Now that you know the terminology, let’s take a deeper look at how all the parts of Clubhouse work together. This is really useful to know, because once you see how the blocks of Clubhouse fit together, it’s easier to build with them.
Let’s start at the top, just to review: a Company is the entity that owns the Organization and everything in it. Organizations (soon to be called Workspaces) are where all the work gets done.
Teams are the next biggest building block. Teams are groups of Projects that share a workflow (again, think departments in a company). Every newly-created Clubhouse Organization has one default Team with a workflow that can be customized right out of the box, and adding additional Teams or workflows is optional.
Some Organizations don’t need or want them. For those Organizations, Teams are a somewhat invisible building block of Clubhouse, but it’s still there nonetheless.
Projects (or Focus Areas) are next, and are groups of related Stories that represent work that’s ongoing (in that it has no defined end date). Unlike Teams, Projects aren’t optional — Organizations have to create at least one Project after they sign up, because all Stories must be associated with a Project.
Epics are collections of related Stories that capture work that’s too big to fit into a single Story, but too small to become a Project. Plus, Epics usually have specific end dates, and Projects don’t. Epics aren’t directly associated with Projects, but because the Stories inside them are, Epics can span multiple Projects and be filtered by them on the Epics page.
Epics are optional, and so Stories can be assigned to an Epic, but they don’t have to be. Some smaller or non-technical teams may not use Epics, but most of our larger and technical teams do.
Milestones are groups of Epics, meant to help Organizations visualize chunks of work over a defined period of time. We tend to organize and plan our work by quarter, but the iteration period is up to the individual user. As with Epics, Milestones are optional, and aren’t directly associated with Projects, but can be filtered by Project on the Milestones page.
Important note: Stories can’t be associated directly with Milestones. This means that Stories which don’t fit easily into an organized Epic are hard to track and plan for.
We’re discussing the pros and cons of changing this relationship in Clubhouse, but for now the recommended workaround for customers is to create a ‘Miscellaneous’ Epic to put unrelated Stories into, and then add that ‘Misc’ Epic to the appropriate Milestone.
Let’s recap: the Organization (or Workspace) is where everything gets done. To help organize work within the Organization, there are Teams, which are groups of Projects that share a workflow.
Stories belong primarily to Projects, but can also be organized into Epics when they represent a larger amount of work. Milestones are collections of Epics that facilitate long-term planning, roadmap-style. Stories can’t be added directly to Milestones.
And that’s it! Those are the relationships between the basic building blocks of Clubhouse. The same diagram you see in this video is available below if you ever need a quick reference – and don’t worry, most of us do!
