Inspiration

Finding "final_v3_FINAL.pdf" in a Slack thread is a sign your documentation is broken. Static files lead to two major roadblocks: inaccessibility and versioning issues.According to a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, organizations using Lucid saved 344,000 hours in user efficiencies. ⏱️We wrote an entire article on how to build a living documentation hub that works for your team. Here are a few tips:1. Automate with intelligenceUse these features to keep your data current:Data-linking: Connect diagrams to external data sets so they refresh automatically. Conditional formatting: Set rules to visually flag changes, such as a shape turning red if a process step is overdue. Cloud Accelerator: Automatically generate infrastructure diagrams to optimize your cloud environment in seconds. ☁️2. Centralize communicationKeep the context where the work happens:@mentions: Tag collaborators directly on the canvas to skip the email back-and-forth. Document status: Assign labels so

Introducing Portfolio management to give large, complex product teams real-time visibility across their entire portfolio!As product organizations grow, work inevitably spreads across multiple teams, product lines, and business units. That's great for execution,  but it makes it difficult for leaders to see the full picture. It’s why we built airfocus Portfolio management! 🎉It’s designed to close that gap, bringing product work from across the organization into live, flexible views and dashboards that update in real time.Available to all customers with an airfocus Enterprise plan subscription, Portfolio management give product leaders and executives the bird’s eye view to monitor priorities, progress, risks, and dependencies at a glance, from different angles, and an understanding of how strategic initiatives are breaking down into real work,drill into team execution when needed, and use dashboards to clearly see whether the portfolio reflects their strategy. The launch introduces two

Ready to see what the future of Lucid looks like? 🚀We’ve been cooking🔥a lot of new functionality here at Lucid and over the next few months I’m excited to host a brand-new, three-part webinar series (alongside many of my brilliant colleagues) to show off our latest features!If you’re looking to work smarter, move faster, and maybe even have a little fun while doing it, you won't want to miss these.Moving from blank canvas to creation faster with AIMarch 26, 2026 at 1 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. MTEMEA: March 31, 2026 at 3 p.m. CESTLearn how Lucid’s new intelligent features will help you create diagrams and documentation faster—so you can accelerate visual clarity and alignment.Register nowBuilding a pivot-ready culture through flexible planningApril 30, 2026 at 1 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. MTEMEA: May 5, 2026 at 3 p.m. CESTLearn about new features for creating plans that can withstand change.Register nowVisualizing systems and processes to drive AI transformationMay 28, 2026 at 1 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. MTEM

Hey community 👋Put a finger down if you’ve ever…Had to chase a coworker because a roadmap item was missing its “Risk score” value. Spent hours manually recreating a Jira dependency. Announced a release date in a board meeting, only to realize your roadmap milestone hadn't been updated in weeks.Fragmented data and invisible blockers don't just slow you down, they actively undermine your strategy.That’s why we’ve been heads-down building a set of capabilities specifically for product teams operating in large-scale orgs. Introducing…→ Required fields: When a field is marked as required, users have to fill it in before creating an item, and it can't be cleared once it's set. It's a small change with a big impact on data quality. Your roadmap is always "boardroom ready" without the need for constant manual cleanup.→ Revamped Milestones: We’ve turned Milestones into a proper field type you can link work to, customize with dates and colors, and roll up across workspaces. They also sync bidir

As a K-8 teacher, I often think of teaching like piloting a plane. You wouldn't wait until the flight is over to ask, “Is this London?” and then tell everyone to get off regardless of the answer! That’s what teaching without formative assessment feels like.Formative assessment isn't a quiz. It’s the continuous process of understanding what students know and don't know in the moment so we can adjust our teaching before we finish the lesson. In my classroom, Lucid has been a game-changer for making these assessments truly accessible and engaging.I’ve seen firsthand how digital boards transform the way students demonstrate their knowledge. For instance, when my students explored Social Studies concepts like sports in Guatemala, they used a collaborative board to draw connections between ideas. This provided me with immediate visual data on how they were synthesizing information, while the digital platform removed the physical and language barriers that often make in-person group work over

Did you know the term "minutes" doesn't actually refer to time? It comes from the Latin minuta scriptura, meaning "small writing." But don't let the name fool you—meeting minutes have a massive impact on team success. ✅Too often, we treat minutes as a boring formality. In reality, they are your team's secret weapon for alignment and transparency.Meeting minutes:Build trust: it gives those who couldn't attend a "seat at the table" and keeps everyone in the loop. 🤝 Drive accountability: no more "wait, was I supposed to do that?" A clear minutes document outlines every owner and deadline. 🏎 Provide legal backup: they serve as an official record of decisions in case you ever need to revisit the "why" behind a project. 📋Minutes vs. notes vs. agendasIt's easy to mix these up, but they each have a unique job:Agenda: the pre-meeting roadmap (chronological) Notes: informal, personal scratchpads Minutes: the formal, shared record of decisions and actions (organized by importance)Here are some

We’re excited to announce two new updates to assisted layout, making it easier than ever to create an easy-to-read workspace! 🎉 What is assisted layout?Assisted layout helps you to create a clean, presentable workspace by organizing and rearranging your content automatically.  What’s new?👇🏽 Spanning containers ✨Containers with assisted layout applied now automatically span rows and columns when you pull them into another container with assisted layout enabled. To activate spacing handles on any current nested containers to have them spam, you can hold Command or Ctrl. Nesting containers can now be spanned multiple rows and columnsAdditionally, there are spanning controls available:Occupy a call Span horizontally Span vertically  Span both directionsSpanning controls within contextual panel in LucidchartSpanning controls within contextual menu in Lucidspark Grouped objects ✨We now also support grouping objects and pulling the grouped objects into assisted layout containersGrouped obj

We’ve seen the rush toward agentic AI, but the truth is, AI agents are only as good as the context we give them. If your process documentation is incomplete (or nonexistent), agents will not be able to carry out tasks and may even reinforce inefficiencies.Join me and Melissa Reeve (creator of the Hyperadaptive Model) for an upcoming webinar to learn how to prepare for the age of AI agents and overcome common AI implementation challenges.We’ll be discussing:How to become AI-native Why AI implementations fail How to use Lucid to jump-start your agentic AI journeyHere are the details:Evaluating your readiness for agentic AIFebruary 26, 2026 at 1 p.m. ET / 11 a.m. MT👉 Register here

Hey community 👋In our latest webinar, we sat down with Teresa Torres, leading voice in product discovery and author of Product Discovery Habits, to hear the story behind her first AI product, Product Talk’s AI Interview Coach. Her key lesson? Building with AI isn't just a new feature; it’s a fundamental shift in how we architect, synthesize, and define quality. Here are my four favorite quotes from the session, and what they mean for product managers. “If I had to write my book, Continuous Discovery Habits, today, I would add a chapter on AI evals. They’re a new discovery habit.” Many teams accept an 80% quality output, but if AI is your differentiator, "good enough" is a failure.The new habit: AI Evals are now a mandatory discovery practice. The goal: Use evals as guardrails so a model never shows a customer a response that doesn't meet your criteria.“We have to understand how to construct input for high-quality output, understand that the context window is limited, understand the co

Hey everyone! 👋🏼I've been thinking about how one of the top mistakes we see product teams make is this: Sending the exact same roadmap export to the CEO, the engineering lead, and the customer.You have one source of truth, but that doesn't mean everyone needs the same view. A generic roadmap often leaves executives wanting more strategy and engineers wanting more detail.Here is your quick cheat sheet for better alignment using airfocus:For Executives: Use a Portfolio Roll-up or Objective-led (Now-Next-Later) view. They don't care about the granular features; they care about the "Why" and the outcome. For Developers: Use Timeline & Release views. They need to see dependencies, specific milestones, and the "When." For Customers: Use a curated Shared URL. Give them the "hype" strip without exposing your internal messy kitchen or uncommitted dates.
My challenge to you: Before your next stakeholder meeting, spend 5 minutes creating a view specifically for them. Stop explaining your ro

Hi all,We've been discussing different roadmap views lately and I wanted to jump in and share some of my thoughts about how the audience matters when creating roadmaps. Sending a granular timeline to a stakeholder who only cares about quarterly outcomes is probably going to lead to more questions than answers.But as a PM, I know we're being asked to do more and more and the the thought of manually keeping multiple roadmap views up-to-date is simply not an option.The great news is that you don't have to do this manually. airfocus makes it super easy to create different views of the same data for different stakeholders or audiences. And, these views all stay up to date as you and your teams work.Here's some of the ways I use airfocus different view types:For the "Big Picture" Stakeholders: I use the airfocus board view to show a kanban-style view of high-level initiatives by quarter. Then, I choose to just show a few key fields shown like "status" and "team" on the cards. For my engineer

In an era of lean engineering, the pressure is on. While 80% of engineering managers see a massive opportunity for productivity gains, many are falling into the "efficiency paradox"—accelerating code output without actually advancing the business.As a senior engineering manager at Lucid, I’ve seen that the secret isn't just adding more AI to your stack; it’s about clarity over volume.Engineering productivity does not equal pull request throughputMetrics aren't the mission: High pull request frequency is a health indicator, not the objective. Avoid gaming the metric by focusing on value to the customer rather than lines of code. AI is a tool, not a strategy: Tools like Claude or Cursor accelerate tasks, but they don't fix systemic bottlenecks or architectural misalignment.  Alignment > individual speed: Real productivity is a team sport. High-performing squads thrive on collective ownership, not stack-ranking devs against each other.How to connect your dev lifecycleDiscovery phase: U

This video is from about 2024, but it shows a cool way to work with Lucid formulas to filter down data to certain date ranges, based on text input on a shape. It’s a fairly specific use case, but gives you an idea of how Lucid’s date formulas work. It also shows how Lucid can reference data in data linked sheet, using Lucid formulas, as well as data on shapes on the page - a powerful use of existing piped-in data and contextual data from the diagram.  See transcript here 🔽Okay, I'm going to show an example. Well, hold on, let me get the right tab here. Here we go. Uh, of how you can filter down dates in Lucid. Um, so I have for myself here this Google sheet that I made with just a bunch of fake names. This is a pretend recruiting example. And um, I've set this up with there's a whole bunch of  dates. Keep in mind these are US format, so month, day, year. um you might have to adjust the formulas if you're using a a different date format like um day, month, year. Uh yeah. So in my board

Complexity shouldn’t be a barrier to clarity. For enterprise architects at global leaders like Devoteam and major financial institutions, the challenge is often the same: fragmented tools and siloed data obscure the "big picture." 🖌By moving to a centralized, visual repository, these teams are replacing weeks of manual documentation with real-time, data-backed blueprints. This single source of truth aligns technical infrastructure with business goals, ensuring every stakeholder is in sync from day one.And the results are measurable:One global athletic brand reduced its ERD creation time by 75%. A top bank reclaimed 80 hours of meeting time through asynchronous collaboration.Whether you are using AI to generate diagrams or data linking to refresh architectures in seconds, the right visual workspace doesn't just document workflows—it accelerates them. 🏎From a 600x increase in data update speeds to saving $500,000 annually per project team, the impact of streamlining your visual stack i

I just ran into this question internally at my company. I do a lot of very large, multi-app workflow diagrams as part of creating tech designs.The only sensible solution I’ve come up with is to do overview diagrams first that fuzz out a lot of the details, and then separate diagrams that give details on a particular area or sub-flow. In the most complicated cases (like the one I’m working on now...) I’ll zoom in “part way” to show more details but still fuzz some of it out, before finally doing the most details level of particular elements.I think Lucid supports internal links between tabs, but I haven’t started using it yet. I’m hoping to find that there’s a robust feature set that makes it easy to “feel” like you’re navigating a single, very complex “picture” of the design.

Hey community 👋 We've heard a great story from SNP Group, a global software team with product folks spread across multiple time zones and products. They were dealing with something a lot of product teams recognize:Roadmaps living in scattered places, Prioritization feeling more subjective than strategic, Limited visibility into customer feedback, Teams unintentionally working in silos. After working with a dedicated product management platform, they ended up with a single source of truth where everyone from cross-functional teams to customers and partners could see what’s happening, share feedback, and even contribute ideas. A few highlights that stood out to me:      → Shared visibility: Everyone can see the same roadmaps and priorities, which helped them break down silos.      → Feedback from more voices: They opened up channels for internal teams and external stakeholders to influence               what gets built next.      → More democratic prioritization: Instead of “the loudest

Hello, Lucid Community! 👋🏼I’m Emma, and I work in the marketing team at airfocus by Lucid. We’re happy to be here, sharing content with you that we hope you’ll find valuable. My team and I create content for product managers: things like how to improve stakeholder management, create visibility, make more data-driven product decisions, or reduce backlogs.But it's not all serious. Here's a little video about stakeholder management we made last year… I'm pretty sure it'll resonate beyond product leaders…Let me know if you think we missed one in the comments! EmmaSr. Content Manager, airfocus by Lucid

Hi – I design diagrams for Salesforce’s documentation. We have put a lot of effort into coming up with a branded style that includes using our products’ defined colors, clean organization and focused grid structure. Trying to visually simplify what can be very complex topics, while also making them look nice. I am not seeing any posts in these forums that specifically relate to the graphic design/information design aspect of using Lucidchart. There must be others out there who are doing similar things though – and if any of you happen to see this post, I’d love to have a thread here that shared some Lucidchart design inspo! (And perhaps there are forums elsewhere that share those types of things?) Here are a few diagrams I’ve done for our documentation, to get the ball rolling:  

I’m excited to share Lucid’s new business transformation framework, developed by Jeff Rosenbaugh, Sr. Director of Professional Services at Lucid ​(@Grizz).Whether you’re preparing for AI transformation, navigating an acquisition, or any other transformation, this framework will help you:Assess the current state of your business and market Define a target operating model and plan for getting there Design pilot programs and scale what works across the businessUnlike many existing frameworks available, Lucid’s business transformation framework doesn’t just tell you what needs to be done—it shows you how to put those recommendations into action with 15+ templates and tips (including new templates for aligning on a strategic vision, tracking pilot program results, and more).👉 Get the full guide + templates here: https://lucid.co/blog/business-transformation-framework Lucid’s business transformation framework  Let us know in the comments below if you plan to try the new framework and templa

Hi everyone,Following up on this month's theme of kicking off the year with strategic alignment, I'm jumping in to offer a tip from the product team here at airfocus. We know that sometimes the hardest part of OKRs is just getting the structure set up.To help you hit the ground running, I wanted to share our ready-to-use Objectives and Key Results template. It is pre-configured to help you instantly map out your goals and connect them directly to your product roadmap, saving you the setup time so you can focus on the "what" and the "why."🚀 Get started with the template here: Objectives and Key Results TemplateTo access and edit the OKR template:In the link above, select 'Get this template' and type in your email. Download the template as a PDF or Google Slides. If you select Google Slides, you'll need to select 'Make a copy' on the next screen. From here, you can adjust this template to fit the needs and goals of your team. You can add or remove rows or make modifications to add any m

Hi everyone,I’ve recently started using Lucidchart to map out a large cross-team workflow, and the diagram is getting bigger than expected. I’m trying to keep everything readable, but once multiple layers and decision paths are added, it starts feeling cluttered.For those experienced with large diagrams: Do you prefer containers or nested pages for organizing major sections? How do you maintain clarity when multiple teams need to collaborate and edit the same diagram? Any Lucid best practices for scaling a diagram without losing structure? Additionally, I’m upgrading my home setup and researching the best pc gaming computer that can handle heavy design work, multitasking, and occasional gaming. If anyone here uses Lucid on a high-performance machine, your hardware suggestions would be appreciated.

Welcome to 2026! 🎉 We hope you all enjoyed the break, and you're ready to take this year on…We spent some time reflecting on what's coming this year, and have some interesting predictions for you.If 2025 had a soundtrack, it would have been a loop of AI jargon. Agentic workforce. LLM-powered. Vibe coding. Product sense.
It was everywhere — in every deck, keynote, strategy doc, and investor update.But inside actual product organizations, the vibe was very different.Teams on the ground, the ones responsible for decisions (not slides), discovered something uncomfortable: Most companies were wildly unprepared for the AI they were racing to implement.The AI hype machine ran into operational reality. And product leaders learned the hard way that buzzwords don’t build winning products. Systems do. We spoke to:Chris Butler, Director of Product Operations at GitHubLauren Kearney, Director of Health & Platform at TwitchCommentary from Malte Scholz, Head of Product and co-founder of airfocus

Hey everyone! Patrick here. As a solutions consultant, I often see engineering teams hitting a velocity ceiling. Not because of the code itself, but because of the massive overhead in mapping processes and aligning stakeholders. While many engineers are already using AI to support coding activities, I see an untapped opportunity to automate the heavy lifting across the development lifecycle. I recently sat down to share my thoughts on how Lucid AI accelerates the engineer’s workflow. Here are two key highlights:Diagram generation: Instead of wrestling with a blank canvas, you can instantly generate ERDs, sequence diagrams, or class diagrams from unstructured requirements, allowing you to jump straight into the technical iteration that actually moves the needle. Design partner: One of the coolest ways I’ve seen teams use Lucid AI is to bridge the gap between complex architectures and non-technical stakeholders. You can use AI summarization to turn a dense system diagram into a high-leve