Planning
Idea capture
An idea records a thought that nobody has decided on yet. The team groups related ideas and promotes a group to a goal when it decides to act.
An idea is a suggestion that nobody has decided on yet. It has a title, a description and an author. Raising one commits nobody to anything. Roko Platform keeps ideas cheap to record so that a thought survives the day, and it keeps every decision about them for later.
Background
Most teams lose ideas in two ways. Some are never written down because writing them down takes too long. Others are written down as tickets, and a ticket looks like a commitment, so the backlog fills with work nobody agreed to.
The platform separates the two steps. Anyone can raise an idea in a few seconds. The idea has no status, owner, assignee or estimate. It stays on the Ideas page until somebody groups it with related ideas and promotes the group to a goal, or archives it.
Ideas and idea groups
Each idea gets a project number, shown as IDEA-007. Its drawer shows these properties:
| Property | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Demand | The upvotes. Each member can upvote an idea once. Upvotes measure demand, not approval. |
| Group | The group the idea belongs to, or No group. An idea is in at most one group. |
| Goal | The goal of the idea's group, or Not committed to a goal. |
| Raised by | The author. |
| Archived | The date the idea was archived, and the goal that archived it, if any. |
| Labels | The labels on the idea, or No labels. |
Members can also comment on an idea.
An idea group is a named, colored cluster of ideas. The platform names a new group Group A, Group B and so on, and you can rename it. A group holds at most one goal. The link to the goal sits on the group, not on each idea, so an idea's goal is its group's goal.
A group that has no goal dissolves when it falls below two ideas. A group with a goal stays. You cannot delete a group while it holds a goal.
Labels
A label says what kind of thing an idea is, for example bug, onboarding or reporting. It does not rule on the idea. A label has a name and a color, and the platform picks the color. Names are unique in a project and ignore case. Type a name that does not exist yet, and the platform creates the label.
Use labels to sort and filter the page. Use groups to say that ideas belong together.
Raise an idea
Open the Ideas page
Open the project and select Ideas under Plan in the sidebar.
Raise it
Select Raise an idea. Type the title in What should change? and, if you have it, context in the description. Only the title is required.
Confirm
Select Raise an idea in the dialog. The idea appears in the list with its number.
You can also ask your agent to record an idea over MCP. The agent asks for one sentence, confirms the project and calls create_idea.
Sort the page
The Ideas page has two views under View: List, the default, and Canvas. The toolbar has these filters:
| Control | Values |
|---|---|
| Show | All, Uncommitted, Committed, Archived |
| Sort | Most upvoted, Newest, Recently active |
| Label | All labels, or one label. The filter appears once the project has labels. |
| Group by | Flat, By group, By label |
The page also has a search box and an author filter.
Group and label ideas
Group ideas
Select several ideas and choose Group N ideas. On the Canvas view you can also drag a card onto another card to make a group of the two, or drag a card onto a group to add it. In an idea's drawer, use the Group row.
Name the group
Rename the group so its name says what the ideas share.
Add labels
In the idea's drawer, select Add label and type a label name.
An agent can do the same with the group_ideas and label_idea tools. group_ideas only groups ideas that are in no group yet. It refuses to move an idea out of a group, because rearranging a board somebody built is a person's decision.
Turn ideas into goals
A goal is the decision to act. Promote a group when the team agrees that the ideas in it are worth doing.
Promote
Select Promote to goal on a group, or on one idea that has no goal yet. For a single idea, the platform forms its group and creates the goal in one step.
Fill in the goal
In the Promote to goal dialog, set the Goal title, the kind, the Horizon and, optionally, the owner and dependencies. Select Promote to goal.
Plan it on the Roadmap
The goal appears on the Roadmap. See Roadmaps.
You can also start from the goal. The goal's drawer has an Ideas section. Use Commit an idea to this goal to add an idea to the goal's group.
The link has these effects later:
- The goal is completed. The platform archives the group's ideas and records the goal that archived them.
- The goal is reopened. The platform restores the ideas that the goal archived. Ideas that a person archived stay archived.
- The goal is unlinked or deleted. The group becomes a plain cluster again. No idea is deleted.
Archive an idea
Select Archive on an idea, or Archive N ideas on a selection. Archiving takes no reason. An archived idea is not deleted: it shows only under Show → Archived, and Restore brings it back. The platform never deletes an idea.
You cannot label, group or promote an archived idea. Restore it first.
Best practices
- Write one thought per idea. Two thoughts in one idea cannot be ruled on separately.
- Keep it short. One sentence, and a second for context. If recording an idea takes longer than a minute, people stop recording them.
- Do not turn an idea into a spec. A spec answers how. An idea has not yet earned a whether.
- Upvote instead of duplicating. An upvote from a second person shows that an idea matters to more than its author.
- Group before you promote. One goal per group keeps related ideas with the decision that answers them.
- Archive freely. Archiving removes an idea from the list without deleting it.