We’ve added a new Board Activity Panel to the next-gen story map experience, making it easier to understand what changed on your board, who made the change, and where it happened.

The new panel brings a real-time activity feed directly into the board, so teams can follow updates as they happen — whether the changes are made by teammates or by AI agents working through MCP-enabled workflows.

This is the next-gen version of the classic board activities panel, redesigned with a stronger focus on transparency, collaboration, and agent-aware product work.

The Board Activity Panel is available from the right side of the next-gen board in Discovery, Planning, and Backlog views. It opens as a side drawer and shows the latest story map changes in real time.

Each activity entry includes the actor, the action, and a relative timestamp, such as “2m ago”. Card-related activities include clickable card references, so users can jump directly to the changed card. When a referenced card is selected from the feed, the board automatically scrolls to it and highlights it for a few seconds.

The panel also supports release-related activities, deleted card references, and detailed field-level updates for MCP-driven card and release changes.

As AI agents become more involved in product discovery and backlog work, it becomes increasingly important to show their actions clearly.

The new Board Activity Panel visually distinguishes activities created by MCP or AI agents. These entries can show a robot icon or distinct styling, along with a friendly tool name such as Claude Code, Codex, or a generic AI Agent label when the source is unknown.

Integration updates from tools like Jira, GitHub, or Trello remain regular integration activities and do not receive the AI agent indicator.

This makes it easier for teams to understand not only what changed, but whether the change came from a teammate, an integration, or an AI-assisted workflow.

For MCP-generated card and release updates, the activity feed now shows structured change details.

Instead of displaying a generic update message, the feed can list each changed field separately, including old and new values. For example:

This gives teams a clearer audit trail and makes agent-driven updates easier to review.

The panel also introduces Follow changes, a new optional mode for real-time board tracking.

When enabled, the board automatically follows incoming activity entries that reference a card. If a teammate or AI agent updates a card, the board scrolls to that card and highlights it.

Follow Changes is turned off by default and can be enabled from the panel. It works for both human and agent-generated changes. If the referenced card is already visible, the card is highlighted without scrolling.

The setting resets when the panel is closed or when the user navigates to another story map.

Jira, TFS, and VSTS-linked subtask cards can now display a compact issue type abbreviation directly on the card, such as S for Story or B for Bug.

The visibility can be controlled per view with a toggle. For Jira integrations, custom abbreviation overrides can also be configured.

GitHub-linked subtasks now show the related GitHub issue number, such as #123, across the board experience.

The issue number is visible in the card chrome, card details modal, clipboard copy, mentions, and search. Existing linked GitHub cards are also updated through a backfill migration.