One board per decision, not per team
The most common setup mistake is creating a board per internal team. Customers do not know your org chart. Create boards around the decision being made — feature requests, bug reports, integrations wanted — and use categories for the finer cuts.
Statuses
Statuses are the public contract you make with the people who voted. Keep them few and unambiguous: Open, Under review, Planned, In progress, Shipped, Declined.
Every status change can notify voters. Declined with a one-line reason builds more trust than silence, so use it rather than letting requests rot in Open.
Categories and custom fields
Categories are for filtering and reporting; custom fields are for the information you need before you can triage. Ask for the minimum — a required field costs you submissions.
- 1Open the board, then Settings.
- 2Add categories that match how you plan to slice reporting.
- 3Add submission fields, marking only the essentials as required.
- 4Preview the public form before saving.
Visibility
Public boards are indexable and collect votes from anyone. Private boards are invite-only and are the right choice for enterprise customers, beta programmes and internal IT queues.