Initiatives

Strategic bets with code-level accountability. Define what matters, then measure whether it is actually happening.

What Initiatives Are

An initiative is the primary strategic unit in InteliG — a declared bet that represents what the organization is investing in. A platform migration, a new product vertical, a performance overhaul. Each initiative carries enough structure for Cognis to reason about it and enough flexibility to reflect how teams actually work.

Name and Intent

What the initiative is and why it exists. Intent is the anchor for alignment attribution.

Theme

Semantic grouping that organizes related initiatives under a common category.

Owner Scope

Organization-wide, team-level, or personal. Scopes who is responsible and how broadly the initiative applies.

Status

Planned, active, at-risk, paused, or completed. Status reflects current state, not aspiration.

Alignment Signal

Cognis-derived indicator: healthy, drift, or risk. Based on actual code activity, not status updates.

Success Criteria

Measurable goals that define what "done" looks like for this initiative.

Initiatives also carry time bounds (start date, target end date) and optional quarter associations for roadmap placement.

Themes

Themes are semantic groupings that organize initiatives into categories. A theme might be "Platform Reliability," "Revenue Growth," or "Developer Experience." Each theme has a name and description.

→ Initiative grouping — Initiatives are displayed grouped by theme in the UI, making investment patterns visible at a glance
→ Investment distribution — Alignment reviews break down engineering effort by theme, showing where the organization is actually spending its time
→ Theme management — Full CRUD with reassignment on delete, so initiatives are never orphaned

Ownership Patterns

Ownership patterns are the bridge between code and strategy. They define how commits and PRs get attributed to initiatives. Three pattern types:

FILE_GLOB — Match files by path pattern. Example: src/payments/** maps all payment module changes to the payments initiative.

REPOSITORY — Match an entire repository. All commits and PRs in that repo are attributed to the initiative.

BRANCH_PREFIX — Match branches by prefix. Example: feat/auth-* captures all work on authentication feature branches.

Each pattern links an initiative to specific code paths in a repository. A pattern match preview shows what files would match and flags overlap with other initiatives before you commit the mapping.

Execution View

The execution view is where alignment becomes measurable. For each initiative with activity, InteliG surfaces:

→ Alignment score — Percentage of total engineering activity (commits, PRs, meetings, documents) linked to initiatives
→ Per-initiative activity — Commit, PR, meeting, and document counts for each initiative, with contributor lists and recent commits
→ Confidence tiers — VERIFIED (matched via ownership pattern or explicit ID) vs INFERRED (AI-attributed via title, topic, classification, keyword, or phrase)
→ Match types — How each signal was attributed: ownership pattern, explicit ID, title match, topic classification, keyword, or phrase matching
→ Effort metrics — Total story points and estimated time across scored commits, giving a quantitative picture of investment

Drilldown views show individual commits and PRs with full intelligence metadata — classification (feature, bugfix, chore, refactor, docs, test, style, perf), risk level, summary, and tags.

Stalled Work Detection

Initiatives with no recent activity in the selected time window are flagged with a stalled indicator. These show up in a separate "No Recent Activity" section, making it immediately visible which strategic bets have gone quiet. No manual status update required — the code (or lack of it) tells the story.

Untracked Work

Not every commit maps to an initiative. InteliG surfaces this explicitly rather than hiding it.

→ Untracked signal count — Total commits and PRs not attributed to any initiative, with percentage of total activity
→ By repository — Which repos have the most unlinked work, revealing where strategic coverage gaps exist
→ By contributor — Which contributors are doing work outside the strategic frame, which may indicate missing initiatives or misaligned effort

Untracked work is not inherently bad — maintenance, ad-hoc fixes, and exploratory work are normal. But if 60% of engineering output is unlinked to any initiative, that is a strategy gap worth addressing.

Setup

The Strategy Setup Wizard walks through connecting initiatives to your codebase in four steps:

→ Connect — Link your codebase repositories
→ Map ownership — Define ownership patterns (file glob, repository, branch prefix) for each initiative
→ Analyze — Trigger initiative intent analysis to correlate existing commits and PRs
→ Complete — Review alignment results and start tracking execution

Ask Cognis

Cognis can reason about initiative data directly:

"Is the payments migration on track?"

"Which initiatives have the most untracked work around them?"

"Who is actually working on the platform redesign this sprint?"

→ Strategy Intelligence — The broader strategy layer: vision, roadmap, alignment reviews, sprint intelligence.
→ Cognis AI Engine — The reasoning engine that powers initiative alignment and strategic analysis.