How Laya fits together

Laya is a connected work-management platform. You can run work natively in Laya, mirror boards from the tools your team already uses, or do both at once — everything lands in the same shell, the same views and the same inbox. This article gives you the mental model that the rest of the Help Centre builds on.

The big picture

Everything in Laya hangs off three levels:

• Workspaces are the top-level containers. Each one has its own boards, members and settings, and lives at its own URL.
• Boards are where work is planned and shipped. A board can be native to Laya, connected (mirrored from another tool), or a master board that combines several sources.
• Work items (cards) are the individual pieces of work on a board — the product UI often labels them "issues".

Workspaces: personal and team

Workspaces come in two kinds, and the kind is fixed at creation. A Personal workspace is private — it lives at /personal/{handle}, only you can access it, and invites are disabled. A Team workspace lives at /{handle} and is where you invite colleagues and assign roles.

Every new account automatically gets a Personal workspace named after you (for example "Alex's Workspace"), so you can start working without any setup. You can create more workspaces at any time — see Create and switch workspaces.

Three kinds of board

• Native boards are created in Laya — Kanban ("Continuous flow, no fixed iterations.") or Scrum ("Time-boxed sprints with backlog grooming."), with the full set of Laya features such as sprints, epics and Board Studio.
• Connected boards mirror boards from Jira, Azure DevOps, monday.com, GitHub or GitLab into Laya, with two-way sync — a change in Laya lands in the source tool and vice versa.
• Master boards "Combine connected boards into one Laya-native view." — they aggregate work from several sources, including native Laya boards, into a single board.

What sits around your boards

Each workspace also carries a set of surfaces that work across all of its boards. They appear in the sidebar under your workspace name:

• Roadmap — a timeline of initiatives and epics across boards, with Timeline, Now / Next / Later, Portfolio, Sprint and Milestones views.
• Initiatives — strategic containers that own epics and track health, confidence and progress.
• Docs — rich-text documents that live alongside your work, with folders, tags and templates.
• Calendar — events and due work aggregated across every board you can access.
• Views — the "Saved views" index, where saved board views can be opened, pinned to the sidebar, renamed or deleted.
• Insights — "Velocity, flow, forecasting and delivery metrics across your boards."
• Labels — workspace-level labels shared across your boards.
• CRM — the built-in customer-relationship area (team workspaces only; personal workspaces do not show it).

Owners and Admins additionally see an Administration section — Settings, Properties (workspace custom properties), Automations and Audit — which other members do not. See Navigation and the shell.

For a tour of these, see Docs, Roadmap, Initiatives and Calendar and Saved views and Insights.

Your personal layer

Three pages follow you across every workspace: Home (your dashboard of assigned, created and due-soon work plus an activity feed), Inbox (notifications, in seven lanes) and My issues (a cross-workspace list of the work you touch). They sit at the top of the sidebar under "Personal" — see Navigation and the shell.

How connected work joins native work

Mirrored work items appear as cards just like native ones, and connected boards get their own "Connected" tab in the boards hub. Master boards go one step further: they pull cards from connected sources and native Laya boards into one view, open grouped by "Source board" by default, and offer a "Sync all boards" action that refreshes every provider on the board in one go. That is what makes Laya a connected layer over your existing tools rather than a replacement for them.

How changes travel between Laya and the source tool is covered in How two-way sync works.