Planning a quarter
A concrete workflow for taking a three-month window from a blank canvas to a board the team can execute against.
1. Name the outcomes, not the work
Start at the top. Open the Initiatives page and create one record for every outcome the team has committed to this quarter. An outcome is a sentence a non-engineer could read and know whether it shipped: “Ship mobile v1 to the App Store,” “Cut p95 checkout latency below 400ms,” “Reach 100 paying customers.”
For each initiative, fill in targetDate and a short Definition of done. Leave status as planned. Three to six initiatives is a healthy quarter — if you're north of eight, you're wishlisting, not planning.
2. Tie initiatives to workstreams
Every initiative happens inside one or more perpetual workstreams (Engineering, Growth, Ops, etc.). Open each initiative and set parentId to the workstream that will staff it. This is how the quarterly push shows up inside the ongoing area of work.
3. Break each initiative into tasks
Open the initiative page and use the inline task list at the bottom. Write tasks at the size of “one person, one sitting” — if a task needs a sub-plan, it's actually a subproject. Use the doc selection menu (→ Task) to promote bullet points from a brainstorm doc directly into tasks with the back-link preserved.
Don't assign owners yet. First get the full breakdown on the page, then triage.
4. Triage: priority and owners
Switch the task list to Board view grouped by priority. Set each task to urgent, high, medium, low, or none. Most tasks are medium. Urgent is for things that block the initiative shipping on time.
Then assign owners. A task with no owner is a task that won't happen — leave it unassigned only if you genuinely want the team to pull it.
5. Create the cycles
Open the Cycles page and pre-create one cycle per sprint for the quarter — usually six two-week cycles. Set start and end dates and leave status as upcoming. When you start sprint planning, you'll drop tasks into the first cycle.
6. Share the plan
Open the workstream or initiative page, switch to the Gantt view, and screenshot or share the URL. The Gantt shows the overlap across initiatives so the team can see where the quarter is dense. If two initiatives pile on the same person, you'll see it here — fix it before kickoff, not mid-sprint.