The timeline is your best defense against the deluge of direct messages and emails that you’re likely receiving today. In a single, explorable interface, the timeline brings together projects, metrics, and footnotes to give you a high-level view of how your business is performing.
In our introductory article on the timeline, you learned about connecting your roadmap of projects and your metrics to real-world events using footnotes. These three types of items are displayed over the weeks shown on the timeline, and they provide you with a look back or ahead into the world that makes up your product growth.
Once you’ve connected a data source, integrated your feature flagging tool in a few simple steps, and set up some metrics, you can deepen your use of the timeline by doing a few more things:
⛳ Add teams to metrics
If you’ve selected which team or teams own a metric (you can edit a metric at any time to add this) and you’ve added the team label to each project, then you can filter the timeline by team. Filtering by team lets you see the project that are specific to that team alongside the metrics they own. All you need to do is select a team from the dropdown menu at the top to see what they’re working on and how that work is affecting the top-line metrics.
🔮 Add future events to footnotes
When you have some downtime, it’s useful to go through the upcoming plans from your broader PR, marketing, and go-to-market teams and add their work to the timeline using footnotes. Is there an article coming out about a recent fundraising event? Do you have a user conference coming up? Any notable and consistent seasonal shifts? Add all of those items to your timeline as footnotes. Your future self will thank you. 🙏
🔭 Find and prevent upcoming collisions between teams
If you’re on a growth team with more than two sub-teams, you know how hard it can be to avoid impacting each other’s experiments. If you select one or more teams on the timeline, you can easily see where future plans may intersect unhelpfully with each other. This can help you figure out issues before your metrics are impacted, so you can revise plans to avoid an experiment collision.
Here’s how to drill down:
Select one or more teams
Filter to see only Upcoming and Live projects
Use the horizontal scrollbar to explore the future
If there are still too many projects, try filtering down by tags like `landing page` or metrics like `activation rate` to see projects similar to what your team is planning on shipping.
Leave comments for your colleagues about upcoming collisions.
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