How to Set Actionable Product Initiatives

Once you set your product goals, initiatives will be the actual steps you’ll need to take that will bring you closer to those goals. Even so, product initiatives don’t have to be tied to a specific goal as long as they’re aligned with your overall product strategy and vision.

The time frame necessary to complete an initiative will vary - from a few months to even a few years. For example, one initiative can be ‘Improve conversion rate to 5%,’ which will take a few months to accomplish, and another one can be ‘Reach 100,000 signups,’ which can take longer to complete.

The important thing is to set a time frame and stick to it, so you can check your progress periodically, measure the results, improve your strategy over time.

Some other examples can be:

• Get 10,000 new users by November 2019
• Increase free trial engagement by 5%
• Top 10 feature rich tool for project management
• Build 3 collaboration features 
• Improve onboarding by 50%

In Infinity, you can set aside a folder for product initiatives. Just like goals, they shouldn’t be too complicated. They should only contain enough information to help your team understand the initiative, its requirements and time frame.

Setting Initiatives in Infinity

It’s easy to see why initiatives are such an important part of your product strategy, but they actually have more than one purpose.

Firstly, they will help you figure out what needs to get done inside and outside the product in order to reach the desired goals. Once you lay them out in the roadmap, you’ll be able to share and track them with the team so everyone can be in the loop.

And finally, you’ll be able to analyze the effort and impact of your initiatives, so you can tweak your product strategy accordingly and know how to best allocate resources.

Here's how you will add product initiatives in Infinity:

• Step 1: Open Initiatives folder.
• Step 2: Delete the items in this folder - you can keep one and use it as a template.
• Step 3: Add a new initiative by clicking +Add new row below at the bottom of the table.
• Step 4: In the first column, write your first initiative.
• Step 5: In the next column add Initiative Status - once you click on the field you will see your options. 
• Step 6: Add relevant metrics. The first metric should be your current value, and the second one should be the target metric.
• Step 7: Set the progress bar to show where you are with completing this initiative. 
• Step 8: In the next two columns, set the start and end dates for completing this initiative. 
• Step 9: Add a goal to which this initiative is linked. 
• Step 10: Open the item to add other details such as description, priority, feature reference, etc. You can open an item in the table by clicking the icon on the left. 
  
• Step 11: Repeat the process to create more initiatives.