management and roadmapping
Screenshot Examples
Roadmunk Screenshots all Demonstrating Views of the Same Date Fields