Status Rollups

Read the colored bar in a PD table row: how status rolls up from attribute to model to feature to solution as a distribution, and how to click through.

What you'll learn

  • What the little colored bar in a PD table row actually shows.
  • How status rolls up from leaf to root: attribute → model → feature → solution.
  • How to read the distribution and click through to the children behind it.

This builds on The Product Development Concept and Your First Solution.

What a rollup is

Every layer of the PD tree owns children: a Solution owns Features, a Feature owns Models, a Model owns Attributes (and Controllers, and Events). A status rollup is how a parent row summarizes the statuses of its children so you can see how far along a branch is without opening every child.

In the table, a rollup shows up as a small horizontal bar with a count next to it — for example, a "Models" column on a Feature row, or an "Attributes" column on a Model row. The bar is divided into equal segments, one segment per child, each colored by that child's status. The number in parentheses is how many children there are.

So a Feature with five Models shows a five-segment bar. If four segments are the color of a "done"-tier status and one is the color of an early status, you can see at a glance that the Feature is mostly built but not finished — without reading a single Model.

The rollup is a distribution, not a single computed grade. m18t doesn't collapse the children into one number or auto-set the parent's own status from them. It shows you the spread and lets you draw the conclusion. (The parent row also has its own status, which you set directly — that's separate from the rollup bar.)

The chain, leaf to root

The same mechanism repeats at each level, so status effectively rolls up the whole tree:

  • An Attribute's status is a leaf — you set it directly.
  • A Model shows the distribution of its Attributes (and its Controllers and Events).
  • A Feature shows the distribution of its Models.
  • A Solution shows the distribution of its Features and Models.

Read top-down, a Solution row tells you how its Features are spread; click into a Feature and you see how its Models are spread; click into a Model and you see its Attributes. Each level is one bar summarizing the level below.

Statuses come from the shared status set — the same opinionated vocabulary used across content and the rest of the workspace, with each status carrying a fixed color. That's why the segment colors are consistent everywhere you see a rollup.

How to read one

  1. Open Product Manager (/studio/product-development) and pick an entity tab — say, Features.
  2. Find the rollup column (e.g. "Models"). Each row shows a segmented bar and a count.
  3. Hover the bar. A popover lists every child by name and slug, colored by status.
  4. Click any child in that popover to jump straight to it.

The count in parentheses also flags empty branches: a (0) bar means the parent has no children of that type yet.

Variations

  • Empty rollups are information. A Feature showing (0) Models hasn't been broken down yet — that's a gap worth noticing, not a bug.
  • One bad segment stands out. Because every child gets an equal slice, a single early-status child in an otherwise-finished branch is visible immediately.
  • The graph view is the same data, drawn differently. If you'd rather see the whole tree at once than scan rows, the dependency graph renders the same status colors across the entire structure.

FAQ

Does finishing all the children automatically mark the parent as done? No. The rollup shows the distribution of children; it does not change the parent's own status. You set a parent's status yourself. Status transitions aren't enforced as a workflow today, either — see The Status Set.

Why are all the segments the same width? Each child gets an equal slice regardless of size or importance. The bar is a count-weighted distribution of statuses, not a progress percentage.

What does the number in parentheses mean? It's the number of children rolled into that bar. (5) means five Models (or Attributes, etc.); (0) means none yet.

Can I click through to a specific child? Yes. Hover the bar to open the list, then click any child to navigate to it.

Where do the colors come from? From the shared status set. Each status has a fixed color used consistently across the workspace.

What's next

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