Why You Should Exchange Your Epics for Initiatives

Your team has epics. Dozens of them, probably. Big, vague containers with names like "Improve Onboarding" or "Enterprise Readiness" or "Performance Improvements." They sit in your project management tool, accumulating stories like a junk drawer accumulates batteries.

Nobody knows when they're done. Nobody knows why they started. And when someone asks "what's our strategy?" the answer is a tour through the epic list — which isn't a strategy. It's a to-do list with ambition.

Epics are killing your product strategy. And the fix is simpler than you think: exchange them for initiatives.

What's Wrong With Epics

Epics aren't evil. They're a tool. But they're being used for the wrong job.

Epics were designed to group related user stories — a way to organize development work. "As a user, I want to reset my password" fits inside the "Authentication" epic. That's fine. That's project management.

The problem starts when teams promote epics into strategic containers. "Improve Onboarding" isn't a development grouping — it's a business objective with no definition of done, no success criteria, and no connection to measurable outcomes.

Three specific problems:

• Epics never end. When was the last time your team "completed" an epic? Probably never. Epics accumulate stories indefinitely because there's no definition of what "done" looks like. You can always improve onboarding. You can always add enterprise features. The epic becomes permanent — which means it's not a plan. It's a category.
• Epics don't connect to outcomes. "Improve Onboarding" says what to work on but not why or how much. What outcome are you driving? Reduced time-to-value? Higher activation rates? Lower support ticket volume? Without a measurable target, the epic is just a direction — and directions without destinations are how teams wander.
• Epics hide strategic confusion. When your roadmap is a list of epics, it looks organized. But organization isn't strategy. Good strategy makes decisions — it says what you'll do and what you won't. A list of epics says what you might do, eventually, in some order, maybe.

Initiatives Are Different

An initiative is an epic with teeth. It has everything an epic has — a scope, a set of work — plus three things an epic doesn't:

• A measurable outcome. Not "Improve Onboarding" but "Reduce time-to-first-value from 14 days to 3 days for mid-market accounts by Q3." The outcome is specific, measurable, and time-bound.
• A definition of done. The initiative ends when the outcome is achieved — or when survival metrics tell you to stop. Either way, it ends. It doesn't live in your backlog forever.
• A strategic connection. The initiative exists because it serves a specific strategic goal. "We're reducing time-to-value because our mid-market churn analysis shows that accounts who don't reach first value within 7 days have a 60% higher churn rate." That's not just work — it's justified work.

The difference isn't semantic. It's structural. Epics organize work. Initiatives justify it.

How to Convert Epics to Initiatives

You don't need a new tool. You need a new lens.

Step 1: Add "because" to every epic

"Improve Onboarding" becomes "Improve Onboarding because mid-market accounts that don't reach first value within 7 days churn at 60% higher rates."

If you can't complete the "because" with a specific, evidence-based reason, the epic doesn't have a strategic justification. It's work your team is doing because someone asked for it, not because it connects to an outcome.

This is harder than it sounds. A lot of epics exist because a stakeholder requested them, or because they've "always been on the roadmap," or because someone important mentioned them once. That's recency or authority bias, not strategy.

Step 2: Add a measurable target

"Reduce time-to-first-value from 14 days to 3 days" is a target. "Improve onboarding" is a direction.

Your target should be:

• Specific: A number, not a feeling. "Better" isn't a metric.
• Connected: Linked to a business outcome you can trace. Make sure you're measuring the right thing, not just the easy thing.
• Time-bound: "By Q3" or "within 90 days." Open-ended targets produce open-ended work.

Step 3: Add survival metrics

Every initiative needs criteria for stopping — not just criteria for success.

"If we haven't moved time-to-value below 10 days after 6 weeks of focused work, we'll re-evaluate the approach before continuing." That's a survival metric. It prevents the initiative from becoming a zombie — alive in the backlog, consuming resources, but producing nothing.

Without survival metrics, initiatives become the very thing they're replacing: open-ended containers that never finish. The definition of done isn't just "we achieved the target." It's also "we learned this isn't working and we're stopping."

What This Looks Like in Practice

Here's an epic-to-initiative conversion:

Before (Epic):

• Name: "Enterprise Readiness"
• Stories: SSO integration, role-based access, audit logs, SOC 2 compliance, advanced reporting
• Status: In progress (for 8 months)
• Definition of done: None

After (Initiative):

• Name: "Win 5 enterprise accounts by removing the top 3 security blockers from our pipeline"
• Outcome: 5 closed enterprise deals that cited security gaps as their primary objection
• Scope: SSO integration + audit logs + SOC 2 compliance (role-based access and advanced reporting moved to separate evaluation — they're nice-to-haves, not blockers)
• Timeline: Q2
• Survival metric: If we haven't closed 2 enterprise deals by mid-Q2, reassess whether security is actually the blocker or whether it's pricing, competition, or product-market fit

Notice what happened: the initiative is smaller than the epic. It dropped two features (role-based access, advanced reporting) because they weren't connected to the specific outcome. The epic would have built all five forever. The initiative builds three, measures results, and adjusts.

That's product calculus in action — continuous evaluation instead of linear execution.

The Roadmap Shift

When your roadmap is a list of epics, stakeholder conversations sound like this: "When will Enterprise Readiness be done?" and the answer is always vague because the epic never ends.

When your roadmap is a list of initiatives, the conversation changes: "We're targeting 5 enterprise deals by removing their top 3 security blockers by Q2. Here's where we are." That's a conversation about outcomes, not activities. It's a conversation executives can engage with — because they care about deals, not feature lists.

This is also how you stop running a feature factory. Feature factories exist because the roadmap is measured in output (features shipped). Initiatives measure outcomes (results achieved). When you shift from "what did we build?" to "what did we achieve?" — the conversation, the priorities, and the culture all shift with it.

Start Here

Pick your team's largest epic — the one that's been "in progress" the longest. Apply the three-step conversion:

1. Add "because" — what's the evidence-based strategic reason this work matters?
2. Add a measurable target — what specific number will tell you it worked?
3. Add a survival metric — what would make you stop?

If the epic survives all three steps, it becomes an initiative. If it can't justify its existence at any step — if there's no "because," no target, or no stopping criteria — you've just found work your team is doing on autopilot.

And autopilot is how product teams build the wrong things with total confidence.

Are your epics driving outcomes or just organizing work?

In my Survival Metrics workshop, product teams build the measurement frameworks that turn vague epics into focused initiatives — with clear outcomes, defined stopping criteria, and strategic justification for every piece of work on the roadmap.

Book a Clarity Call — 30 minutes, no pitch. Just clarity on whether your roadmap is driving outcomes or just organizing a to-do list.

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