Goals

A goal is a dated outcome that several streams serve and that completes: an event’s registration running on the new stack, a renewal season on a new mechanism, a platform step shipped by a date. Streams are durable Epics and never finish; goals cut across them and end. Since 2026-10-26 a goal is a work item of its own type, so it has a place to carry its purpose, its date, its definition of done and its history.

1. The Goal work item

Aspect How it is set

Type

Goal, a custom type on the inherited process. It is on no backlog level: a goal is a grouping item, not a backlog item, so it has no parent and nothing is parented to it. Its home is the Goals query, ordered by Target Date.

Area Path

The project root, by design, because a goal cuts components. The classifier and the Control Tower sweep exclude Goal wherever they exclude Epic.

Title

The goal’s name as people say it, for example "WC Track Champs 2026".

Goal Slug

The slug of the goal’s tag, goal:<slug>, so the item and the tag cannot drift apart.

Target Date

The date the outcome must be observed by. The sweep’s maturity check reads it alongside Features' dates.

Description

The narrative: the outcome in one paragraph, what it serves, the scale or constraint that shapes it, what it cuts, and what is deliberately not in it.

Met when

The Acceptance Criteria field, relabelled on the form: one bullet per observable fact that, together, mean the goal is met.

States

New (set, not yet driven) → Active (being driven) → Met (the outcome observed; a comment names the observation) → Closed (after the retrospective note).

Tags

Its own goal:<slug>, so a tag query returns the goal with its items.

Links

Related to every Feature, Story and Bug that carries the tag. The link is the truth; the tag is the index for boards and flat queries, and the factory will later derive the tag from the link.

2. Setting a goal

  1. Create the Goal item with title, slug, Target Date, Description and Met when; tag it goal:<slug>.

  2. Tag the items that serve it and add a Related link from each to the Goal item.

  3. Add one line to the Control Tower’s goal register, which is an index over these items and holds only what no single item can: sequencing between goals, gates, the critical path.

The tag vocabulary’s goal: facet is open: a new slug needs no approval, but it must have a Goal item, because a goal that exists only as a tag has no date, no definition of done and no owner.

3. The description is always the current state

A Goal’s Description is read cold, by someone who was not in the conversation, so it must say what is true now: the outcome, what it serves, what it cuts, what is deliberately out, and one present-tense Status line. It is not a log. When anything about the goal changes — purpose, scope, date, definition of done, status — the affected sentence is rewritten, and a comment on the item records what changed and why, dated, with the evidence or decision behind it. The comments are the goal’s history; the Description is its present. A change made only in a comment leaves the Description stale and the next reader misled; a Description that reads like a diary has lost its job to the comments. The same discipline applies to Met when.

4. Tracking and meeting a goal

"What does goal X still need" is answered by the item first — Description, Target Date, Met when and the latest comments — then the tag query for the open items that carry it. Status updates, triage results and decisions are comments on the Goal item, dated, with the Description’s Status line updated in the same step. When every Met-when bullet is observed, the state moves to Met with a comment naming the observation; Closed follows the retrospective note. Nothing is deleted: a met goal stays in the Goals query as the record of what was done by when.

5. Related