Create your first initiative
Start building your roadmap by creating an initiative for one real project, feature, or customer request. Use an initiative when the work needs intent, ownership, progress tracking, and a place on the roadmap.
What an initiative is
An initiative represents larger work: a feature, product bet, engineering project, customer request, goal, or other trackable effort. Initiatives can be nested under parent initiatives so large work can be broken into smaller pieces without losing the strategic thread.
Initiatives live on the roadmap and can be filtered, grouped, ranked, assigned, and measured. In spec-driven development, the initiative also becomes the source brief people and agents build from.
Use Initiatives for planned work and Bugs for defects or incidents. Issues are synced execution items from apps such as Linear, Jira, GitHub, or GitLab.
Replacing Aha!, Productboard, or another roadmap tool? Move projects, epics, and larger product bets into initiatives first. Keeping Linear, Jira, or another issue tracker? Put initiatives above synced issues so execution stays in the source issue tracker while roadmap context lives here.
Create the first initiative
Start from the roadmap, backlog, or recap. Give the initiative a clear title and description.
Set the fields that make the work actionable:
| Field | What it controls |
|---|---|
| Status | Where the initiative sits in the workflow: idea, planned, in progress, in review, blocked, completed, or cancelled. |
| Teams | Where the initiative appears in team planning, standups, reports, and analytics. |
| Assignees | Who is assigned to move the work forward. |
| Taxonomy | How the initiative is grouped and measured by goal, product, company, skill, coding tool, or agent. |
| Parent initiative | Where the initiative sits in the roadmap hierarchy. |
Use Writer Mode when the brief is rough
Initiatives can start in Writer Mode. Describe the work in plain language, answer follow-up questions about problem, scope, constraints, proposal, and risks, then save the generated draft as the initiative description. The same writing session can continue from dashboard or Slack until finalized.
Writer Mode is available for initiatives. Bugs do not support it yet.
After the first initiative exists, invite your team so teammates join with current work already in place. For the full initiative model, including hierarchy and Writer Mode, continue to Initiatives.