Strategic Planning: Epics

Strategic planning happens once per initiative. You take a high-level objective and decompose it into epics that can be delivered in 2-4 sprints each.

Step 4: Break Down Epics

Decompose an initiative into manageable delivery chunks.

The AI analyzes the initiative scope and proposes epics sized for 2-4 sprints. Each epic is:

• Self-contained: delivers a coherent set of features
• Independently releasable: can go to production without waiting for other epics
• Sized for a team: enough work for 2-4 sprints, not more

Epic 0: Foundation Work

For new projects, the skill includes an Epic 0 assessment, infrastructure, tooling, and foundation work that must happen before feature development:

• Repository setup, CI/CD pipeline
• Core libraries and shared components
• Development environment and quality gates
• Authentication/authorization foundation (if needed)

Epic 0 is created only when the assessment identifies essential setup work.

Triage Against the Existing Backlog

Before writing anything, each candidate epic is matched against epics already linked to the initiative, proposed as EXTEND #ID (substantial scope overlap) or CREATE (distinct), with the rationale shown before you confirm. A re-run with the same candidates never creates duplicates: an exact title/parent match is recognized as already-present, and a partial-overlap match is proposed as EXTEND again rather than a second CREATE.

Optional: Domain Modeling (DDD)

If your project benefits from domain-driven design, two capabilities place work into subdomains and bounded contexts. They are scoped capabilities, not standalone steps, invoked by /pair-process-plan-initiatives, /pair-process-plan-epics, /pair-process-refine-story, or /pair-process-plan-tasks with $scope set to what was just touched (see Migration Notes).

Define Subdomains

Classifies problem areas as:

• Core: your competitive advantage, build in-house
• Supporting: necessary but not differentiating, build or buy
• Generic: commodity, buy or use open source

Each subdomain also gets a Volatility rating (High/Medium/Low), defaulted from the classification with a human override.

Define Bounded Contexts

Establishes service boundaries and integration patterns between contexts (synchronous, asynchronous, shared kernel, contract). Each relationship is assessed on integration strength, socio-technical distance, and volatility: an unbalanced and volatile relationship must be mitigated or explicitly accepted before it passes approval.

Skip DDD if your project is a simple CRUD app or doesn't need service decomposition, both capabilities fall back to plain "system areas" (services/modules) when no DDD artifacts exist, without erroring.

What You Have After Strategic Planning

PM Tool:
├── Initiative (P0): User Management
│   ├── Epic 0: Foundation & Infrastructure
│   ├── Epic 1: Authentication & Registration
│   ├── Epic 2: Profile & Preferences
│   └── Epic 3: Admin Dashboard
└── Initiative (P1): ...
    ├── Epic 4: ...
    └── Epic 5: ...

Each epic is ready for iteration: the next level breaks them into sprint-sized stories. Initiatives and epics are not classified: the risk tier enters at story refinement (Iteration), as laid out in the risk-driven thread.

Next: Iteration, break epics into stories, refine them, and create tasks.