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Initiatives are the big rocks in your organization – strategic efforts that pull together people, tasks, and goals around a shared outcome.
Use initiatives when you want to:
  • Keep a quarterly or multi-sprint effort visible and on track
  • Tie day‑to‑day tasks back to clear objectives and outcomes
  • Give teams and stakeholders a single source of truth for status, risk, and ownership

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Overview

An initiative in mpath represents a strategic project, OKR, or program. It brings together:

Objectives

What success looks like – measurable chunks of progress toward the outcome

Owners & Team

Who is accountable and involved in driving the initiative forward

Tasks

The execution work that moves the initiative forward day-to-day

Status & Health

Status, RAG, and confidence indicators showing how healthy and likely to succeed

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Typical Examples

  • “Ship v2 of the onboarding experience”
  • “Reduce infra costs by 20%”
  • “Improve time‑to‑resolution for P1 incidents”

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Why Initiatives Matter

See how individual tasks and objectives roll up into a bigger outcome. Instead of losing track of how daily work connects to strategic goals, initiatives make the relationship explicit and visible.
Use a single page to talk about status, risk, and confidence instead of scattered docs and spreadsheets. When stakeholders ask “How’s that initiative going?”, you have one place to point them to.
Make it obvious who is accountable, who’s involved, and which team is driving the work. No more confusion about who owns what or who to talk to about progress.
RAG status and confidence make it easy to spot initiatives that need support before they go off the rails. You can quickly identify what needs your attention most.
Use initiatives as the backbone for weekly, bi‑weekly, or monthly check‑ins with leads and stakeholders. They become the natural agenda for status discussions.

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Key Concepts

A container for a strategic effort. An initiative has:
  • Title & summary – what you’re doing and why
  • Outcome – the primary result you’re aiming for (e.g. “NPS > 50”)
  • Dates – when the initiative starts and when you’re aiming to finish
  • Status – planning, in_progress, on_hold, completed, or cancelled
  • RAG – health indicator (red, amber, green)
  • Confidence – 1–10 sense of how likely you are to hit the outcome
Start with a clear, measurable outcome. If you can’t measure success, you can’t know if you’ve achieved it.
Objectives break the initiative into measurable chunks of progress:
  • Each objective has a title and optional key result
  • They act like mini‑goals within the initiative (e.g. “Improve DB performance – p95 < 100ms”)
  • They help frame discussions in check‑ins (“Which objectives are at risk?”)
Aim for 3–5 objectives per initiative. Too many objectives can dilute focus and make progress tracking difficult.
  • Owners are specific people accountable for the initiative’s success (engineering lead, PM, EM, etc.)
  • You can add multiple owners with roles like owner, tech lead, or product
  • Initiatives can also be linked to a team, which anchors the work to an org unit
  • Team information is displayed on the initiative detail page, showing which team owns the initiative
Assign clear ownership roles. Having multiple owners is fine, but make sure each person knows their specific responsibility. Linking to a team provides additional context about organizational ownership.
Tasks are the execution layer:
  • Concrete work items that connect to an initiative and/or its objectives
  • They carry status, priority, and assignees
    (see the tasks help topic for more detail)
Tasks linked to initiatives automatically show up on the initiative detail page, making it easy to see what work is moving the needle.

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How to Use Initiatives

1

Create a new initiative

  1. Go to the Initiatives section.
  2. Click New initiative.
  3. Fill in:
    • Title – clear and specific (e.g. “Q4 Platform Resilience Upgrade”)
    • Summary – 1–3 sentences describing the scope
    • Outcome – the result you care about (latency, NPS, revenue, etc.)
    • Dates – realistic start and target dates
    • Status – usually planning or in_progress when you create it
    • RAG & confidence – your honest starting point
  4. Save the initiative – this becomes the home for related objectives and tasks.
Be specific with your outcome. “Improve performance” is vague. “Reduce p95 latency by 30%” is actionable and measurable.
2

Add objectives with clear key results

  1. From the initiative detail page, add Objectives.
  2. For each objective, define:
    • A title (e.g. “Reduce p95 API latency”)
    • An optional key result (e.g. “p95 < 150ms for top 10 endpoints”)
  3. Aim for 3–5 objectives per initiative – enough to cover the work but still focused.
Good objectives have clear success criteria. If you can’t tell when an objective is done, refine it.
3

Assign owners and (optionally) a team

  1. Add one or more owners:
    • Use roles like owner, tech lead, PM, or EM to clarify responsibilities.
  2. If the initiative belongs to a specific org unit, link a team:
    • This makes it easier to filter initiatives across the org.
Don’t skip ownership. Initiatives without clear owners tend to drift and lose momentum.
4

Link tasks to the initiative

  1. When creating or editing tasks, link them to the relevant initiative (and objective where applicable).
  2. Or use the initiative actions dropdown to Add Task directly from the initiative page.
  3. Use task status and priority to keep execution clear:
    • status shows where the work sits in the lifecycle (see tasks).
    • priority shows what should move first when schedules get tight (see tasks).
  4. In reviews, start from the initiative and drill into tasks that are blocked or at risk.
Link tasks as you create them, not after. It’s easier to build the connection from the start than to retrofit it later. Use the initiative actions dropdown for quick task creation.
5

Use initiative actions for quick additions

The initiative actions dropdown (available on initiative detail pages) provides quick access to common actions:
  • Add Task - Create a new task linked to this initiative
  • Add Note - Document context, decisions, or updates
  • Add Link - Attach external resources (docs, dashboards, tickets)
  • Add Check-In - Record progress updates and status changes
  • Add Objective - Define new objectives and key results
  • Manage People - Add or update initiative owners
  • Edit Initiative - Modify initiative details
  • Delete Initiative - Remove the initiative (if you have permissions)
Use the actions dropdown to quickly add related items without navigating away from the initiative page. This keeps your workflow efficient and context-focused.
6

Run regular check‑ins

  1. On your initiative detail page, review:
    • Overall status, RAG, and confidence
    • Progress on each objective
    • Recently updated or blocked tasks
  2. Adjust as needed:
    • Update status/RAG/confidence to reflect reality.
    • Add or re‑prioritize objectives if the scope shifts.
    • Reassign or clarify ownership when responsibilities change.
  3. Use this page as the shared artifact in your weekly / bi‑weekly reviews with leads and stakeholders.
Regular check-ins keep initiatives alive. Set a recurring meeting to review initiatives and update their status.

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Examples & Best Practices

  • Initiative: “Launch self‑serve onboarding for SMEs”
  • Outcome: “Increase self‑serve signups by 30%”
  • Objectives:
    • “Reduce time‑to‑value for new workspaces”
    • “Improve onboarding completion to 90%”
    • “Reduce support tickets for new users by 25%”
  • Tasks:
    • Design flows, implement backend, instrument analytics, update docs
  • Usage:
    • Weekly review with PM + EM: check RAG, confidence, and tasks that didn’t move.
  • Initiative: “Improve incident response”
  • Outcome: “Cut P1 MTTR in half”
  • Objectives:
    • “Standardize runbooks for top 10 incident types”
    • “Reduce alert noise by 40%”
    • “Train all on‑call engineers on new process”
  • Best practices:
    • Make the outcome measurable.
    • Tie initiatives into meetings (e.g. weekly ops review) so it’s regularly inspected.

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General Best Practices

Start with the outcome
Write the outcome first, then add objectives and tasks that support it. This ensures everything you do is aligned with what you’re trying to achieve.
  • Update RAG and confidence before reviews
    This keeps conversations focused on what changed and why. Don’t wait until the meeting to think about status.
  • Limit the number of active initiatives per team
    Too many “important” things means nothing is truly important. Focus beats fragmentation.
Close out completed or cancelled initiatives
Use completed or cancelled so dashboards stay accurate and historical work stays readable. Don’t let old initiatives clutter your view.

Tasks

Learn how task status and priority work together to focus execution on what matters most

People

See how people connect to initiatives through ownership and team assignments

Meetings

Use meetings to review initiatives and keep them on track with regular check-ins

One-on-Ones

Bring initiative context into 1:1s to discuss progress and blockers

Teams

Understand how teams anchor initiatives to organizational units