Your board should match how your team actually works. When your stages mirror your real process and your approvals gate the right moments, a project's status is clear at a glance and nothing advances before it is ready.
This article shows you how to define the stages in a workspace, move projects across the board, and add approvals, including sign-off from someone outside your team.
Define your stages
Stages are the columns of your board. A workspace comes with stages, and you can shape them to fit your process:
Create a stage for each step your work passes through.
Rename a stage so its label matches how your team talks about the work.
Reorder stages so they read left to right in the order work happens.
Remove a stage you no longer need.
A common stage set for content work looks like this: Backlog, Drafting, Review, Ready to publish, Published. Start with the steps you already use and adjust from there.
Move projects through the board
Each project sits in one stage at a time. As the work progresses, you move the project to the next stage. View the workspace as a board organized by stage to see where every project stands and what is waiting at each step.
Add approvals
Approvals let you require sign-off before work is considered done. Relato supports a few forms:
In-app approval: approve a project inside Relato when it meets your bar.
External stakeholder sign-off: send an approval request to someone outside your team, so a client or reviewer can sign off without a full account.
Task-level approval: mark a task as needing approval, so that specific piece of work carries its own requirement.
Use a stage as a gate
You can combine a stage with an approval to hold work until it is signed off. A common pattern is a Review stage plus an approval acting as a gate before Ready to publish. A project stays in Review until it is approved, so nothing reaches Ready to publish without sign-off. Add an external approval request at the same point when a client or stakeholder needs to sign off before you go live.
Tips
Keep your stage set short. Fewer, clearer columns are easier to read than a long row.
Name stages after the work, such as Drafting or Review, not after a person or a date.
Put your approval gate right before the stage that means work goes live.
Use task-level approvals for the one step that needs a check, and a project approval for the whole piece.
FAQ
Can someone outside my team approve a project?
Yes. Send an external approval request to a stakeholder outside your team, and they can sign off on the task or project.
Can I change my stages later?
Yes. You can create, rename, reorder, and remove stages at any time as your process changes.
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If you need help, message us in the Relato Slack community or email [email protected].