Initiatives turn goals into work in flight. Each one names the outcome it's going to move, the Briefs that will deliver it, and how it's tracking — so the line from a goal to a shipped PR is visible at every altitude.
An Initiative is your team's commitment to deliver a goal. Goals say what we want with Metrics, baselines, targets, and per-period Results attached. Initiatives say what we're going to do about it — concretely enough that Delivery can start.
Each Initiative carries:
Initiatives sit at the top of Hamster's Delivery layer. Above an Initiative is the goal it serves (with its Metric, target, and per-period Results); below it are the Briefs the Initiative breaks into, and the Plans, Tasks, and PRs they generate.
You manage Initiatives in three places: the dedicated Initiatives surface in the sidebar, inline from any Brief, and from Hamster Chat in natural language. If you have Linear or Jira connected, your Initiatives also stay in sync with the matching projects or goals on those platforms.
Open the Initiatives tab — Find Initiatives in the sidebar. The page opens in tree view, with a card grid available as an alternative layout.
Create an Initiative — Click New Initiative. Give it a title and an optional description, pick an icon, and assign an owner. Initiatives can be created at the top level or as a child of an existing one.
Link the goals it delivers — From the Initiative, link one or more goals. The Metrics and per-period Results on those goals propagate up so you can see at a glance which outcomes this commitment is meant to move. Add a weight (0–1) when the contribution is partial.
Build the hierarchy — Drag any Initiative onto another to nest it as a child. There is no depth limit, and Hamster prevents drags that would create a cycle. Two levels usually beats five.
Break it down into Briefs — Use Add Brief to multi-select existing Briefs, or create new ones from chat. Each Brief is one deliverable chunk of the Initiative; together they're how the commitment gets executed.
Link sub-initiatives in bulk — Use Add sub-initiative the same way to attach existing Initiatives as children, in a single multi-select pass.
Track state and health — Set the state (Draft, Refining, Shipping, Done, Blocked, Archived) for lifecycle, and the health (Not Started, On Track, At Risk, Off Track) as your weekly pulse. They're independent — a Shipping Initiative can be At Risk; a Draft Initiative can be On Track if planning is going well.
Filter the list — Use the status filter at the top of the list to scope the view. Your filter, expanded tree state, and visible columns persist per user.
Ask in chat — Type "what's the status of growth and adoption?" or "are any active Initiatives at risk?" in any Hamster Chat thread. The Initiative Manager agent answers inline, citing initiatives as reference pills.
An Initiative can link to multiple Briefs and other Initiatives. A single Brief can be linked to multiple Initiatives — the same deliverable can contribute to several strategic goals at once.
Linking Briefs and sub-initiatives is a multi-select action, not one-at-a-time. Open the link dialog from an Initiative detail page, tick every Brief or Initiative you want to attach, and submit once. Hamster fans the request out across all selections at the same time.
The dialog handles the noise for you:
shipping state and clears its archived status, so the Initiative re-enters active tracking.The Initiatives list supports filtered views without leaving the page:
Flipping that toggle re-flows the same Initiatives in place — from a nested tree into a board of cards — without leaving the page or reloading the list.
All of these preferences are stored per user, so your view is yours alone. Switching workspaces or accounts does not affect them.
Hamster's AI assistant has a dedicated Initiative Manager. It is always available in the Getting Started, Brief, Goal, and Blueprint chat surfaces — no setup required.
Ask things like:
The agent resolves names — you do not need to copy IDs around. When it cites an Initiative, the link renders as an inline pill with the title and a live status dot. Tap it to open the Initiative directly.
If a chat thread is scoped to a specific Initiative (because you opened the chat from an Initiative page), the agent picks that up as context automatically.
Each Initiative has its own root chat thread where the team can discuss strategy, progress, and decisions. The chat adapts to your screen — collapse it to focus on the Initiative details, or expand it for longer conversations.
Mention participants — From an Initiative's root chat or any linked Brief's chat, mention teammates normally using @name. Mentions create navigable links and notify participants that they were referenced in the message.
Root chat persistence — The Initiative root chat persists independent of Briefs and Plans. Messages in the Initiative root chat stay visible even after Briefs are delivered or moved to other Initiatives.
If your workspace has Linear or Jira connected with two-way sync enabled, Initiatives stay in sync with the matching projects (Linear) or goals (Jira):
Hamster's hierarchy is deeper than Linear's, so deeply nested Initiatives map to a Linear project plus a label fallback. Jira goals map onto Initiatives one-to-one.
On an Initiative detail page, authorized teammates can update its state, health, owner, and start or target dates without leaving the page.
The Initiative's root chat starts with four reusable prompts: Summarize the initiative, Surface risks, Plan next steps, and Find related context. Selecting one sends that prompt with the Initiative already in context; the suggestions are fixed quick starts rather than generated recommendations.