Product Swimlanes
What are they
Product swimlanes are areas of focus and expertise within the Flowfuse product.
Why we use them
They allow us to:
- identify the functional areas we work within
- provide enough granuality so that every feature has a natural home
- ensure we are iterating across the whole product surface
As a team, we work across all of the lanes over time, but not all of them in any one release. A release will typically invest heavily in two or three lanes, touch a few others lightly, and do nothing in the rest. That's intentional prioritisation.
Our swimlanes
| # | Lane | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | AI | FlowFuse Expert, assisted authoring, data insights, MCP access to live data, agents at the edge |
| 2 | Dashboard | Dashboard, HMI, blueprints, the build surface for non-technical users |
| 3 | Certified Nodes | Certified nodes, catalogue, plugin/extension architecture, partner and OEM/white-label paths |
| 4 | Platform | Everything else the product needs. See the areas below |
Platform covers a wide surface. These are the areas within it:
- Data layer: broker, historian, contextualisation, Unified Namespace
- Edge & device: device agent, fleet-scale provisioning, offline resilience, OS/hardware/container support matrix, brownfield protocol coverage
- DevOps for OT: environments, promotion pipelines, snapshots, git workflows, testing, rollback
- Enterprise readiness: SSO/SCIM, RBAC granularity, audit, HA, air-gapped, multi-tenancy
- Security & product hardening: hardening, vulnerability posture, secure defaults
- Platform health: debt, migrations, scalability, upgrade paths
- The editor: the Node-RED editing experience itself, including collaborative editing
Not all of these lanes can be handled equally.
- AI is pervasive across the whole product surface.
- Platform health is the ongoing background work that customers do not notice unless it doesn't happen.
- Security & product hardening splits into value delivered under the Govern pillar, as well as our own, non-discretionary compliance work.
- Certified Nodes is customer-led and carries ongoing maintenance cost, so it is sustained rather than expanded by default.