navigating-the-initiative-funnel

Bitwarden runs cross-cutting technical work through the Software Initiative Funnel. A senior engineer — typically Staff+ for cross-team initiatives, sometimes a tech lead for smaller-scope work that lives largely inside one team's domain — shepherds each initiative through five phases: Identification, Research, Proof of Concept, Scoping & Commitment, and Implementation. The tech lead participates throughout, but most heavily in Scoping & Commitment and Implementation. This skill is the working playbook for that participation, written from the perspective of a tech lead working alongside a separate shepherd; when the tech lead is also shepherding the initiative, read the phase descriptions for both roles and run both. When the canonical reference is needed, fetch the funnel page via the get_confluence_page MCP tool; this document is the operating summary.

The Rule of Ownership

Every phase has a single sentence to remember: the shepherd owns the initiative; the tech lead owns how their team executes its part. The moment that line blurs, one of two failure modes shows up — either the shepherd starts writing the team's stories (and the team doesn't own the work), or the tech lead starts making cross-team decisions that aren't theirs to make (and the initiative drifts).

Phase-by-Phase: Who Does What

Phase 1 — Identification

The shepherd creates a BW Initiative issue, documents the problem, and gets a go/no-go from engineering leadership.

The tech lead's role is light here. If the shepherd reaches out because the team's domain is affected, provide context, known history, and stakeholders. Flag prior attempts. Don't pre-scope — the research hasn't happened yet.

Phase 2 — Research

The shepherd interviews stakeholders (the tech lead is a likely one), surveys the codebase, and produces an Architectural Assessment with 2–4 solution options.

The tech lead's role: be interviewed well. Share the team's pain points, workarounds, and the constraints the shepherd won't see from outside. Quantify where possible ("this causes ~3 bugs per sprint"). If the shepherd proposes a direction that would conflict with work already on the team's roadmap, surface it now — not after commitment.

Phase 3 — Proof of Concept

The shepherd picks a PoC area (sometimes in the team's codebase), builds a framework or example, presents to Architecture Council, and drafts an ADR.

The tech lead's role if the PoC lands in the team's codebase: assign a point-of-contact on the team to pair with the shepherd or review their PRs. Be a collaborator, not a gate. The PoC is meant to test feasibility in real code — if it's cutting corners, that's a signal worth surfacing, but don't treat the PoC PR like a production review. Surface concerns about the approach to the shepherd directly; don't quietly ship workarounds.

Phase 4 — Scoping & Commitment

This is the phase where the most rides on the tech lead's participation. The shepherd creates child epics under the BW initiative (typically one per team or major module), writes epic descriptions, and schedules handoff meetings. Then the team owns the breakdown.

The shepherd brings to the handoff: the PoC findings, the architecture plan section relevant to the team, the success criteria, and time for Q&A. The tech lead brings: questions, a realistic read on how this fits the team's existing roadmap, and a commitment date for the breakdown itself.

After the handoff, run a team breakdown session. The team creates the stories — not the shepherd. Apply the funnel's story-quality rules:

• Be specific. "Migrate user-service error handling to new pattern" beats "update error handling."
• Write acceptance criteria that define done. Reference the PoC PR or architecture plan for the technical approach.
• Note dependencies — especially cross-team ones. Those feed back to the shepherd for coordination.
• Assign to the team, not to individuals. Individuals come during sprint planning.
• Label for filtering (e.g. initiative-typescript-migration) so the shepherd's dashboard can track progress.
• Size with the team's normal process. Don't invent a new estimation method for initiative work.

When the breakdown is done, share it back with the shepherd. They review for consistency with the initiative's vision, not to rewrite stories or micromanage. Expect questions like "this looks good but uses callbacks instead of the async/await pattern from the PoC — was that intentional?" That's the shepherd doing their job. The tech lead's job is to have a good answer.

The Tech Breakdown Template is the canonical artifact for this phase. The funnel hands the team an epic; the team produces a Tech Breakdown from it. Breakdowns live in the bitwarden/tech-breakdowns repository, whose top-level README.md documents the per-team folder conventions. The two template files are templates/breakdown.md and its companion templates/tasks.md. To obtain them, either read from an existing local checkout (ask the human where it lives if the path is not obvious) or clone the repo:

git clone https://github.com/bitwarden/tech-breakdowns.git

If the clone fails (the repo is private, so an unauthenticated clone will 404), ask the human to clone it with their credentials and share the local path. Copy the two template files into the team's folder per the repository README's conventions, and fill in the sections the template defines. The breakdown is what the shepherd reviews when "share it back" happens above.

Before the initiative advances to Implementation, engineering leadership must explicitly commit capacity — a specific allocation for specific sprints. Do not accept an epic into a backlog without that commitment. Executive commitment without operational prioritization is the failure mode where epics sit in backlogs and never get pulled into sprints.

Phase 5 — Implementation

The team executes. The shepherd coordinates across teams, answers approach questions, reviews 1–2 early PRs for alignment (not detailed code review), and reports progress to leadership.

Ongoing responsibilities for the tech lead:

• Bi-weekly tech-leads sync with the shepherd and other affected teams. Round-robin on progress, blockers, cross-team dependencies, and emerging questions. 30–45 minutes.
• Watch for drift inside the team. If engineers are interpreting the pattern differently across PRs, tighten guidance — don't wait for the shepherd to catch it.
• Flag emerging issues. If the team hits a problem that suggests the PoC didn't cover the real production shape of the problem, raise it. The shepherd can escalate to Architecture Council and coordinate a pause or pivot. The worst outcome is three teams quietly implementing three different workarounds.
• Use the FAQ doc. If there's an #initiative-foo Slack channel or an FAQ Confluence page the shepherd is maintaining, post answers the team figures out — other teams will hit the same question.
• Do not stop reviewing code. The shepherd is not a reviewer for the team's PRs. The team's detailed code review still happens inside the team.

When the team's epic is done, mark it done, participate in the retrospective the shepherd runs, and hand back to the team's regular cadence.

The Two Lists to Hold in Mind

Things the tech lead owns and the shepherd does not:

• Story breakdown, acceptance criteria, estimates.
• Detailed code review inside the team.
• The team's PR merging cadence.
• Sprint planning and assignment to individuals.
• Decisions that are purely inside the team's codebase boundary.

Things the shepherd owns and the tech lead does not:

• The initiative ADR and architecture plan.
• Cross-team consistency and the decision to pause/pivot.
• Architecture Council representation.
• The leadership-facing progress narrative.
• Communicating with other teams' leads about shared dependencies.

When something is in neither list, it's usually a cross-team dependency — which means it belongs to the shepherd until they push it back to the team with scope and context.

Escalation Paths

• Capacity conflict (the team can't absorb the epic on the proposed timeline): escalate to the team's EM and the shepherd. The funnel's Scoping & Commitment phase is explicitly where capacity gets negotiated — that's the right venue, not halfway through Implementation.
• The PoC approach doesn't work in the team's context: raise to the shepherd. If it's a fundamental issue, the shepherd takes it to Architecture Council.
• Another team is drifting from the pattern in a way that will hurt the team's work: raise to the shepherd. Cross-team consistency is their job; tech leads don't negotiate directly with another team's implementation.
• The shepherd is absent or unresponsive: the funnel calls out that shepherds should designate a backup for long absences. If there isn't one, escalate to engineering leadership — don't quietly fill the gap.

Common Mistakes

• Accepting the shepherd's stories as written. If the team didn't run its breakdown session, the team doesn't own the work. Re-run it, even if it feels like redundant work.
• Treating the handoff as ceremonial. The handoff meeting is the moment to ask the uncomfortable questions. If something seems off in the PoC pattern, the handoff is cheap; post-merge is expensive.
• Letting drift compound. Small variations multiply. Catch them in the first 1–2 PRs, not the last 10.
• Starting work before capacity is allocated. Epics that land in backlogs without clear sprint allocation die there. That's a leadership conversation, not a heroism conversation.
• Over-indexing on the shepherd. They're coordinating 5+ teams. The team's detailed code quality, sprint discipline, and team-internal decisions are still the team's.

Reference

• Software Initiative Funnel — the canonical phase-by-phase document. Fetch via get_confluence_page when the full template, the go/no-go criteria, or the example timeline table is needed.
• Related: bitwarden/tech-breakdowns for the Tech Breakdown template the team uses to draft the breakdown coming out of Phase 4 (see Phase 4 above for how to consume it); Skill(running-work-transitions) for the Phase 4→5 transition mechanics on either side of the handoff; Skill(architecting-solutions) for the architectural judgment to bring to the breakdown.