Not every story is ready for a team backlog right away. Maybe it’s just an idea, or it needs more details before development can begin. Story refinement gives product owners a dedicated space to organize and prioritize work before handing it off to a team.

While this area is built with product owners in mind, anyone can add stories—giving teams a shared space to capture and refine ideas before they’re ready to move forward.

A simple, focused workflow

In Story refinement, stories are organized into four steps:

• Idea — Capture early-stage concepts.
• Refinement — Develop and finalize details.
• Ready for assignment — Queue fully specified stories for assignment to a team backlog.
• Won’t do — Track items that won’t move forward in the foreseeable future.

Since these stories aren’t assigned to a team yet, they won’t show estimated completion dates or sizes—those come into play once a team takes ownership.

Filter and find what matters

To help product owners focus on the right stories, Story refinement includes the following filtering options:

• Assignee — See stories assigned to specific product owners.
• Product theme — Group work by investment category.
• Timebox — Find stories planned for a particular timeframe.

More control over backlog management

To keep backlogs structured and aligned with priorities, two new roles provide clearer ownership:

• Product Managers — A workspace-level role responsible for managing product themes and overseeing backlog organization, to ensure work aligns with broader priorities.

• Backlog owners — A team-specific role responsible for managing which stories a team will work on and in what order. When a team’s backlog is managed, backlog owners determine what gets added, created, and reordered in the ‘To do’ category, as well as which stories move in and out of ‘Won’t do’.

Customize what you see

List and board views in Story refinement can display product themes and timeboxes, with independent controls for each view. These settings are personal, allowing each user to adjust visibility without affecting other team members.

This release introduces two powerful new features: Timelines, for high-level planning with flexibility, and the Everything page, for a centralized view of all your work.

Timelines

Balancing time, scope, and resources is one of the toughest parts of project management. Traditional tools often lock time and scope together, creating rigid plans that can’t adapt to real-world challenges like unexpected bugs, shifting priorities, or changing estimates.

Atono’s Timelines take a different approach. By separating timeboxes (time), product themes (scope), and resources (teams), Timelines give you the flexibility to plan confidently and adjust as needed. Use timeboxes to define scheduling windows, product themes to group related work, and tailored timelines to share the right level of details with different stakeholders.

Timelines are built to keep you agile and focused on delivering results, no matter what.

Key features:

Timeboxes for scheduling

Define start and end dates to organize work and prioritize what matters most. Flexible drag-and-drop controls let you reorder timeboxes as priorities evolve—without tying scope to rigid deadlines.

Product themes for alignment

Group related stories under product themes to align work with strategic goals. Themes make it easy to track long-term progress, clarify scope, and ensure that every deliverable supports your organization’s priorities.

Zoomable views

Quickly switch between detailed and big-picture planning with zoom levels from 2 days to 5 years, providing the clarity you need at every stage of the journey.

Tailored timelines

Create customized timelines to share the right level of detail with executives, teams, or product organizations. Whether you’re communicating strategic plans or coordinating with your team, you’ll have the tools to ensure everyone is on the same page.

Looking ahead

Future updates will expand timelines to support external stakeholders, helping customers anticipate upcoming features for adoption and tool integration while giving prospects the clarity they need to make informed buying decisions.

See everything!

The Everything page gives you a clear, centralized view of all your work items, making it easy to search, filter, and review details across teams and workflows without switching between different backlogs.

Key features:

Tailored insights for every item type

Unlike tools that treat all work items the same, Atono gives stories and bugs unique properties, reflecting their real-world differences. Filters and columns adapt to the specific types of item you’re viewing, so you’ll only see what’s relevant—no clutter, no noise.

Filter by specific criteria

Refine your view by applying filters such as item type, workflow step, product theme, timebox, and many more. Combine multiple filters to a tailored view of items to focus on.

Search by keyword

Quickly locate specific stories or bugs by searching for keywords in their titles or numbers in their Item ID.

Click to open items

Access the full details of any story or bug with a single click from the table view.

Customize your table view

Add, remove, sort, and reorder columns to focus on the details that matter most to your workflow.

Understand what you’re viewing

See at a glance how many items match your criteria with a count displayed at the top of the table.

This release brings new ways to manage your team’s work, the ability to connect related items, and a refreshed design to make Atono feel more cohesive and polished.

Team board view: visualize your workflow

The team backlog just got a major upgrade with a kanban-style board view—perfect for visualizing progress, identifying bottlenecks, and limiting work in progress. And yes, it works seamlessly with custom workflows too.

Here’s what makes it great:

At-a-glance details

Spot key details like item types and IDs, assignees, sizes (stories), risk ratings (bugs), estimated completion dates, and staleness indicators.

Load balance

Reassign stories and bugs right from the board to distribute work evenly across team members.

Drag and drop

Move items through workflow steps or reorder them within a step.

Collapsible columns

Focus on what matters by collapsing steps you don’t need to see right now. Collapsed columns show indicator bars and item counts on hover, so you can still keep an eye on workflow progress and spot bottlenecks.

Item type filter

Switch between viewing stories, bugs, or both. Your preference is remembered for each backlog.

Want to dive deeper into an item? Click it to view full details, and use the + button in a column header or at the bottom of a step to add new items.

Prefer the list view? It’s still here—switch between views anytime using the icons in the backlog header.

Linked items: track dependencies with ease

Work smarter with Linked items, a feature that links related stories and bugs so you can stay aligned and tackle dependencies head-on.

Why it’s invaluable:

• Highlight critical connections: Show dependencies between items, like which bugs pertain to which stories, so your team understands what impacts what.
• Navigate seamlessly: Jump between related stories and bugs directly from the Linked items section in an item’s details.
• See the bigger picture: Quickly see the status of related items to understand broader workflow progress.

A fresh new look

We’ve given Atono a makeover! The new design feels cohesive and polished, uniting the website and app for a seamless experience.

What’s new:

• Light and dark modes: Redesigned to reduce eye strain and improve focus, no matter how you like to work.
• Updated colours: Users, teams, and workflow steps are now easier to differentiate.
• Refreshed emails: Consistent, modern, and unmistakably Atono.

Every team works differently. That’s why Atono workflows are designed to balance customization with measurability, giving teams the freedom to align their workflows with how they actually work while still gaining clear, actionable insights into continuous improvement opportunities.

Tailored to your team

Atono lets teams customize workflows to fit their unique ways of working—whether influenced by story granularity, team structure, or delivery speed. With this flexibility, teams can refine and optimize processes over time, ensuring workflows evolve as needs change and that work progresses naturally and efficiently.

Built-in measurability

Even with customized workflows, Atono keeps tracking dependable and consistent. Workflow steps are organized into categories, making performance insights reliable across teams, no matter how workflows are customized. This structure helps teams monitor key metrics like average cycle time—the average time items of similar type and size spend in progress—which is vital for optimizing processes, forecasting timelines, and improving delivery.

Key features

Customizable workflows

Create new steps, reorder them, recategorize, and change colors to match your team’s needs—all in real-time, without complicated workflow migrations. This flexibility lets teams build processes that truly reflect how they work.

Cycle time tracking

Track the time each item spends in progress, providing insights into workflow pace while supporting forecasts, release management, and process optimization—all without rigid processes. Teams can also incorporate story sizing in cycle time calculations for added precision.

Average cycle time reports

Get a visual overview of average cycle times for stories and bugs over time to identify trends and uncover opportunities for improvement.

Projected completion dates

Estimate when backlog items are likely to be completed based on past performance, helping with prioritization and keeping projects on track. Reorder backlog items to ensure critical items are completed before their deadlines.

Exclude outliers

Mark unusual cases as outliers to prevent them from skewing performance metrics in cycle time reporting.

Staleness indicators

Spot items that have significantly exceeded expected cycle times in specific steps, helping catch bottlenecks before they cause delays.

Restore to default

Reset workflows to the default to maintain consistency with organizational standards if desired.

We’ve been busy designing bug tracking features to help teams easily log and track defects from detection through resolution. Just like with our Stories MVP, Atono's bug reporting, tracking, and resolution workflow is purpose-built and distinct from other backlog items.

What’s inside?

Our bug tracking capabilities incorporate best practices and specialized features to streamline the entire bug management process:

• Triage area: Quickly assign risk ratings to new defects by evaluating probability and impact, making it simpler to prioritize fixes.

• Smart templates: Guide reporters to include all crucial information, ensuring no detail is missed.

• Browser reporting: Report bugs directly from your web application, automatically including essential diagnostic info to speed up resolution.

We’ve also added features that are useful for bug reporting (and also applicable to other backlog items, like stories):

• Attachments: Add screenshots, videos, and other file types to provide clear context for each bug.

• Comments: Share general feedback or specific comments on selections of text, fostering better communication within your team.

What’s next?

Our goal is to make bug tracking as efficient and stress-free as possible—and we’re just getting started. Here’s a peek at what’s coming post-MVP:

• Enhanced comments: Include @mentions and real-time chat notifications.
• Customizable templates: Tailor templates at both the workspace and team levels.
• Configurable risk ratings: Adapt risk ratings to align with your team’s specific standards.

Feature flags are a powerful tool in modern software development. They let teams separate deployment from release, making rollouts smoother, experimentation safer, and iterations faster.

The story behind Atono feature flags

In many systems, feature flags exist in a separate application, requiring teams to cross-reference them with the functionality they control. With Atono, feature flags are embedded directly into user stories, cutting out this extra step.

Key benefits

• Streamlined workflow: By integrating feature flags into user stories, we reduce cognitive overload, simplify project management, and centralize all relevant information. This makes it easier for teams to track progress and control feature rollouts.

• User-friendly implementation: Implementing feature flags in Atono is intuitive. Each story comes with built-in documentation and code snippets, so even if you’re new to feature flagging, you can set them up with ease.

• Comprehensive tracking: Atono’s reporting system provides a clear view of all stories under flag control, allowing product owners to monitor ongoing releases and identify opportunities to retire flags for fully-released features.

How it works

For MVP, we’ve prioritized keeping feature flags simple yet effective. You can set flags ON or OFF for any story and slice them by common dimensions like environment, customer, and location.

A foundation built on standards

Atono feature flags are based on openfeature.dev, the emerging standard for feature flagging. This means you can easily switch to a different feature flag provider in the future if needed.

What’s next?

We believe our current approach covers 80% of customer use cases without adding unnecessary complexity. As we gather user feedback, we plan to expand these capabilities to meet specific customer needs.

Slack, with its outstanding user experience, is the go-to chat platform for software development. Our team relies on it for real-time discussions, sharing time-sensitive information, and handling urgent issues (we've abandoned email entirely to avoid juggling multiple inboxes). Integrating Slack with Atono instead of building our own chat feature ensures teams can keep using their favorite chat platform without disruption.

Slack is great for quick communication, and once a discussion about a story, bug, or security vulnerability wraps up, you can easily turn any resulting decisions into actionable items in Atono. Our goal is to maintain this balance and provide a seamless, easy-to-use integration between Atono and Slack, making sure both tools work well together without much overlap.

Atono meets Slack

The Atono Slack integration provides convenience and encourages best practices for teams using both Atono and Slack in their work. By leveraging the strengths of both platforms, Atono helps teams streamline their workflows, fostering better collaboration and keeping everyone organized and on track.

For our MVP, we’ve focused on two key integration points:

• Teams: Create or connect to existing team channels in Slack, where you can discuss issues, share code samples, and collaborate effectively. Team members can be added automatically on channel creation or later if they join the team. Important updates like team membership changes, feature flag activity, and deployments are automatically posted to keep everyone informed.

• Stories: Collaborate on design, implementation, testing, and deployment in dedicated channels. Atono keeps implementers up to date by positing significant story-related activities directly to these channels.

What’s next?

As Atono evolves, so will our Slack integration. Look forward to features like enhanced workflows, usage metrics, and deployment notifications. Additionally, the Atono Slack app will support slash commands for reporting bugs, moving items through workflows, posting comments, and more exciting features to come.

Most systems treat stories as just another task in a long list of issues—they look and feel like bugs, security vulnerabilities, or architectural improvements. This generic approach misses the opportunity to provide a great user experience for story authors and implementers, and often contributes to task burnout.

Stories are the fundamental unit of software delivery, representing real customer needs, desired functionality, and business value. We believe they should be treated as first-class objects, providing a richer and more purposeful experience.

Introducing: Atono stories

Our Stories MVP provides the framework for specifying, designing, implementing, and testing stories. It enables you to create user stories, define acceptance criteria, prioritize and move stories through a workflow, and maintain a detailed history of all activities.

Key features include:

• Guided user story writing: Craft user stories intuitively with the prompt, “As a {persona}, I want to {perform an action}, so that {rationale},” ensuring each story is complete and focused.

• Reusable personas: Save time and maintain consistency by reusing previously created personas, or easily add new ones as needed.

• Persistent acceptance criteria references: Since stories are first-class objects, it’s crucial that ACs remain intact. Keep copied links to ACs preserved through text edits, reordering, and nesting changes.

• Built-in feature flagging: Directly link feature flags to stories, with integrated documentation and code snippets for easy implementation.

What’s next?

We envision a longer life cycle for user stories than what’s typically seen in other issue tracking systems. By extending their life cycle, we aim to enhance their impact across the entire development process.

Future enhancements seek to:

• Track real customer usage: After a story is deployed and flagged on, tracking customer usage provides valuable insights for evaluating product decisions and guiding future development.
• Serve as reference points: User stories are essential during production incidents, offering critical design details and rationales for future developers who may not have been part of the original team.
• Save time and avoid mistakes: Easy access to information saves time and helps avoid costly mistakes by providing the full context of the system.