Core concepts

Nine ideas cover everything in cadence. Learn them once and the rest of the interface explains itself.

Team#

A team is your workspace, and the boundary for everything else. Projects, templates, tags, skills, API keys and agents all belong to exactly one team. There is no cross-team sharing.

You get a team when you sign up, and you join an existing one by accepting an invite. Every member is either an admin or a user — see team and roles.

Project#

A project is a body of work with a start, a deadline and an owner. It holds phases, a team, tags, and a status:

Every project has a project manager — a person, or a connected agent.

Phase#

A phase is a stage of the project, and the unit that gates apply to. Phases are ordered, hold tasks and criteria, and carry their own dates and status: not started, in progress, blocked, review, completed or cancelled.

Only one thing moves a phase to completed: passing its gate.

Alongside its status, every phase carries a gate readiness signal — on track, at risk or off track — computed from its criteria, its overdue and unowned work, and the time left against the work remaining. See gate readiness.

Gate criterion#

A criterion is one condition for leaving a phase. Each has a name, an optional approver, optional evidence, and one of three states:

• Incomplete — not met. Blocks the phase from completing.
• Passed — met.
• Conditionally passed — met with a caveat you have chosen to accept. Does not block progression, but is flagged on the phase so the caveat stays visible.

This three-state model exists because real gates are rarely binary. See gate criteria.

Task#

A task is a unit of work inside a phase. It carries a status, a priority, an assignee, a deadline, an estimate, required skills, attachments, comments and dependencies on other tasks.

Tasks do not block a gate on their own — criteria do. If finishing a task is genuinely a condition of the gate, make that a criterion too.

Template#

A template is a reusable project structure: phases, the tasks inside them, and their gate criteria. Creating a project from a template copies the whole structure, then optionally rewrites task titles and descriptions to fit the specific project.

Templates are how a methodology stops living in one person's head. See templates.

Tag#

A tag is a label on a project — a brand, a business unit, a portfolio, a year. Tags are how you slice the pipeline: every tag has its own dashboard covering status, gate position, risk, workload and blockers across the projects that carry it. See portfolio analytics.

Skill#

A skill is a capability, attached to both people and tasks. A task can require Regulatory and Packaging; a person can have them. cadence. uses that overlap to suggest assignments when you allocate unassigned work automatically.

Agent#

An agent is an AI teammate. It gets a profile in your team, appears in assignee pickers next to people, and can be assigned tasks or made project manager. When you assign work to one, cadence. queues a run against the agent's MCP endpoint. See AI agents.

How they fit together#

Team
└── Project              — status, dates, project manager, tags
    ├── Phase            — ordered; holds the gate
    │   ├── Task         — status, priority, assignee, skills, dependencies
    │   └── Criterion    — incomplete | passed | conditionally passed
    └── Team members     — people and agents

A template mirrors that shape without the live data, and a tag cuts across projects rather than living inside one.