Initiatives are the connective tissue between strategy and tactical execution. They are high-level feature groups across multiple places in the hierarchy that together achieve a product or business goal.
In Productboard, initiative entities provide product teams with a holistic view of how their efforts contribute to the overall organizational goals. They also help with stakeholder alignment by providing the right level of transparency into the team’s work.
Note: Different organizations have different names for initiatives. You might call them projects, program epics, portfolio epics, programs, or something else.
In this article:
- Creating new initiatives
- Quickly accessing initiatives
- Assigning initiatives to objectives and features
- Archiving initiatives
- Converting initiatives into features
- When should I use initiatives?
- Why should I use initiatives?
- How do initiatives fit into Productboard?
- What is the difference between objectives and initiatives?
- How does the Productboard team use initiatives?
- See also
Creating new initiatives
- From the Main menu, click More > Data > Initiatives.
- Click the Create button in the top right corner to open your new initiative's detail sidebar.
- Edit the initiative’s name and description.
- Click the Timeframe field on the sidebar to set a high-level or specific timeframe for the initiative.
- Beside Teams, click
Assign to associate one or more teams with the initiative.
- Click value beside Status to set the status of the initiative.
- You can assign multiple features, objectives, and releases to the initiative with the plus button next to their sections.
Quickly accessing initiatives
You can favorite initiatives so that they appear at the top of your Home menu, and you can create shortcuts to your initiatives so that they appear directly within teamspaces.
Favoriting initiatives
The Favorites section is a convenient way to access initiatives that you frequently use. You can add any initiative to your favorites by clicking the 🌟 star button in the header at the top of the initiative's details sidebar. Once you have added an initiative to your favorites, it will appear in your Favorites section for easy access. This can save you valuable time and improve your workflow by allowing you to quickly access important initiatives without searching for them every time.
Note: You can favorite boards the same way—use the star beside the board name at the top of the screen to add it to your favorites section!
Creating initiative shortcuts
A shortcut is an alternate way to access an entity in Productboard. You can add an initiative shortcut to a teamspace to easily open that initiative's details sidebar without having to hunt for it within an existing board.
To add an initiative shortcut to a teamspace:
- Click the initiative to open its details sidebar.
- Click ••• More options > Add shortcut to.
- Select the teamspace to which you'd like the shortcut added and click Add to confirm.
Assigning initiatives to objectives and features
Initiatives help you structure hierarchical relationships between your company's goals and the work you're doing. The best way to model this in Productboard is to assign initiatives to objectives (above them) and features (below them).
There are two ways to do this.
1. From an initiative's sidebar
To manage all of an initiative's relationships:
- Click on an initiative to open its details sidebar.
- Scroll down to the Objectives or Features section.
- Click the plus buttons beside the section name.
- Select an item from the list that appears.
You can remove item assignments from here by clicking the Remove button that appears when you hover over an item.
2: From a column on a grid
You can assign items to initiatives by putting those initiatives up on a grid board as a column. See Grid boards: Planning and prioritization management for details about adding columns.
Archiving initiatives
See Archive and unarchive items for details.
Converting initiatives into features
If you realize that an initiative would be better represented as a feature, you can convert it into one without having to recreate it.
- Click on the initiative to open its sidebar.
- In the top right corner of the initiative's Detail tab, click the ••• More actions button.
- Select Convert to feature from the dropdown menu.
- Follow any on-screen prompts to complete the conversion.
You can also convert features into other types of product hierarchy items. See Add features to your hierarchy for details.
When should I use initiatives?
Since initiatives can overarch several teams, they should be used to coordinate multiple teams working together on the same project.
initiatives can even include several products, so they can be used when work touches multiple places in the hierarchy.
Why should I use initiatives?
Using initiatives in your organization can provide several benefits:
- Strategic Alignment: Initiatives help align your efforts with overall company strategy and vision. Features can be directly linked to your objectives through initiatives, making it clear what you are working towards and why.
- Prioritization: Initiatives enable teams to prioritize their projects and help them focus on what matters most.
- Efficiency and Accountability: By defining initiatives and setting clear goals and timelines, you reduce ambiguity in the organization, improve efficiency, and set accountability. Teams have a well-defined path to follow, reducing the risk of wasted efforts on unimportant tasks.
How do initiatives fit into Productboard?
Productboard product management items fit into four categories:
- Product: Represents stable product capabilities and allows you to capture the structure of products and domains.
- Strategy: Captures objectives and goals in a structured way.
- Work: Captures the structure of work items. Once they are marked as done, you rarely return to them. Work items are synced with Dev tools, such as Jira or ADO.
- Planning: Allows you to flexibly capture sprints, product increments, solution version, and now/next/later.
Looking inside the categories, we currently have the following items:
An initiative is not another layer in the product hierarchy. It is a work item that groups multiple features, sometimes from different teams or products. It connects those features with objectives.
What is the difference between objectives and initiatives?
Objectives are strategic goals that help the organization achieve its vision. They help articulate the what of the plan.
Initiatives are projects or groups of features that support objectives and answer the question of how.
Here is an example for a health tech company highlighting their product hierarchy:
-
Objective: Increase patient engagement in H2 of 2023.
-
Initiative: Improve mobile app loading performance.
- Feature: Simplified log-in experience.
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Initiative: Redesign mobile app to include virtual appointment capabilities.
- Feature: In-app messaging capabilities.
- Feature: Video conferencing capabilities.
- Feature: Add New Releases website.
-
Initiative: Improve mobile app loading performance.
In this example, the objective describes a business goal ("What are we going to do this year? We're going to increase user engagement."), and the initiatives beneath it describe how that goal will be accomplished.
How should I start working with initiatives in Productboard?
In Productboard, you can link features to objectives and initiatives, and you can link initiatives to objectives. These links don’t define a hierarchy or parent-child relationship, which makes the model very flexible. Additionally, you can have multiple links between the items (e.g. one feature linked to multiple objectives or one initiative linked to multiple features). Due to this concept, you can model any relationship between these items and accommodate your organizational model.
Despite this flexibility, organizations typically set their product objectives first based on the vision. Then, they define initiatives to reach those objectives. And finally, they group features under those initiatives. In this way, they connect the tactical execution to strategic goals and define how to reach those goals.
How does the Productboard team use initiatives?
Here is an example of how Productboard uses initiatives to support three teams who are coordinating their efforts to build complex features.
We use the initiatives progress check-in board to see the upcoming initiatives we have to tackle. We assign an owner for the initiative who coordinates the release and adds features under the initiative to be implemented, often by multiple teams. We have a bi-weekly meeting where we use this board to talk about progress and coordinate dependencies.
We also use the Timeline board representation of the same data to give us more context and visualization of the progress.