Tasks

Tasks is Compass's standalone delivery/tracking entity. It's built to scale from a full engineering sprint board (replacing a Jira-style workflow) down to a lightweight list of high-priority initiatives a PM wants to keep an eye on — both use cases share the same status vocabulary and the same underlying entity, so there's nothing to migrate between them.

📸 Screenshot: run pnpm docs:screenshots with a DOCS_SESSION_FILE to capture this image.

Status Vocabulary

Every task moves through: Backlog → To Do → In Progress → Blocked ⇄ In Review → Done, with Cancelled as a terminal escape hatch from any state.

Blocked is its own column, not a flag layered on top of another status — dragging a card into Blocked is how a task gets blocked, and dragging it back out resumes whatever stage makes sense. This keeps the board a single-axis kanban that matches the mental model of tools like Jira, rather than asking you to track two independent pieces of state.

Cancelled tasks are collapsed behind a Show cancelled toggle above the board so a graveyard of abandoned work doesn't clutter the columns you're actively using.

Board and List Views

Toggle between Board and List at the top of the Tasks page — ?view=list in the URL takes you straight there.

• Board — the familiar column-per-status kanban. Drag a card to a new column to change its status; drag within a column to reorder (order communicates relative priority, same as the Roadmap).
• List — a flat, filterable table with one row per task, indented by hierarchy depth. This is the better view for the "PM tracking a handful of initiatives" use case, where a full kanban is more structure than the work needs.

Both views read the same underlying data — there's no separate "lite" data model for the list view.

Creating and Assigning Tasks

Click Add task at the bottom of any column (or Add subtask on a task's detail page) to create one. A task has:

• Title and Description
• Priority — Urgent / High / Medium / Low
• Assignee — a Compass workspace member, for engineering accountability and future "my tasks" views
• Owner — a freeform name, for PM-tracked initiatives whose responsible party isn't a Compass user (an external stakeholder, an exec, etc.). Either or both of Assignee and Owner may be set on the same task.
• Squad — the owning team, same convention as Objectives, Opportunities, and Roadmap Items
• Story points and Due date — optional estimation/scheduling fields
• Iteration — a freeform sprint label (e.g. "Sprint 24") for teams that want lightweight grouping without a full Sprint entity

Epics and Subtasks

Tasks can nest: a task with no parent and its own children behaves as an Epic, and a task with a parent is a Subtask. There's no separate "Epic" type to set — the label is just how the UI describes the shape of the parentTaskId tree, so a task's role can never drift out of sync with its actual position in the hierarchy.

Manage a task's children from its detail page's Subtasks tab.

Linking to the Rest of Compass

A task can link to any number of other Compass objects — Opportunities, Solutions, Roadmap Items, Objectives, Key Results, Docs, Experiments, and Feedback Items — from its detail page's Links tab. Links are many-to-many with no cap: one task can be linked to both a Solution and a Doc, and one Opportunity can have many tasks pointing at it. This is how delivery work stays traceable back to the discovery and planning context that motivated it.

A task's owning Squad is not part of this link system — it's a first-class field on the task itself (same as Opportunities and Roadmap Items), so squad-based board filtering stays a simple, exact match.

Filtering

Use Filters at the top of the page to filter the board or list by Squad, Assignee, or Priority. The facets compose, so you can filter to a specific squad's Urgent tasks assigned to one person, and Clear all removes every active filter at once. Filtering by squad is strict (a task's own squadId, not anything it's linked to).

Custom Fields

Like other Compass entities, Tasks support workspace-defined custom fields (Settings → Custom Fields → Task). Add fields like "Component" or "T-shirt size" without a schema change; they render on a task's detail page under the Details tab.