Designing your pipeline
Renaming, reordering and adding stages, the four stage types, and the one that stops nagging you.
Rename, reorder, hide or add the stages of your project board. Everyone on the team sees the same pipeline.
That last sentence is the constraint. Stages are workspace-wide, so this is not a personal preference screen. Only team admins can change it.
Every stage has a type
This is the part that actually matters, because the type decides how a project in that stage is treated:
| Type | What it means |
|---|---|
| Open | A live deal. Counts as active and can go stale. |
| Won | A closed win. Counts toward your win rate. |
| Lost | A closed loss. Counts toward your win rate. |
| Parked | Deliberately paused. Never flagged as stale. |
Name a stage whatever you like; the type is what your dashboard numbers read.
A stage called "Waiting for legal" typed as Open will start warning you when it goes quiet. The same stage typed as Parked never will. Both are legitimate; they are just different decisions about whether silence there is a problem.
The parked trap
Parked stages raise no attention warnings at all. That is their purpose, and it means nothing will ever remind you a parked project exists.
Look at your parked stages deliberately every so often. They are the one place work can sit forever without the product ever mentioning it.
Reordering and hiding
Drag to reorder; the board follows. Hiding a stage takes it off the board without deleting it, which is the gentler option when you are not sure you are done with it.
Colors
Each stage has one. On a board with eight lanes, color is what lets you see shape at a glance.
Before you change the set
Changing stages retroactively changes what your numbers mean. Retyping a stage from Open to Won moves projects into your win rate that were not in it yesterday.
That is not a reason to avoid it, only a reason to do it deliberately and not in the middle of a quarter you are about to report on.