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Workflow

Ideation canvas

An infinite brainstorming whiteboard integrated directly into the product lifecycle.

User-facing guide
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The canvas

Open the Ideation Canvas from Planning, Ideation in the sidebar. This gives you an infinite 2D canvas entirely dedicated to brainstorming, sketching out logical structures, and clustering ideas before they become rigidly structured tasks.

Unlike traditional whiteboards that get forgotten later, the Ideation Canvas is fully aware of your Iterel project context and can be translated directly into your backlog.

Canvas interactions

  • Panning: Click and drag anywhere on the empty canvas or use your mouse wheel/trackpad.
  • Zooming: Pinch to zoom or hold Cmd/Ctrl while scrolling.
  • Selecting: Click a node to select it. Click and drag across multiple nodes to select a group.
  • Connections: Drag from the edge port of one node to another to draw an arrow linking them. This is useful for mapping hierarchies or thought chains.

Expanding thoughts

You don't need to manually type everything:

  1. AI expansion: Select a node that contains a core thought (e.g. "We need a new dashboard"). Press the Expand button in the floating toolbar.
  2. The AI Conductor will branch out from that node, creating multiple new connected sub-nodes that break down the idea into actionable chunks or alternative explorations.
  3. You can iteratively expand ideas across the infinite board until a solid plan emerges.

Section clustering

If your canvas gets messy, you can create a Section Box around a cluster of nodes. Moving the Section Box will automatically move all of its internal nested children together, maintaining your spatial organization. Sections snap their connection lines intelligently so you can connect entire groups of thoughts to one another.

From ideation to execution

The biggest advantage of the Iteration canvas is that it isn't an isolated silo.

When you are ready, you can select any node (or group of nodes) and press Send to Backlog. Iterel will automatically parse the sticky notes, their structural connections, and their parent section titles, converting them into properly formatted Tasks and Epics on your Kanban board.