What Are Views?
A view in Cartographer is a named combination of filters and display settings applied to your story map. It is the same underlying data, seen through a different lens.
Think of views like saved queries for your board. One view might show only cards tagged with the “Admin” persona, another might filter to a specific customer with metadata collapsed, and a third might show the full board with everything expanded. You define them once, name them, and switch between them instantly.
Why Views Matter
A story map grows quickly. Once you have dozens of cards across multiple journeys and steps, the full board can be overwhelming, especially when different people need to see different slices of it. Views let you:
- Focus. Strip away the noise. Show only what is relevant to the current conversation, whether that is a sprint planning session or a stakeholder review.
- Move fast. Instead of manually re-applying filters every time you switch contexts, save your configuration and recall it with a click.
- Tailor for the audience. Leadership wants the big picture. Engineers want the detail. Customer success wants their account’s roadmap. Views let you serve each audience without maintaining separate boards.
- Stay consistent. Named views create a shared vocabulary. “Pull up the risk view” means the same thing to everyone on the team.
How Views Work
Filtering
Views support filtering by multiple dimensions, and you can combine them freely:
- Persona. Show only cards associated with specific personas. Useful for walking through one user type’s journey end to end.
- Customer. Show only cards tied to specific customers or segments. Useful for account-level planning and QBRs.
- Status. Filter by workflow state (for example, Backlog, In Progress, Done) to see what is active, what is shipped, or what is still in the queue.
- Card type. Narrow to specific types like objectives, risks, questions, or knowledge gaps. A “risk view” that shows only risk cards is a quick way to audit threats across the whole map.
Filtered cards can be hidden entirely or faded. Fading keeps the layout in place while it de-emphasizes irrelevant items, so you always know where you are.
Display Options
Beyond filtering, views control how the board is displayed:
- Metadata visibility. Toggle whether cards show descriptions, persona tags, customer tags, and status badges. Hiding metadata gives you a compact, scannable overview.
- Card scale. Adjust the visual density of cards. A zoomed-out scale fits more on screen for big-picture planning. A zoomed-in scale is better for detailed work.
- Collapsed journeys. Collapse entire journey columns you do not need right now. If you are focused on the onboarding journey, collapse the others to free up space.
Saving and Switching
Once you have configured the filters and display settings you want, save the view with a name you will remember. Good names describe the purpose, not the mechanics: “Leadership Review” is better than “Status = Done + Collapsed.”
Switch between saved views from the view selector. The board updates in place: no page reload, no navigation. You can also restore the default, unfiltered view at any time.
Views are saved per project. Each project can have its own set of named views tailored to how that project is used.
Use Cases
- Leadership reviews. Zoom out. Collapse detail, hide descriptions, show only objectives and milestones. Give executives the big picture without the noise.
- Team standups. Filter to “In Progress” status. See what is active, who it is for, and what is blocked, all without scrolling through the whole map.
- Customer roadmaps. Filter by customer to build a focused view of what you are building for a specific account. Pair with sharing to send it to them directly.
- Risk assessments. Filter to risk cards only. See every identified risk across all journeys in one view. Use this in quarterly risk reviews or before major launches.
- Sprint planning. Combine status and persona filters to see what is queued for your primary users. Helps the team focus on the highest-impact work.
Sharing Views
Views work well together with sharing. Instead of sharing your entire board, you can share a specific view. This gives external stakeholders a focused slice of your story map without exposing the full picture.
Create different shared links for different audiences: a customer gets their roadmap view, leadership gets the strategic overview, and a partner gets the integration timeline. Each link is password-protected and read-only.
See the shared views walkthrough for a step-by-step example of setting up views and sharing them externally.
