What is a Component and when should I use it ?
Components let you organize your product backlog into areas, themes, or teams for example. They contain your Discoveries, which are customer problems and ideas to explore and prioritize.
Your Components are the backbone of your product's organization and for this reason, they are mutually exclusive: one Discovery can only belong to one single Component.
Components can be easily accessed from the left navigation bar in the Product section.
How to organize Components: categorization examples
The way you should organize Components depends on how your products and teams are organized.
To find the right organization, ask yourself you and your team expect to visualize and navigate in your product backlogs and roadmaps.
Here are some examples of categorization that you can use to organize your Components:
by product and/or product areas: Onboarding, Home, Dashboard, Settings, etc.
by product team: Team 1, Team 2, Team 3, etc.
by objective: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, etc.
At Harvestr for example, we chose to organize our Components around our main product areas and Jobs to be Done. Hence the Components we have: Feedback, Integrations, Discovery, etc. When we start working on a new customer problem related to one of those categories, we create a new Discovery and we assign it to the corresponding Component.
Create Components
You can create your own Components using the "Add component" button at the bottom of your Components list.
Create Sub-Components
To get even more organized, you can also add Sub-Components inside of your Components, and add Discoveries inside of these Sub-Components.
Edit and delete Components
To edit a Component's name or to delete it, open in the Component's settings by clicking on its name in the upper section.
Add Discoveries to Components
Discoveries always belong to Components or Sub-Components. The are two ways to add a new Discovery to a Component.
Create Discoveries in a Component's view
The first way to create a Discovery is to go to the Component where you want to store it, using the navigation bar on the left. Once you are in the right Component, click on the "New" button on the right, above the list of your Discoveries.
Create Discoveries from a message you receive
In a message, when you open the feedback categorization popup, you can create a new Discovery in the Component of your choice by clicking on the "+" button that will appear when you hover the Component's name.
Give your new Discovery a title, press Enter, and the feedback you highlighted in the message will be linked to the Discovery.
If you want to know more about Discoveries, have a look at this article.