Initiatives

ProductPlan's Initiative layer empowers you to tell the why behind the big problems you need to solve to achieve your organization's strategic goals.

Initiatives Overview

Creating Initiatives

Connecting Initiatives

Best Practices

FAQ

 

Initiatives Overview

Opportunities will now be known as Initiatives in ProductPlan to support larger, cross-functional, and long-term planning efforts across your organization. Initiatives serve as a place to define the big problems you need to solve, explaining the why and building your business cases for significant efforts that may span multiple teams, quarters, and validation phases before landing on a roadmap. With a rich text editor and custom fields, initiatives can be fully customized, allowing you to create comprehensive business cases reflective of your organization's internal workflows and planning needs.

 

Creating Initiatives

Initiatives can be created through the Initiatives page (star icon) in the left navigation menu, or through AI suggestions.

1. Click on the Initiatives tab in the left navigation menu to access the list.
2. Click the + New initiative button.
3. Provide a title.
4. Leverage the rich text editor to build a compelling business case for stakeholders.
   1. Note: To ensure links open properly in a new tab, format the full link as ‘https://’.
5. Enter the planned dates, if applicable.
6. Set the status.
7. Associate one or multiple teams with the initiative.
8. Set the owner.
9. Optionally, apply custom fields to capture key data related to the initiative. Click the + button and select the custom fields to apply.
10. Click the Save button.

 

Connecting Initiatives

Initiatives can easily be connected to the other ProductPlan modules to demonstrate how validated efforts transform into roadmap commitments and align with strategic goals.

To connect Initiatives to Roadmap Items:

1. Within the initiative, click the Connect bar or container button on the Roadmap Items table.
2. Click Select from roadmap to search for an existing bar/container to connect to the initiative. Multiple items can be connected to the initiative. Leverage the search functionality to search for specific bars/containers or search by roadmap. Once the bars/containers have been selected, click Add.
3. You can also select Create new to create a new bar or container associated to this initiative.
   
   1. Note: Connection can also be established from the bar/container details page, within the Initiatives tab.

To connect Initiatives to Objectives:

1. Within the initiative, click the Connect objectives button on the Objectives table.
2. Select one or multiple objectives to connect to the initiative.
3. Click Save.
   1. Note: Connection can also be established from the objective.

To connect Initiatives to Ideas:

1. Within the initiative, click the Connect ideas button on the Ideas table.
2. Select one or multiple ideas to connect to the initiative.
3. Click Connect.
   1. Note: Connection can also be established from the idea.

 

Best Practices

• Start with Discovery: Gather ideas in ProductPlan from intake forms or API. Then, use the AI-Suggested Initiatives feature to surface potential initiatives and refine them into problem statements to kickstart your initiatives. Collecting ideas in ProductPlan provides context to your team about which problems drive research and validation efforts as you develop your business case.
• Document the "Why" Before the "When": Leverage the rich text editor in the initiative to document research, engineering input (effort and feasibility), and validation work before assigning roadmap dates. Align initiatives with strategic objectives to ensure work contributes meaningfully to the company's goals.
• Customize Your Workflow: Utilize custom fields and dates to categorize and track initiatives in a way that aligns with your business processes, planning cycles, or decision-making frameworks.
• Promote Cross-Functional Buy-in: Use initiatives as the foundation for stakeholder alignment. The new structure makes it easier to present comprehensive, well-organized business cases and secure consensus before roadmap work begins.
  
  

FAQ

Is this available on all plans?

The rebranding of opportunities to initiatives, as well as the new section for Initiatives in the sidebar will be available on Professional & Enterprise plans. However, the key enhancements to initiatives such as rich text, custom fields, and dates will only be available on Enterprise plans.

Who can create, edit or delete Initiatives?

Initiatives will share the current permission set with opportunities. Editors and Admins will both be able to create, edit, or archive initiatives. Viewers will be able to view but not edit any of the initiatives in the account. Please note that viewer permissions for initiatives do not require a viewer to be invited to each individual initiative.

Will the word 'Opportunity' be changed everywhere in the platform?

Yes, after the release the word 'opportunity' will be changed to say 'initiative' for all users.

What kind of options are available in the rich text editor?

The rich text editor supports text sizes, text styling (bold, italic, underline), text justification, bulleted and numbered lists, and hyperlinks. At this time, it does not support uploading images or code snippets.