Your first initiative
A walkthrough of creating your first initiative — from writing a brief to reviewing AI-suggested focus areas and generating a plan.
This walkthrough takes you from a blank workspace to a plan-ready initiative. It assumes you've signed in and created a workspace. If you haven't, start with Signing in.
Step 1: Create an initiative
From your workspace dashboard, click New initiative. Give it a name — this is just a label for your project. Something like "User notifications" or "Auth refactor" is fine.
Step 2: Write the brief
The brief editor opens automatically. Write a description that covers:
- What you're building — the feature, change, or system
- Why it matters — the user need or business reason
- What's not included — at least one explicit boundary
A good brief for a first initiative might look like:
Add email notifications to Penling so workspace members are alerted when a clarification is raised against one of their focus areas. Notifications should be togglable per-user. Out of scope: in-app notifications, push notifications, and digest emails.
You don't need to write a perfect brief. You can refine it after seeing the AI's suggested focus areas.
Step 3: Review AI-suggested focus areas
After saving the brief, and if you ask it to, Penling extracts a set of suggested focus areas. Each one has a definition, results, boundaries, and conditions based on Penling's analysis of your brief.
Read each suggestion carefully. For each one, you can:
- Accept it as-is
- Edit any of the four parts
- Delete it if it's not relevant
- Add a focus area the AI missed
The AI will sometimes combine things that should be separate, or split things that should be together. Trust your judgment — the AI is a starting point, not the final word.
Step 4: Resolve clarifications
After you've reviewed the focus areas, Penling surfaces any clarifications — questions raised by the AI where it couldn't determine the right approach from the brief alone. Answer each one to keep the focus area unambiguous.
Step 5: Generate the plan
Once you're happy with the focus areas, click Generate plan. Penling produces a phased build sequence. Review the phases and the order — drag focus areas to reorder if needed.
The plan is now ready. From here you can:
- Publish to make it available to your coding agent*
- Share the plan with your team for review
- Start tracking as the build begins
* published tasks are only available to participants of the focus area. If you aren't seeing a claimable task listed via the MCP connection then make sure you appear in the participants list of the top level focus area.