How to get the most out of Cadence

Cadence turns a 300-page delivery framework into a one-screen answer for your role, today. This guide walks through setup and the five things you'll use most.

Knowledge Base · ~4 min read · Applies to SAFe, Scrum and Kanban

1. Set up in three steps

Choose your framework. SAFe (Scaled Agile), Scrum, or Kanban. This scopes the gates, ceremonies and language you see — a Scrum user never sees PI-Planning machinery, and a Kanban user is guided by flow, not sprints.

Choose your role. Only the roles valid for your framework are shown. Your role is your accountability — it drives the gates you own, your playbook, and your daily plan. The same role is guided differently per framework: a Product Owner in SAFe feeds PI Objectives and syncs with the RTE; in Scrum they own the Sprint Goal at Sprint Review; in Kanban they shape the Replenishment queue.

Set your cadence window. Your sprint or PI start and end dates. Leave “Repeat this cadence automatically” on and the window rolls forward on its own — when a sprint ends, the next begins the following day, so you never re-enter dates and your plan keeps flowing.

Tip: sign in with Google or Microsoft so your setup, issues and daily plan are saved — come back any day and land straight on today's actions.

2. Read your role playbook

Your playbook is a concise, AI-synthesized brief for where you are in the cadence right now:

Focus today and Do now — the highest-value actions for your role in this phase.
Watch out — the anti-patterns most likely to bite.
If you slip — exactly which gate, team commitment and business outcome it breaks downstream.
Your delivery lifecycle and timetable — the gates you own and a dated schedule, scaled to your window.

3. Resolve an impediment

On the Your plan tab, describe any blocker in plain words and pick a timeframe. Cadence maps it to the exact framework gate(s), assesses impact on timeline / progress / dependencies / quality, proposes precise corrective actions, and names the meeting and participants to raise it in.

4. Track issues to resolution — the Issue Registry

After analysing an impediment, choose “Log to Issue Registry.” Cadence then:

Records the issue with its generated solution on the Issue registry tab.
Rebuilds your daily action plan around it. From that day until the resolution deadline, your Do today brief gains a dedicated “Resolve your reported issue” step — a concrete, role-specific action for that day, sequenced so the fix actually lands: diagnose and align early in the cadence, do the work through the middle, verify and close near the deadline. Each day's step is generated for your exact role, framework and cadence position, so no two days repeat the same generic advice.
Sets a resolution window based on the timeframe you chose (see the table below).
When that window closes, asks you to confirm:
- Resolved → the issue closes and the resolution steps drop out of your plan.
- Not yet → describe what's still open; Cadence regenerates the solution, extends the window, and keeps adapting your daily actions until it's fixed.

Timeframe you pick	Resolution window (check-in due)
Daily	Next day
Weekly	One week
Sprint / iteration · Program Increment	End of your current cadence window

In short: reporting an issue doesn't just file it — it changes what Cadence tells you to do each morning, day by day, until the issue is resolved by the end of your sprint or cadence.

Getting around: use the tabs (Your plan, Issue registry, Role mastery, Your team) to move between views. The button at the bottom is “← Back to my plan” on those tabs, and “⚙ Change role or cadence” on your plan — it never resets your setup unexpectedly.

5. Build your review case all year — the Impact tab

The Impact tab quietly turns a year of work into your self-assessment, promotion case, or resume — from your own evidence, so it says what actually happened, not what you can remember in December.

Set your goals once. Cadence seeds industry-standard objectives for your role; add your manager-agreed goals and your company name so the write-ups align to what the business rewards.
Log wins in 30 seconds, all year. A quick note when something goes well — optionally with a number (“cut lead time 30%”) and the goal it supports. And every impediment you resolve in the Issue Registry is captured automatically, so the log fills itself as you work.
Generate at review time. One click turns your logged wins into a STAR self-assessment, promotion case, resume bullets, or a quarterly manager update — grouped by objective and quantified where you gave a metric. Edit it, copy it, done.

It’s yours and private — never shared with your team or manager through Cadence; you copy/export it into whatever your review process uses. The more you log through the year, the stronger it writes.

6. Stay on cadence

Adjust cadence any time from the toolbar — change framework, role, dates, or turn recurrence on/off. Your logged issues are preserved.
Daily action-plan email — opt in to get your cadence-aware plan each morning at the address you signed in with.
Automatic recurrence means that once a period ends, the next begins seamlessly — Cadence keeps providing daily inputs without interruption.

Data & privacy. Cadence's AI runs on Anthropic's Claude via AWS Bedrock in Canada (PIPEDA-aligned). If you connect Gmail or Microsoft 365 it uses send-only access to email you your own daily plan — it never reads or stores your inbox. See the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.