Initiative management built for the way engineering teams actually work with AI.
Jira, Linear, and Asana were designed for a world before AI coding agents. Athena isn't. It's built for teams where humans and agents share the work — and where the old ticket-sizing model has stopped making sense.
Agent surfaced a follow-up refactor — saved to backlog automatically.
3 epics progressed · 1 PR merged · 2 stories queued for agents
Jira, Linear, Asana — they all assume every unit of work is a human-sized task on a human-sized timeline. The moment your team starts using Claude Code or Cursor in earnest, the model breaks.
The hierarchy isn't arbitrary. It's the shape the work actually takes when you're building software with AI agents, and it's the shape existing tools fight you on.
Map to strategic outcomes — the real work your team is doing to move the business forward. This is where strategy connects to execution.
The atomic unit of execution. Each epic is sized to be handed off whole to a single AI coding session, with all the context the agent needs co-located and ready.
Pre-authored markdown files that live alongside the epic, versioned with the codebase, readable by both humans and agents as part of the working context.
Example hierarchy
You
Let's scope out the auth refactor. I think we need to handle token rotation, session storage migration, and update the middleware — but the middleware piece might be its own epic.
Claude
That's a clean split. I've pushed the auth refactor as Epic #12 with 5 stories, and created Epic #13 for middleware updates. Both are in Athena now, linked to the Platform Modernization initiative.
The best planning happens in a conversational interface — working through a design problem in Claude.ai, pressure-testing an approach in ChatGPT. That's not a bug in how your team works. That's how good thinking happens.
Athena's MCP server closes the loop. Refine your thinking wherever the conversation takes you, then push the output back into Athena — as feature requests, comments, or refined user stories — without leaving the chat.
The manual labor of translating "we had a great conversation about this" into "here's a well-formed ticket an agent can execute on" is gone.
Agents wander. Given a well-scoped epic, a capable AI coding agent will often produce useful work that's adjacent to the original request — a refactor that should happen, a bug it noticed, a follow-up that's worth capturing.
Normally, that work evaporates the moment the session ends. Athena captures it. Out-of-scope work surfaced during execution is automatically pulled back into the system as new feature requests or candidate stories, linked to the originating epic.
Your backlog grows organically from the work itself, instead of from someone remembering to file a ticket after the fact.
Agent activity feed
Story completed
Update JWT validation logic — Epic #12, Auth Service Refactor
Out-of-scope captured
Agent noticed expired token cleanup job missing — saved as candidate story, linked to Epic #12
Out-of-scope captured
Found duplicate auth middleware — tagged as tech-debt feature request in backlog
PR linked
PR #247 attached to Epic #12 · Platform Modernization initiative
Athena isn't just a planning tool — it's where the whole engineering lifecycle is tracked and coordinated.
Capacity planning that accounts for both human and agent throughput — not just headcount.
Daily summaries pulled from actual work signals — not from people typing into Slack.
Push notifications for the things that actually need your attention. Nothing else.
GitHub and GitLab integration — PRs automatically attached to the originating initiative. Full arc from intent to shipped code.
Comment threads on initiatives, epics, and stories. The conversation stays with the work.
Build your own integrations, automations, and reporting on top. Athena is a platform, not a walled garden.
CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and Engineering Managers leading teams of 5 to 100+ developers who are actively using AI coding tools and finding that their existing project management stack wasn't built for the way they actually work now.
Athena is especially well-suited to teams that take code quality seriously and want their planning tool to reinforce quality — not undermine it.
Strategic oversight with full visibility from initiative to shipped code.
Sprint and team coordination built for hybrid human + agent workflows.
Teams actively using Claude Code, Cursor, or other AI development tools who've outgrown existing project management.
We're expanding Athena with deeper retrospective and quality-loop tooling — closing the feedback cycle between what was planned, what was built, what the quality signals show, and what the team learns for the next initiative.
Hierarchical work structure, MCP server, out-of-scope capture, sprint management.
Available nowSonarQube and CodeRabbit signal integration — closing the loop between quality gates and planning.
Coming soonAutomated retrospective summaries that surface patterns across initiatives — what shipped on time, what drifted, and why.
RoadmapAthena is in early access. We're working with a small number of engineering teams to shape the product. If your team is using AI coding tools and your project management stack is fighting you, we'd like to talk.
Request Early Access