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 (Planning, Active, Completed, …) for lifecycle, and the health (On Track, At Risk, Off Track, In Planning) as your weekly pulse. They're independent — an Active Initiative can be At Risk; a Planning 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 with rich reference cards.
A Brief is the smallest unit of change that ships. One Initiative breaks down into many Briefs over its lifetime; each Brief is small enough to refine in chat, align on, and ship as a PR. The Initiative says what we're going to ship; Briefs are the actual things we ship to do it.
A Brief belongs to one Initiative at a time. Linking a Brief that's already attached to a different Initiative moves it; the picker hides Briefs already linked to this Initiative so you can't accidentally double-link.
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:
The Initiatives list supports filtered views without leaving the page:
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 a rich inline card with the title, description, status badge, and Brief count. Click the card 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.
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.