Strategy Intelligence

What Strategy Intelligence Is

Strategy Intelligence is the layer that connects declared organizational intent to actual engineering work. It defines what the organization is trying to accomplish — through vision, initiatives, and roadmaps — then uses an alignment engine to measure whether commits, PRs, meetings, and documents are actually moving toward those goals.

The output is concrete: an alignment score, per-initiative activity breakdowns, untracked work detection, and AI-generated strategic health assessments. Not a dashboard of green lights. A truth layer.

Vision

Vision defines the strategic posture for a planning horizon. It is designed to be readable in under 30 seconds — one sharp statement that anchors every decision.

Vision is scoped to organization or team level and operates on a year-based planning horizon. It can be synced to GitHub via Signal, so your strategic posture lives in version control alongside your code.

Initiatives

Initiatives are the primary strategic unit — the bets the organization is making. Each initiative has a name, intent (why it exists), theme grouping, ownership scope, status, and an alignment signal derived by Cognis.

• → Ownership scope — Organization-wide, team-level, or personal initiatives
• → Status tracking — Planned, active, at-risk, paused, completed
• → Alignment signal — Cognis-derived health indicator: healthy, drift, or risk
• → Ownership patterns — Map code to initiatives via file globs, repository names, or branch prefixes

Initiatives are grouped by themes — semantic categories that organize related bets. Themes carry active and total initiative counts, making it clear where investment is concentrated.

Roadmap

Roadmaps provide a quarterly timeline for sequencing initiatives across a year. Each roadmap is linked to a vision and scoped to an organization or team.

• → Q1 through Q4 grid — Four-column layout with initiatives linked to each quarter
• → Milestones — Checkpoints, initiative starts, and initiative completions with target dates and status (planned, achieved, missed, cancelled)
• → Quarter status — Mark quarters as future, active, or completed. Current quarter is highlighted.

Multiple roadmaps are supported per organization. Initiatives can be linked and reordered within quarters, giving teams a clear view of what ships when.

Execution Tracking

This is the alignment engine. It correlates commits, PRs, meetings, and documents to initiatives and produces a concrete alignment score — the percentage of engineering activity that maps to declared strategic intent.

Per-initiative activity cards show commit, PR, meeting, and document counts, effort metrics (story points, time estimates), contributor lists, and recent commits. Match types include ownership pattern, explicit ID, title match, topic classification, keyword, and phrase matching.

Configurable time windows (7, 14, 30, 60, 90 days) and sort options (most worked on, time invested, commits, recent, alphabetical) let you cut the data the way you need it.

Sprint Intelligence

Sprint Intelligence ties time-boxed execution windows to strategic initiatives and generates AI-powered analysis for each sprint.

• → AI-generated summary — Executive summary, key findings, strengths, concerns, and recommendations
• → Sentiment analysis — Positive, neutral, cautionary, or critical assessment of sprint health
• → Initiative linking — Each sprint connects to strategic initiatives, showing alignment data scoped to the sprint window
• → Sprint health — Derived from alignment score: 70%+ is healthy, 50-70% indicates drift, below 50% is at risk

Sprint views include an overview tab with the AI summary, a goals tracker, linked initiative activity, a contributor leaderboard, and a retrospective notes editor.

Alignment Reviews

AI-generated periodic reviews that assess how execution aligns with strategy over a defined period.

• → Cognis narrative — The thesis: an AI-written summary of strategic alignment health
• → Initiative alignment levels — Each initiative rated: strong, emerging, moderate, weak, none, paused, or complete, with evidence
• → Investment distribution — Visual percentage bars showing where engineering effort is concentrated across themes
• → Drift analysis — Narrative about strategic drift, surfaced only when notable divergence is detected

Signal: Strategy as Code

Signal syncs strategy artifacts — vision, initiatives, roadmaps, themes, sprints — to a GitHub repository as files. Your strategic intent lives in version control alongside the code it governs.

• → Sync modes — Direct commit or pull request, configurable per repository
• → Status tracking — Pending, pushing, synced, PR open, failed, or stale
• → Custom configuration — Commit message templates, base paths for strategy files, auto-sync toggle

Signal indicators appear on initiative and vision cards, showing sync status at a glance. Bootstrap push creates an initial PR with strategy files in your repository.

Ask Cognis

Cognis reasons across all strategy data. Ask it directly:

Use with Agents

Three agent playbooks accelerate strategy setup and ongoing tracking:

See all playbooks →

Related

• → Initiatives — Deep dive into strategic bets, ownership patterns, and execution tracking.
• → Cognis AI Engine — The reasoning engine that powers strategy intelligence.