Project milestones

Project milestones help you divide and organize work inside projects.

Overview

Project milestones represent different stages in a project’s lifecycle. You can easily create milestones, add issues to milestones, and track the progress of each milestone in a project. Progress towards project milestones are also visible from Roadmaps and project views on a timeline to help quickly contextualize the current state of work.

Basics

Create milestones

With a project in view, open the project details pane (CMD I) and create a new milestone by clicking beside the milestones header. Alternatively, create a milestone through the command menu (Cmd / Ctrl+K.) Assigning a date to a milestone is optional and can be added after the milestone is created. On a project timeline, you can right-click to add a milestone on the selected date.

Edit and delete milestones

When viewing existing milestones in the project information pane, click on the … icon beside each milestone to edit or delete the milestone. To remove or add a date to a milestone, choose Edit and select a date by clicking on the calendar icon.
On a project timeline view, you can right-click on a milestone to delete or when selected hit ⌘/CTRLbackspace.You can also drag milestones on the timeline to your preferred date, select multiple or hold shift to drag all to a new date.

Add milestones to issues

If an issue belongs to a project that contains milestones, you can add a milestone to the issue from the command menu by searching "Add to milestone". You can also use the keyboard shortcut Shift M, or you can drag the issue onto the milestone in the project details pane.

When creating a new issue in a project with milestones, we will automatically suggest suitable milestones during the creation process. You can choose one of the suggestions or click on the diamond icon to choose another milestone.

Filter and group by milestones

Filter by milestone by pressing F from within a project, searching for the Milestone filter type and choosing the desired milestones. Alternatively, open the project details pane and quickly filter for a single milestone by clicking on it.

When viewing an issue that has a milestone attached, you can also click on the arrow beside the milestone in the issue details pane to open the project with that milestone applied as a quick filter

Clicking into the display options for a project permits grouping by milestone.

Reorder milestones

When viewing milestones in the project details pane, hover over each milestone and click on the icon to the left of a milestones name to drag and drop it into a new position.

Milestones and Roadmaps

When viewing projects within a roadmap, the current milestone is displayed on the timeline alongside its completion percentage. The same is true when viewing projects within a team. Hover or click a milestone to view more details.

Double-clicking on a milestone from either view will open the project with that milestone applied as a quick filter. Clear this filter from the project details sidebar to view all issues within the project.

You can also filter by completed and upcoming milestones on the roadmap view. Click Filter at the top of a roadmap, choose between Next milestone and Completed milestones, and then enter the text contained with the milestone names you are looking for.

Milestones progress

When viewing milestones in the project details pane, we will show a completion percentage for each milestone. This is the percentage of issues in the milestone that have been moved to a completed status.

The diamond icon for the milestone will change depending on the completion status and the milestone currently being worked towards will have a yellow icon to show focus. Take a look at the below video to see this in action.

If you are on our Plus plan, you will have access to our Insights feature where you will be able to view milestones as a dimension and segment milestones by status type so you can see which milestones are currently in progress

How Linear uses milestones

Once we had completed a functional prototype, we used milestones to help us organize work inside our milestones project. We chose the following milestones:

• Internal alpha
• Beta 1
• Beta 2
• Public launch
• Post launch

In our weekly project syncs, we were able to quickly see at a glance the current milestone's completion percentage. We could also easily filter for issues in the current milestone to check if there were any issues we needed to discuss or move to another milestone.

Looking at how other teams have used milestones while in beta, we have seen similar patterns of dividing work into development and release phases.

FAQ