Initiatives

Initiatives group your projects by organizational objective and showcase the goals your company is working towards alongside their progress.

Overview

An Initiative is a manually curated list of projects (similar to our previous iteration of Roadmaps). All Initiatives are presented within a single Initiatives view at the workspace level. Their purpose is to express the goals and objectives an organization aims to achieve and to monitor their progress. This enables high-level planning across multiple projects and long timelines.

Leadership can use the top-level Initiatives view to see a quick overview of ongoing goals, objectives, and their progress. This allows them to assess progress without the need to drill down into individual projects. For example, Karri from the Linear team can easily navigate to our Initiatives view to see an overview of our current goals and their progress.

Basics

Create and view initiatives

Navigate to the Initiatives page in your workspace to create and view existing Initiatives. In this view, you will see a list of all active Initiatives in your workspace, and you can switch to viewing planned or completed Initiatives, Each initiative is shown alongside their short summary, Initiative owner, associated teams, number of projects within, target date, and their health status. You can also create a new Initiative from here.

To create an Initiative, all you need is a name. The creator is automatically assigned as the Initiative owner and the owner can be reassigned later if needed.

Initiatives will be visible by all members of your workspace, excluding guest members. Since Initiatives live at the workspace level, guest members will not be able to view Initiatives.

Health Status

When viewing your workspace Initiatives, the health indicators provide a quick status update for your projects:

• Green: On track
• Yellow: At risk
• Red: Off track
• Gray: No recent update (appears when a project within the Initiative lacks a recent project update)

These indicators are directly linked to project updates and you can select a health indicator to view and discuss related project updates.

For projects marked as at risk or off track, consider commenting and mentioning the project lead to offer assistance. For projects without a recent update, you can tag the project lead to check for any missed updates or potential blockers.

Top-level summary

Initiatives roll up all project updates within an Initiative into a top-level summary. To access this summary, click on the Initiative activity icon in the top right of the initiative page, or click Cmd / Ctrl U. From this view, you can also write a new project update for any project in the initiative or comment on existing project updates.

Lifecycle management

Designating Initiatives as planned, active or complete clearly signals the current state of your highest level work. When an Initiative is completed, it will move to the completed section to maintain a historical record of work. To change the status of an Initiative, click on the Initiative and update its status from the Initiatives overview page.

Initiatives overview page

Use the Overview page to share detailed information about the overall Initiative and the projects within it. From this page, you can access and modify the following Initiative properties:

• Status Property: Indicates if an Initiative is Planned, Active, or Completed.
• Initiative Owner: Initially set to the creator of the Initiative but can be reassigned to another workspace member.
• Target Date: The expected completion date of the Initiative.
• Documents or Link Attachments: Relevant documents or links associated with the Initiative.
• Descriptions: Both short and long descriptions for detailed information.
• Opinionated Project List: Option to create a curated list of projects from within the Initiative to highlight specific efforts.

Example use cases

• Engineering managers might look at a pipeline view to help them manage immediately upcoming staffing needs
• Product leaders may want to use and revise a scenario plan across multiple quarters
• Marketing leaders might look at a release timeline filtered only on projects that require serious GTM communication
• Product leaders may want to see an overview of all larger asks from customers that are currently being prioritized and actively worked on

Initiatives versus Project Views

Initiatives are manually curated lists of projects and they typically align with organizational goals or objectives, allowing leadership to easily track progress towards these goals.

If you have projects you want to group together and automatically filter that don't align with organizational goals or objectives, and you don't have the need to closely track their overall progress, we recommend attaching project views to your workspace projects page.

The advantage of project views is that once you set up relevant project filters, all future projects matching these criteria will be automatically included. These views are also visible to all members of your workspace.

For example, you can create a project view to filter all projects with an “In Progress” status, allowing you to see all such projects across your workspace in one place. Another example is creating a view that filters all projects involving your team members, providing a consolidated view of team activities.