Customizing your roadmap columns

Your Creative Roadmap is a pipeline board where every creative moves through a set of status columns, from planned all the way to winner. Out of the box those columns cover a standard testing workflow, but no two creative teams work exactly the same way. This guide shows you how to customize which columns appear, what order they sit in, and how to keep the board focused on the stages that actually matter to you.

The default roadmap columns

Every roadmap ships with the same status columns so you always have a complete pipeline from idea to result. They are:

• Planned — an idea captured but not yet briefed
• Needs brief — approved to move forward and waiting on a creative brief
• Working — in production with an editor or designer
• Ready to test — the asset is finished and queued to go live
• Testing — currently running in your ad account
• Winner — a proven creative worth scaling or iterating on
• Archived — parked, killed, or retired creatives

These map to how DTC creative actually gets made: you have an idea, you write the brief, someone builds it, it ships, and you learn whether it works. The customize options below let you keep that spine while adapting the board to your team.

How to customize your columns

Open the column customize panel from the roadmap toolbar to change what you see on the board.

1. Go to the Creative Roadmap and select the roadmap you want to edit from the roadmap switcher.
2. Click Customize columns in the toolbar to open the column panel.
3. Drag a column by its handle to reorder it — the leftmost column is the earliest stage in your pipeline.
4. Toggle a column off to hide it from the board without deleting the creatives inside it.
5. Toggle it back on at any time to bring that stage back into view.
6. Close the panel to save. Your layout is remembered for that roadmap the next time you open it.

Reordering to match your workflow

Column order is more than cosmetic — it defines the left-to-right flow your team reads every morning. Put the stages your team touches most often toward the left where they get scanned first. If most of your day is spent moving cards between Working and Ready to test, keep those front and center. Reordering is per-roadmap, so a UGC roadmap and a static-image roadmap can each have their own arrangement.

Hiding stages you don't use

Not every team needs every stage. A small brand that briefs and ships in the same sprint might hide Planned and start everything in Needs brief. A team that never formally archives might hide Archived to reduce clutter. Because hiding is reversible, it's safe to experiment: trim the board down to only the columns you touch, then add stages back if your process grows.

• Hide Planned if ideas live in your Brand Bible or briefs instead of on the board
• Hide Archived to keep the working board tight, then re-enable it when you do a quarterly cleanup
• Keep Testing and Winner visible — these are the columns that tell you whether your creative strategy is paying off

Using multiple roadmaps instead of overloading one

If you're tempted to add columns for different product lines or channels, a cleaner approach is often a second roadmap. ATIYO supports multiple named roadmaps, each with its own column layout. That keeps every board readable instead of stretching one board across a dozen statuses. See Renaming and managing roadmaps to learn when to split.

Next steps

With your columns dialed in, set up the views that sit on top of them. Learn how to filter down to just your work in Using the My Queue view, and speed up daily moves with Keyboard shortcuts for the roadmap. If you manage several product lines, read Renaming and managing roadmaps next.