Welcome to Compass

Compass is a product discovery and delivery platform built around Teresa Torres' Opportunity Solution Tree (OST) methodology. It gives product managers and their teams a structured way to move from business outcomes all the way through to shipped experiments — with every decision traceable back to customer evidence.

The Core Workflow

Compass organises product work into connected layers. Four entities carry the strategy, and each has one clear job:

1. Opportunities — The whole landscape of customer problems, desires, and pain points discovered through research. They exist before you commit to anything, and the ones you have not chosen stay visible as a "not now" backlog. Opportunities live on the Discovery board.

2. Objectives — The areas you choose to attack: a selection from that landscape. In Teresa Torres' terms an Objective is the outcome at the root of the tree. Objectives are set in OKR cycles.

3. Key Results — The measures that show whether an Objective moved. What does success look like, and how will you measure it?

4. Solutions — The tactics you try in order to move a Key Result. Each opportunity can have multiple competing solutions, and a solution can also be linked to the Key Results it is meant to move. Rather than committing to a solution immediately, you attach assumptions to it — the riskiest things that need to be true for the solution to work.

Two more layers carry the work to delivery:

5. Experiments — Structured tests designed to validate or invalidate the assumptions attached to your solutions. Experiments have a hypothesis, a method, kill conditions, and a conclusion (PROCEED / KILL / ITERATE).

6. Roadmap — The three-horizon view (Now / Next / Later) of what your team is building. Roadmap items link back to the opportunities, solutions, KRs, and experiments that justify them.

Links, not just parents

Three kinds of connection tie these together:

• Opportunity ↔ Objective is many-to-many: an opportunity can serve several Objectives, and an Objective can pull in many opportunities. An opportunity's single Driving Key Result also counts: it links the opportunity to that Key Result's Objective.
• Solution ↔ Key Result is many-to-many: a solution can be aimed at several Key Results. A solution still belongs to exactly one opportunity, which does not change.
• Everything else keeps the parent it always had: Key Results belong to one Objective, assumptions to one solution.

Workspaces on the Opportunity-first or Torres model show these links in a workspace tree and offer an Objectives (or Outcomes) box on each opportunity; see Thinking models. Agents can read and change the links with the link tools in the MCP API.

Words are a workspace setting

A workspace admin can choose a thinking model in Settings that changes how Compass names and presents these entities. Classic OKRs is the default and unchanged. Opportunity-first OKRs puts the opportunity pool first. Torres opportunity solution tree calls an Objective an Outcome and a Key Result a Success metric. Admins can also rename any of Opportunity, Objective, Key Result, Solution and Cycle for their workspace. Choosing a model or a name never changes your data. Agents and API tools always use the standard names. See Thinking models.

How the Sections Connect

Every section in Compass is designed to reinforce the others. When you promote an opportunity to ACTIVE status on the Discovery board, it surfaces as a candidate for your roadmap. When an experiment concludes with PROCEED, the validated solution can be linked to a roadmap item. OKR check-ins pull in linked roadmap progress automatically.

Any opportunity, solution, or assumption can also carry linked Evidence — interview quotes, feedback, support tickets, experiment results, or analytics — so a claim on the tree is never just an opinion. See the Evidence section under Discovery for details.

The OST Tree view in Discovery lets you see the full tree at a glance: outcome at the top, opportunities branching below, solutions hanging off each opportunity, and assumptions attached to each solution.

Supporting Features

Beyond the core OST workflow, Compass includes:

• Updates — Catch up on grouped workspace activity, expand the changes behind each story, and explicitly mark a loaded snapshot caught up. Available when Updates capture is enabled; see Updates.
• Following and notifications — Follow Opportunities, Solutions, Tasks and Docs, and get their status changes and comments in an in-app inbox. You follow what you create, comment on or are assigned automatically. Available when following is enabled; see Following and notifications.
• Workspace Search — Press ⌘K on macOS or Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux, or choose Search in the desktop sidebar, to find Opportunities, Solutions, Experiments, Roadmap items, Tasks, Feedback, Docs, and User Guide articles by title or topic. Entity results stay within your current workspace; use the workspace switcher before searching another workspace. User Guide results search Compass's own product documentation and aren't workspace-scoped.
• Feedback — Collect and triage direct feedback and ideas; see Feedback.
• Research — Run shareable customer-interview studies, or record manual and external studies (UserTesting, Maze and others), without moving research into a separate product; see Capture.
• Feedback Portal — A public-facing page where customers can submit feedback and vote on requests. Internal teams triage incoming feedback by linking it to opportunities.
• Docs — A rich-text editor for internal documentation. Pages live in a hierarchical tree and support inline screenshots.
• Squads — Organise objects by team for filtered views across every section.
• Custom Fields — Extend any object type with your own fields (text, number, date, select, etc.).
• Branding — Customize a workspace's accent color, font, and logo — applied consistently across the internal app and its public feedback/roadmap portal.
• MCP API — Connect AI agents to Compass via the Model Context Protocol so they can read and write discovery data programmatically.
• Background agent runs — Turns you give the in-app agent run on the server, so you can close the tab and pick the reply up later; see Background agent runs.

Signing In

Compass supports email magic-link sign-in by default — enter your email and click the link sent to your inbox. In production, you can also sign in with Continue with Google, or with a passkey if you've registered one (Face ID, Touch ID, a security key, or your device's built-in authenticator) — a faster, phishing-resistant option that doesn't need a password or a round trip to your inbox. Development environments don't register a Google or passkey provider, so local sign-in instead shows a Dev Login button for instant access.

Manage your passkeys from your avatar menu → Passkeys: register a new one, see when each was added and which device it's tied to, and revoke any you no longer use. Registering a passkey adds it to the account you're already signed in to — it doesn't replace your existing sign-in method, so Google and magic-link both keep working.

When you return to the Compass homepage while signed in, the header provides a direct path back to your work. A single-workspace account gets a Dashboard shortcut; accounts with multiple workspaces can choose one from the workspace menu; and new accounts can continue workspace setup. Your avatar menu also includes Dashboard or setup, User Guide, and Sign out.

Getting Started

The fastest path to value is:

1. Create an OKR cycle and add one Objective with at least one Key Result.
2. Add several Opportunities discovered from customer interviews, and link each to the Key Result it should move (or, on an Opportunity-first or Torres workspace, to the Objectives you chose to pursue it for).
3. Attach Solutions to your most important Opportunity.
4. Write Assumptions for each Solution and create an Experiment to test the riskiest one.
5. Once an Experiment concludes, add a Roadmap item linking it all together.

Help and docs in the side panel

The panel beside the navigation shows one view at a time: Agent, Help or Library. Open it with Agent beside your account menu (or ⌘J), then use the menu on the panel's title to switch views, or press ? anywhere outside a text field to land on Help directly.

• Library is the same tree of Docs, diagrams and artifacts you see on the Docs screen, available from any page. Choosing an item opens it in the main area and leaves the panel where it is.
• Search the whole user guide, or browse it by section. Guides that cover the screen you are on are suggested first under For this page.
• Read in place. Opening a guide keeps you where you are; links between guides stay in the panel. Open full page takes you to the same guide at /help.
• Ask the agent. Ask the agent about this (or Ask the agent instead after a search) switches to the Agent view with the guide attached as context and the start of your question filled in. Nothing is sent until you press send, and switching views never interrupts a reply that is still streaming.