If you’ve ever tried using Azure Boards to manage both product strategy and release planning, you’ve probably run into this problem: Releases get tangled up in the product management hierarchy (Epics > Features > PBIs), and suddenly your elegant roadmap looks like a plate of spaghetti.

In my work with senior leaders, I hear the same frustration again and again:

  • “Why does my release have to belong to an epic?”
  • “Why do my PBIs lose flexibility when I assign them to a release?”
  • “Why can’t I see clean releases on my Delivery Plan without polluting product management?”

Good news: there’s a way out. No extensions. No over-engineering. Just a convention.

🎯 The Insight

  • Epics → Stay where they belong: product management, vision, long-term bets.
  • PBIs → Still the heartbeat of sprint execution.
  • Features → Repurposed as Releases.

The trick?

  • Keep Features flat (no parents).
  • Make PBIs link to exactly one Feature via a Related link (not parent-child).
  • Turn off parent display in the Feature backlog.

Boom. You’ve now decoupled releases from the product hierarchy while still using all the native goodies: boards, queries, and Delivery Plans.

🛠️ The Convention in Practice

- **Features (Releases):**
  - Never have a parent.
  - Always set `Start Date` and `Target Date`.
  - Optional: `Release Version`, `Release Notes`.

- **PBIs:**
  - Never children of Features.
  - Must have exactly one "Related" link to a Feature.

- **Epics:**
  - Purely product management.
  - Do not connect Epics to Releases.

- **Delivery Plans:**
  - Row 1: Features → see release bars on the roadmap.
  - Row 2: PBIs → see sprint commitments.
  - Leave Epics out if you want a clean release view.

✨ Why Leaders Love This

  • Clarity: Releases are visible, time-bound, and trackable.
  • Decoupling: Strategy (Epics) and execution (PBIs) stay clean, but you still know what ships when.
  • No new tools: 100% native to Azure DevOps.

This is how you turn “we can’t model releases cleanly” into “our release roadmap is finally crystal clear.”

🎤 Closing Thought

Leaders don’t want to see spaghetti. They want a roadmap that tells a story:

  • Where are we going? (Epics)
  • What are we shipping? (Releases)
  • What’s the team doing this sprint? (PBIs)

With one small convention change, Azure Boards can finally speak that language.

👉 Try it. Your teams will thank you. Your stakeholders will thank you. And your roadmap will finally make sense.