Creating a project
The four-step project wizard, what each field does, and how AI tailors a template to the project you are actually running.
Create a project from the sidebar's quick-create menu, from Projects → New project, or with ⌘+alt+N.
The wizard
Project creation is four steps. You can go back at any point, and your progress is kept if you navigate away mid-way.
Details
Name, description, start date and deadline.
The description does more work here than it looks like it does. If you pick a template in the next step, cadence. uses this text to rewrite the template's generic tasks into project-specific ones. "Reformulate the 500ml sparkling range to remove artificial sweeteners ahead of the EU HFSS deadline" produces markedly better tasks than "Reformulation project".
Template
Choose one of your team's templates, or start with no template.
Starting from a template copies its phases, its tasks, and its gate criteria. Starting blank gives you an empty project you add phases to yourself.
Team
Pick who is on the project, and who manages it.
The project manager is accountable for the project as a whole. It can be a person or a connected agent — assigning an agent here queues a run for it as soon as the project is created.
Only members of the project team can be assigned its tasks, so it is worth adding people generously; you are not granting anything they could not otherwise see.
Review
A summary of what is about to be created: phases, task counts and dates. Confirm, and cadence. builds the structure and starts the first phase.
What gets created
From a template, a new project arrives with:
- every phase, in order, with the first one started,
- every task inside those phases, unassigned and not started,
- every gate criterion, all incomplete,
- the team and project manager you selected,
- any tags you add afterwards.
Task deadlines are not copied from a template — templates carry estimates, not dates, because dates only make sense relative to a real start.
AI task refinement
When a project is created from a template with a description, cadence. rewrites each template task's title and description to fit the project. Order and count are preserved exactly — it is a rewrite, not a re-plan. A task called "Design authentication" in a template becomes "Design SSO for the retailer portal", with a description naming the actual deliverables.
After creation
Three things are worth doing straight away:
- Tag it. Tags are what make the portfolio dashboards useful, and they are much easier to add now than to backfill across twenty projects later.
- Read the first gate. Open phase one and check its criteria say what you would actually stop the project for. See gate criteria.
- Assign the first phase. Either by hand, or with automatic allocation — see managing tasks.
Editing and deleting
Project name, description, status, dates, manager, team and tags can all be changed at any time from the project page. Changing a project's status to on hold or cancelled does not touch its phases; it is a signal, not a cascade.
Deleting a project deletes its phases, tasks, criteria, comments and attachments with it. There is no undo — a confirmation dialog is the only safeguard.