The plan and the backlog stopped talking.
Leadership picks initiatives in a doc. Engineers get tickets weeks later, with the why stripped out. When priorities shift, nobody rewrites the backlog.
The blank-page problem
Product managers spend days turning a one-page brief into tickets. Grooming, estimating, and mapping dependencies eat the week, and every team does it differently.
Constant backlog drift
Backlogs go stale the moment priorities change. Dependencies surprise teams mid-sprint. Estimates and staffing come from gut feel, so the roadmap slips and nobody can say exactly why.
AI makes this worse
AI agents are accelerating execution. That makes accurate planning more important, not less. When teams ship faster, errors in initiative planning compound faster. A misaligned initiative surfaces in weeks, not months.
Tools manage — not plan
Jira, Asana, Monday, Linear — they all manage work after decomposition. None of them do the decomposition, maintain it, or forecast staffing from it. Sortie HQ fills that gap.
Your hierarchy. Your vocabulary.
Sortie HQ plans across the hierarchy your organization already uses, from four levels to seven: a four-level chain for a single team, up to a seven-level chain for a company running many teams at once. We set up your levels with you at the start. Every level is generated with full context and acceptance criteria. When you edit an item, Sortie HQ flags the related items that may need to change and regenerates them when you say so.
- Initiative
- Epic
- Story
- Task
- Initiative
- Deliverable
- Project
- Epic
- Story
- Task
- Objective
- Initiative
- Deliverable
- Project
- Epic
- Story
- Task
We set up your levels with you when you start. Dependencies, acceptance criteria, and confidence scores carry across any chain.
Workspace
Your model. Your agents. Your data.
Bring Your Own LLM
Start on our managed AI, or connect your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Azure OpenAI key. With your own key, the model calls for your planning work run on your provider account, never ours. Need another provider? Talk to us.
Bring Your Own Agent
Sortie HQ classifies which work an AI agent could take on, so agent-ready work is marked before anyone picks it up. Nothing is sent to an agent unless you connect one and switch dispatch on.
Confidence-Driven Review
Every decomposition produces a confidence score. Below-threshold items are flagged with the open questions behind them, and you can answer those questions right on the item: you see it rewritten with your answer before anything changes, and the answer is kept as a decision for the initiative. High-confidence items arrive ready for your approval. You keep the decision without doing the grooming.
You're approving an estimate. Approve the work instead.
The estimate you approve today is usually a guess from a planning meeting, with nothing verifiable beneath it. Sortie HQ decomposes every initiative into the stories, dependencies, and capability gaps behind the cost — so you approve the real work, not a guess. And once you commit, every edit flags the related items that may need to change, so the plan doesn't quietly drift.
Sortie HQ vs. traditional tools.
Existing tools manage work after decomposition. None of them do the decomposition.
Same engine. Seven angles of value.
One product underneath — sensing strategy, decomposing it into work, keeping the plan alive. The benefit you'll feel first depends on which seat you're in. Pick yours.
A/B-test a strategy before you commit a dollar to it.
Sortie decomposes any strategy you're considering into the actual work, staffing, and capability requirements it would demand — so you can compare two paths side-by-side and pick the one that's actually feasible.
Stop betting the budget on plans you can't pressure-test.
All seven roles work the same workspace. Different lenses, one source of truth.
Start planning today. Talk to me any time.
I built Sortie HQ to solve the initiative-to-execution gap I've seen firsthand across product and engineering teams. The fastest way to see it is to run one of your own initiatives through it. If you'd rather talk first, I'm happy to walk you through it.