What is an Initiative?

An Initiative is a strategic effort or project that groups related work items together to achieve a specific business outcome. Initiatives sit above the product hierarchy — they can span multiple products and components, pulling together features from different areas toward a shared goal.

Think of initiatives as the answer to "What are we working on this quarter and why?" They connect the dots between individual features and the broader product strategy.

When to use it

Strategy alignment — Create initiatives that reflect your strategic themes, then link features to show how day-to-day work maps to company goals.
Cross-product coordination — Group features from multiple products under a single initiative when they contribute to the same business outcome.
Roadmap communication — Use initiatives as the building blocks of high-level roadmaps shared with leadership or external stakeholders.
Progress tracking — Monitor initiative health and progress to get a roll-up view of how strategic bets are progressing.
OKR integration — Link initiatives to objectives and key results to connect execution with measurable outcomes.

Key fields

Field	Description
`name`	Display name of the initiative
`description`	Rich-text description of the strategic intent
`status`	Current status (e.g., Planned, In progress, Done)
`owner`	The member responsible for this initiative
`timeframe`	Planned timeframe with start/end dates and granularity
`health`	Health indicator: on track, at risk, or off track
`progress`	Aggregated progress across linked work
`archived`	Whether the initiative has been archived

Field availability depends on your workspace configuration. Use the Configuration endpoint to discover which fields are available for the initiative type in your workspace.

Relationships

Initiatives support several relationship types:

Relationship	Description
`link`	Features and other entities connected to this initiative
`parent`	The objective this initiative rolls up to (if using OKRs)
`child`	Objectives or work items nested under this initiative

Related objects

Objective — high-level goals that initiatives contribute to
Key Result — measurable outcomes tied to objectives
Feature — features linked to the initiative
Release — releases that deliver parts of the initiative

Learn more

Initiative management in Productboard .