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Creating Initiatives

Learn how to create and manage roadmap initiatives at the project, team, or organization level.

Initiatives are the building blocks of your roadmap. Each initiative represents a discrete piece of work that improves your website and belongs to exactly one scope: a project, a team, or an organization.

Scope Overview

ScopeWho sees itTypical use
ProjectMembers with access to that projectWork tied to a specific website or property
TeamAll members of the teamCross-project work owned by a team
OrganizationAll org membersCompany-wide strategic initiatives

Important: An initiative must belong to exactly one scope. You cannot assign it to both a team and a project simultaneously.

Creating an Initiative

From a Project Roadmap

  1. Open your project and navigate to Roadmap in the sidebar.
  2. Click Add Initiative.
  3. Fill in the initiative details (title, description, and optional RICE scoring fields).
  4. The initiative will automatically be scoped to the current project.
  5. Click Create Initiative.

From a Team Roadmap

  1. Navigate to your team via the sidebar and select Roadmap.
  2. Click Add Initiative.
  3. Fill in the initiative details.
  4. The initiative will be scoped to the team, visible across all projects in that team.
  5. Click Create Initiative.

From an Organization Roadmap

  1. Navigate to your organization and select Roadmap.
  2. Click Add Initiative.
  3. Fill in the initiative details.
  4. The initiative will be scoped to the organization.
  5. Click Create Initiative.

Creating from Insights

The fastest way to create an initiative is directly from an audit insight:

  1. View an insight in your content audit or SEO insights
  2. The insight data automatically provides context about affected pages and the issue
  3. This preserves the connection between the data that motivated the work and the initiative itself

Initiative Fields

FieldRequiredDescription
TitleYesA short, descriptive name for the initiative
DescriptionNoAdditional context, scope, and acceptance criteria
ReachNoEstimated number of users or pages affected
ImpactNoExpected impact score (used for RICE)
ConfidenceNoConfidence level in estimates (used for RICE)
EffortNoEstimated effort in person-weeks (used for RICE)

When all four RICE fields are provided, Evergreen automatically calculates a RICE score to help prioritize your initiatives. See RICE Scoring for details.

Linking Pages, Objectives, and Insights

Linking Pages

Associate specific URLs from your sitemap with an initiative. This makes it clear exactly which pages the work affects.

Linking Objectives

Connect an initiative to one or more objectives and their key results. This creates the traceability chain: objective (why) → key result (what) → initiative (how).

Linking Insights

Link the audit insights that motivated the initiative. This preserves the data context and makes it easy to verify the initiative addressed the original finding.

Managing Initiatives

Updating Status

Drag initiatives between columns on the kanban board, or click an initiative and change its status directly.

Editing

Click any initiative to open its detail view. Modify the title, description, RICE scores, linked objectives, or linked pages.

Deleting

Delete an initiative when it is no longer relevant. This removes the initiative and its links but does not affect linked objectives or insights.

Related

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