Initiatives
Initiatives are collections of opportunities and solutions gathered around an achievable outcome. They represent key areas of focus or themes broader in scope which align with your organization’s objectives.
Product Owners and Researchers can think of Initiatives as a centralized space to explore, document, and refine ideas during the discovery phase—an interactive canvas for strategic planning.
In terms of software mechanics, the easiest way is to think of Initiatives is as containers for Product Discovery objects (e.g. opportunities, solutions).
Creating initiatives
Timebook facilitates decision making with descriptive approach to Product Discovery. In other words, you describe what you want to achieve, and Timebook suggests how to proceed on the basis of available data sources. Alternatively, you can describe everything manually from top to bottom.
Initiatives can be found in your product space in the main navigation sidebar. Adding a new initiative opens a prompt with two options:
🫙 Create empty – creates a blank initiative to which you can manually add a description and attach opportunities and solutions
✨ Generate – automatically generates title and description and attaches matching objects by answering the question What outcome do you want to achieve? in the context of the entered prompt.
Structure
Each created initiative is structured into three tabs: Overview, Explore, and Roadmap.
Overview
The overview tab holds the description of the initiative, problems it tries to address, opportunities to pursue, and example metrics that can be used to measure the initiative's outcome.
Explore
In its default Canvas view, this tab provides a graphical visualization of the initiative with all interconnected objects.
What you need to know
Clicking an object will open its details
You can reassign attached objects with drag and drop
You can add children items directly on the Canvas view by hovering mouse on the parent object and clicking 💡 and 🧩 icons
Changing the view to List will display the data in a more concise form, ideal for large-scale initiatives with a lot of attached objects:
Roadmap
The last tab is meant for product and project managers as a means to track progress of solutions in the initiative.
Progress in solutions is measured by the rate of closed work items they hold.
The roadmap has two views:
NNL (Now/Next/Later) – lets you arrange solutions as Kanban cards and move them around depending on priority and availability.
Timeline – lets you track start and end dates of solutions on a chronological axis ranging from a single day to a quarter.
Tracking metrics
You can add data metrics to initiative outcomes that will help you track the progress to the desired result. To do this, click the 'Add metric' button on the selected outcome:
The metric can be configured in two ways:
Manually – you enter the metrics name and desired value, and update the current value by hand.
Synced – this method requires an integration with an external analytics tool from which Timebook will automatically fetch the selected metric.
Once added, the metrics will remain attached to the outcome card. In this example, we can see tracking for weekly active users (WAUs) and daily active users (DAUs), with the red/greed marking indicating the relation to the desired value.
You can also apply metrics to opportunities in the same way.
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