type: concepts name: planning model description: Guide to the difference between workstreams, milestones, initiatives, tasks, and owners. owner: dave
This page explains the planning objects in the master plans docs and, more importantly, how to tell them apart when the names feel similar.
| Planning object | What it answers | Scope | Time horizon | Typical page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Workstream | "Which area of the product or platform owns this?" | Broad, durable lane of work | Long-lived | A workstream home page |
| Milestone | "What does readiness look like by this phase?" | Cross-workstream roadmap checkpoint | Phase-based | A milestone page |
| Initiative | "What larger effort are these tasks part of?" | Scoped body of work inside a workstream | Medium-term | An initiative page with spec, research, or decisions |
| Task | "What concrete thing should we implement or decide next?" | Smallest tracked execution unit | Short-term | A task file |
| Owner | "Who is accountable for moving this forward?" | Person or role | Ongoing | Linked from workstream, initiative, or task metadata |
A workstream is a durable area of responsibility such as graph library, cloud suite, or mcp analyst agent. It is the main organizational lane for planning, ownership, and execution.
A milestone is a cross-workstream stage on the roadmap, like M1 or M4. Milestones answer "what does readiness look like by this phase across the program?"
An initiative is a scoped multi-task effort inside a workstream. It usually has research, spec, and decisions docs plus one or more tasks. Initiatives are the best fit when a body of work needs a narrative, not just a checklist.
In practice, initiatives sit between workstreams and tasks:
An owner is the accountable human when one is known. If a specific person is not assigned yet, the docs fall back to the role that should own that area.
A task is the concrete unit of execution. It is the thing we implement, review, ship, or explicitly decide not to do. Tasks are where status, checklists, and implementation notes usually live.