Shared Legends

Standardize the style and structure of your roadmap's legend to create consistency between your team's roadmaps.

Alex Choate avatar
Written by Alex Choate
Updated over a week ago

Admins on Professional and Enterprise Plans can choose to standardize the style and structure of a team's roadmap legend. With a shared legend, Admins will be able to create a centrally managed legend that can be applied to roadmaps across the entire organization.

Updating legends manually as your team grows can be a painstaking process, but creating a shared legend used by multiple roadmaps is simple and easy. Shared legends ensure your team stays closely aligned even as goals and priorities change.

To begin your legend standardization, go to your Account Settings, choose Standardize, then Shared Legends.

To create a new Legend, click New Legend, and give your legend a title with an optional description. Add your labels with an optional description, customize the color of your labels then click Done. You will then see the new Shared Legend in your list.

Once the shared legend is created, Editors can then choose an existing shared legend to apply to their roadmaps. Simply go to the roadmap Settings, under the General tab, you will see Legend with a dropdown menu. Choose which shared legend you would like to apply to the roadmap and click Save.

When changing an existing legend to a new legend, there is a possibility that the new legend may have more or less labels that the current one. You can see in the screenshot below how you will be able to map the labels:


As shown in the above example, Research items will then become Increase Revenue, Strategy/Planning items will become Increase Customer Satisfaction and so on.

If a label gets left unassigned, the roadmap's containers and bars will revert to the unassigned blue color. You can quickly and easily change the unassigned legend labels by going to the Planned section of your Table layout and update the unassigned labels as needed.

FAQ

What happens if my team didn't have a shared legend before and now I want to create one?

You can create and apply your shared legends at any time. A shared legend will not be applied to any existing roadmaps until an Editor on the roadmap selects it from the roadmap settings.

If an administrator adds a new label to an existing legend, then that label will display on all roadmaps using the shared legend. No bars will be assigned to the legend until the roadmap editor assigns bars to the new label.

If an administrator deletes a label that was assigned to bars on roadmaps using that shared legend, then those bars will be unassigned. It’s recommended that administrators consider whether a label should be edited to something else with the same or similar meaning before deleting a label.

If an administrator changes a label on a shared legend, then all bars using that label will also be changed. It is recommended that administrators delete the label and add a new label if the new label has a different meaning, so that it’s clear which unassigned bars need to be assigned (opposed to having bars that are mis-assigned).

Can other users change the shared legend?

Only Admins have the functionality to create a shared legend but any Editor can apply a shared legend to their roadmaps.

If I edit a shared legend after it's created, will it update all the roadmaps that are using it?

Yes, if an existing shared legend is updated, each roadmap where the shared legend is applied will also be updated.

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