Hello 👋! We’re so glad you’re here!

As the name suggests this guide is meant to give you a quick overview of what Shortcut is. If you’d like a deeper understanding of Shortcut, such as how to run team standups or how to create templates for work you do again and again - we have a more in-depth guide for that! Or, if you and your team would like a personalized Shortcut walkthrough (read: not a sales call), book time with our Team - we’re here to help! 

Start here and see why Shortcut is the issue tracker your team will actually enjoy using. Let’s get into it!

The Basics

Shortcut is designed for product development teams who care about making progress. It unites issue tracking, sprints, roadmaps and goals into a single experience to help teams - from startup to scale - build and ship products. Shortcut’s hierarchy is simple:

• Stories are the smallest unit of work - think: a feature, bug or chore that takes 1-2 days to complete. 
• Epics are collections of Stories that represent larger projects. Epics are great for cross-functional squads to manage work. For example, the go-to-market plans for a feature launch might involve Stories from product, engineering, marketing and CX.
• Objectives connect teams, the projects they own, and individual work to strategic company goals. Objectives are made up of Epics and the associated Key Results let you see progress as work is completed. 

💡Look for the Breadcrumbs on Story and Epics detail pages to let you drill down into how those pieces of work connect back to the strategy, helping align teams focus with the work that matters most.

Getting Set-up

Importing your data brings your progress, history and insights directly into Shortcut, so you can pick up right where you left off. We offer importers to help you move from other project management tools quickly and effortlessly. You can do this anytime - now or later!

Shortcut Integrates with Tools to Help Improve Your Team's Workflow 

• Connect Github, GitLab or Bitbucket with Shortcut and save your team time and manual work by linking Stories to commits, branches and pull requests to automatically move Stories across your workflow and keep things up to date with the work you’re already doing.
• Our Slack integration lets you create and update Stories directly from Slack and see the progress that your team is making inside of Slack.

See the full list of integrations.

Managing Work

The best thing about Shortcut is that it can help you get stuff done faster and keeps all of your work organized so you and your team can see what’s happening, who’s doing it and when it will be done. 

Start by creating a Story 

Add in a title, description, and connect related documents and tasks. Once created, if you connected GitHub (or your preferred VCS), you can automatically link commits, pull and merge requests, and more, to your Story - saving you time and keeping things in sync. 

When you’re done, click Create and see your Story on the Kanban board. As progress is made on this story, it will move from left to right as it goes through each workflow state until it’s done.

Add Stories to an Epic

Epics are collections of Stories and are meant to organize work for features or releases. As an example, if your team is working on an updated mobile UI for your application, all of the Stories that you created for this project will sit inside of an Epic. As Stories are completed, you’ll see progress made on the Epic until the feature is ready for delivery.

Go to your Epic page and add the Story you just created to a new Epic. You can create additional Stories right on the page to group the related work together.

See your team’s focus with Roadmaps

The Roadmap makes planning, visualizing and communicating work across your organization even easier. It’s organized by teams and structured via Epics, making it a flexible way for teams to clearly communicate what they’re going to build, and when, to keep the broader team aligned. 

Add your Epics to the Roadmap to explore the options: you can rearrange the order and customize what’s shown to keep your Roadmap view focused.

Add a Health Status with contextual comment to indicate if work is On Track, Off Track or At Risk. You can also export your Roadmap view to share it with your team. 

💡Even if an Epic is not assigned to the team, the Epic can still be added to the that group to help craft cross-collaborative team roadmaps. 

Plan your Sprints with Iterations

Iterations (similar to Sprints) are defined periods of time where we aim to deliver a set of Stories. At Shortcut, we work in two week iterations. Your Iteration page displays what Stories you’re working on during the Iteration and provides valuable, at-a-glance versions of your Burndown and Cumulative Flow reports so you can quickly understand how work is progressing, identify bottlenecks in the process, and understand if you’ll meet your commitments.

Focus on the big picture with Objectives

Objectives let you see progress towards your top-level strategic goals in the same place as where the product development work is happening. As Stories roll up into Epics, Epics roll up into Objectives and are the key components that drive the business forward. You can add Key Results to track the metrics that matter most.

Work with your Team

Shortcut was made for teams, and it shines when it comes to collaboration, so invite a few people to try it out with you! 

The best way to see the value of Shortcut is to build something real together. Pick something your team’s working on and create an Epic, add a few Stories, put it on a Roadmap. See it move across workflows and be delivered to your happy customers! Yay, progress! 👏 

We’ll be ready to answer any questions your team has as they get started. Contact our team or check out the Help menu to ask questions, find keyboard shortcuts and access our demo workspace.

Want to chat with other Shortcut users? Join the Shortcut Slack community

Like what you see and are ready to get started? Sign up for Shortcut

Updated September 23, 2024 21:22