Broccoli for Leadership
Who this is for: Directors, VPs and executives responsible for several teams who need to see across them without going team by team.
Your role in Broccoli: Director or Executive — the same capability set; only the label and an optional title differ. Both are read-only by design, enforced in two independent places, so you cannot accidentally alter a team's plan while looking at it.
Step 1 — First login
Change your password when prompted. You land on Portfolio, your home page. Your navigation has three items: Portfolio, Knowledge Graph, Whiteboard.
If it's empty, that's normal — you have no data of your own. Everything you see arrives through grants from managers. Ask each manager whose team you cover to add you as a Director or Executive; if your workspace was set up with the onboarding wizard, this was done automatically for every team in your organization.
Step 2 — Read the Portfolio
The rollup of every granted team's roadmap, in one timeline. You can see every team's items side by side, filter and group by team/status/priority/quarter, spot at-risk items and slipped dates, and drill into any item for its ticket link, points, owner and live status.
The status you see is the real status — items linked to a ticket pull their state from JIRA rather than from whatever a manager last typed, so the rollup doesn't drift away from reality between reviews.
Step 3 — Know what you're looking at
Three things that will otherwise mislead you in a review:
- Ticket-linked items are live; unlinked items are not. An item without a ticket key shows the status a human last set by hand — a suspiciously static board is a planning-hygiene signal in its own right.
- Data is cached — JIRA for 30 minutes, GitHub for 15. Broccoli deliberately serves the last good data rather than an empty chart if a system is unreachable. Check the timestamp.
- Coverage scores measure the plan, not the team. A team scoring low on "items with story points" has an under-specified plan — a conversation about planning discipline, not velocity.
Step 4 — Use the Knowledge Graph
An interactive map built from your teams' roadmap and ticket data — concepts, skills and work items as nodes, references and dependencies as edges. Useful for questions like which teams are all touching the same subsystem? It's built by a periodic batch job, reflecting the last sync.
What you cannot do, and why
| You cannot | Why |
|---|---|
| Edit any roadmap item | Enforced by the route gate and the roadmap permission check — two independent locks |
| See 1:1 notes, goals, or a manager's journal | Never leaves the manager's scope |
| See a team that hasn't granted you access | Grants are additive and explicit |
| Administer accounts | That's the Org Admin's job, deliberately separated from reading the work |
If you need someone who can both see the rollup and nudge items, that's the Program Manager role — see For Product & Program Managers.
What to ask in a review
Portfolio answers a handful of standing questions:
- What is at risk, and since when? Filter to at-risk, sort by how long it's been there.
- What slipped quarter over quarter? Slipped dates are recorded in roadmap history.
- Is the plan actually specified? Team Health coverage — ticketed, pointed, epic-parented, assigned.
- Where are two teams doing the same work? Knowledge Graph, shared nodes.
- Is anything unowned? Items with no assignee on a ticket.
Next: For Organizations · For Managers · For Product & Program Managers