Overview
In Canny Ideas, custom fields live on your Ideas dashboard. They let you capture internal data about each idea: effort estimates, prioritization scores, engineering owners, and more. Fields also power your scoring formulas.
Canny Ideas is available on Free, Pro, and Business plans. Teams on legacy plans (Starter or Growth) will need to move to new plans to access Ideas.
Field types
Available field types:
Checkbox — a true/false toggle (e.g., "Security reviewed").
Date — a target or due date.
Dropdown — select one option from a predefined list.
Fibonacci — 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 scale for effort pointing.
Formula — aggregates a single factor (e.g., MRR, insights, votes) across a user segment using sum, count, average, max, or min. Example: "Sum of MRR across Everyone."
Last admin portal response: records the timestamp of the most recent public admin comment on the idea's portal post, and updates automatically. Filter or sort by it to find ideas waiting on a reply from your team.
Multiline Text — a longer text input for descriptions or notes.
Multiselect — select multiple options from a predefined list.
Number — a plain numeric value (e.g., estimated dev days).
Range — a slider with a defined minimum and maximum.
Rating — a 1–5 or custom-scale input for subjective scoring.
Score — a RICE-style composite. Multiplies impact fields by their weights, then divides total weighted impact by total weighted effort. Use this for prioritization scoring that balances impact against effort.
Text — a single-line text input.
URL — a clickable link.
User — assign an admin (e.g., engineering owner).
The Idea Type field
Ideas also have a built-in Idea Type field with three options: feature request, bug report, and usability issue. It gives you a consistent way to categorize ideas by the kind of problem they represent, so triage is faster and you can slice your feedback by type.
Set Idea Type from the idea details panel, and filter or sort by it like any other field. Admins set Idea Type manually — Autopilot does not set it automatically yet.
Action fields
Action fields put one-click actions directly on your ideas table, so you can triage a whole view without opening each idea. Enable them from the Fields button like any other column. Three actions are available:
Move — move the idea to a different group or parent idea.
Merge — merge the idea into another idea.
Push to integration — one column per connected PM integration (Asana, Azure DevOps, ClickUp, GitHub, Jira, and Linear). If the idea isn't linked yet, the button pushes it to that tool and links it. If it's already linked, the button opens the linked item.
When both Move and Merge are enabled, they appear together in a single actions column. The buttons follow your admin permissions — admins who can't move or merge ideas won't see those actions.
Adding fields to the Ideas dashboard
On the Ideas dashboard, click Fields in the top toolbar.
Click Create new field.
Choose a field type and give it a name.
Configure any type-specific settings (display mode, dropdown options, formula factor and segment, score impact and effort weights).
Save — the field appears as a column on your ideas table.
Combining fields: Formula vs Score
Two field types let you derive values from other data, and they serve different purposes:
Formula aggregates one factor across a segment. Use it to surface a single metric — for example, "Sum of MRR across Enterprise" — as a column on your ideas table.
Score combines multiple weighted impact fields and divides by weighted effort, producing a single prioritization number per idea.
See Scores and formulas in Canny Ideas for a detailed guide to building both.
Things to note
Idea fields are internal only — end-users never see them, even if the idea is published to the portal.
Fields are applied across all ideas globally — they are not scoped to specific groups.
You can toggle field column visibility on a per-view basis using the Fields button on the Ideas dashboard.
Score and Formula fields reference other field values. If you rename or delete a referenced field, update any Score or Formula fields that depend on it.
Only admins with the Owner or Manager admin role can create or edit fields.
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