Setting Up Your Organization

Your organization is the top-level container for everything in Lifecycle OS — your boards, team members, sprints, custom fields, and settings all live here. Think of it as your company's private workspace.

This guide covers how to create an organization, what you can configure, and how to manage it over time.

What Is an Organization?

In Lifecycle OS, an organization maps to your company (or a distinct business unit within it). Every piece of work, every team member, and every board belongs to an organization.

When you sign up for the first time, you'll create an organization as part of the onboarding flow. If you were invited to join an existing organization, this step is handled for you.

Key things that live at the org level:

  • All boards (R&D, Bugs, Feature Requests, Customer Success, Custom)
  • All team members and their roles
  • Custom fields shared across boards
  • Sprints and sprint schedules
  • Organization-wide settings and billing

Creating an Organization

After registering your account, you'll be taken directly to the organization creation screen.

  1. Enter your organization name — Use your company name or team name. This is displayed throughout the product.
  2. Review your org slug — The slug is auto-generated from your name (e.g., acme-corp). It's used in your portal URL: /{org-slug}/join. You can edit it before saving.
  3. Review your org key — A short uppercase key (e.g., ACM) is generated alongside the slug. This key is prepended to every work item ID in the system (e.g., ACM-42, ACM-143). Choose something memorable — it can't be changed after org creation.
  4. Click Create Organization.

Tip: If you're setting up for a client or a separate product line, use a key that's specific enough to be meaningful at a glance. ACM for Acme, API for an API platform team, etc.

Organization Settings

After your org is created, you can configure additional details from Settings → Organization. None of these are required to get started, but filling them in helps with onboarding new team members and gives context to external collaborators.

Identity

  • Logo: Upload your company logo. It appears in the sidebar, the customer portal, and invitation emails.
  • Website: Your company's URL — shown in portal-facing contexts.
  • Industry: Tag your org by industry. Used for onboarding recommendations.
  • Company size: Select the size range that fits your team.

Regional Settings

  • Timezone: Set your org's default timezone. Sprint due dates, deadline notifications, and time-based automations respect this setting.
  • Billing email: The email address that receives invoices and billing notifications.
  • Address: Physical address for billing and legal purposes.

Customer Portal

  • Enable customer signup: Toggle this on to allow customers to self-register at /{org-slug}/join. Toggle it off to restrict portal access to users you invite manually.

Tip: Start with customer signup disabled while you're setting up the portal experience. Enable it once you're ready to invite customers.

The Org Key and Work Item IDs

Every work item created in your organization gets a unique, sequential ID prefixed with your org key — for example, ACM-1, ACM-2, and so on. These IDs are:

  • Permanent — They don't change when items are moved between boards or renamed.
  • Universal — The same ID format works across all board types.
  • Referenceable — You can mention any item by ID in comments, descriptions, or external tools (Slack, GitHub, etc.).

The org key is set once and cannot be changed after creation. Choose wisely.

Multi-Organization Support

A single Lifecycle OS account can belong to multiple organizations. This is useful for:

  • Agencies and consultants who work across multiple clients
  • Large companies that maintain separate orgs for different divisions
  • Staging/production setups where one org mirrors another

Switch between organizations via the org switcher in the top-left of the sidebar. Each org is fully isolated — no data, settings, or members are shared across organizations.

What Lives Under the Org

Once your organization is set up, everything you build lives under it:

Thing Where it lives
Boards Org → Boards
Team members Org → Settings → Team
Custom fields Org → Settings → Fields
Sprints Org → Sprints (or per-board)
Automations Per-board, under Org
Billing Org → Settings → Billing

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