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Goals, KPIs, and initiatives are optional, but they are the part of Atoll that gives agents strategic context.

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Strategy chain

Goal: Reach 100 paying customers by Q2
  KPI: paying_customers
    Initiative: Launch self-serve onboarding
      Milestone: Beta onboarding release
        Tasks: design, build, test, launch
The Strategy page is the main planning surface for this chain. Use it to browse goals, inspect KPI health, review initiatives, and trace strategy through projects, milestones, and tasks.

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Strategy views

The Strategy page has five views for different planning modes:
  • Attention: the default focus view when strategy signals need action, ranking off-pace KPIs, stale metrics, stalled initiatives, blocked tasks, overdue tasks, and overdue milestones.
  • Plan: a narrative view for reviewing the current plan, gaps, KPI health, linked initiatives, and next actions.
  • Update KPIs: an operational workbench for scanning KPI freshness, target health, current values, HTTP sync state, and recording metric updates.
  • Trace Chain: a visual Goal -> KPI -> Initiative -> Project -> Task trace that makes missing links obvious.
  • Audit Table: a dense grid for scanning objectives, owners, target dates, KPI values, health, linked projects, task progress, risk, and update recency.
Use the global filters to narrow the page by project or company, owner, goal status, KPI health, initiative status, risk signal, quarter, or date range. Filters stay in the URL so you can share or revisit a specific strategy scope. When heartbeat has enough strategy evidence, the Strategy page shows a strategy-backed action card above the views. The card turns the current goal, KPI, initiative, linked work, and signal context into one concrete next action. Depending on the recommendation, it can prefill a new task with strategy evidence, update an existing task status, open KPI snapshot recording with initiative attribution and note context, or submit blocker/progress comments with the KPI, initiative, and why-now evidence preserved.

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Goals

Goals are directional objectives with a target date. Good goals are specific enough to guide prioritization:
  • Reach 100 paying customers by Q2
  • Reduce median first response time below 2 hours
  • Launch public API documentation before product launch

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KPIs

KPIs are measurements that tell you whether a goal is on track. Each KPI has:
  • Current value
  • Target value
  • Direction: increase, decrease, or maintain
  • Source type
  • Staleness window
KPI snapshots can be attributed to an initiative or issue, which creates a history of what moved the number.

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KPI HTTP syncs

KPI HTTP Syncs let an admin connect a KPI to a third-party JSON API without Atoll maintaining a custom connector for every service. The safe setup loop is:
  1. Open the KPI in Strategy and identify the third-party source host.
  2. Have a human admin add that exact host in Settings > Integrations.
  3. Use Agent handoff to copy a prompt for an agent with the Atoll atoll skill. The prompt tells the agent to install/use the skill if it is missing and includes safe IDs, dates, statuses, directions, and numeric KPI values while withholding labels, descriptions, source notes, and expected-impact prose.
  4. Ask the agent to draft or validate a sync after the exact host is allowlisted.
  5. Create or review the draft in Settings > Integrations > KPI syncs. Human admins edit supported request/extraction fields, enter secrets, validate, dry-run, and publish from structured UI instead of raw JSON.
  6. Published syncs write normal KPI snapshots with source: "api_poll" and provenance linking the snapshot to the exact sync run.
V1 syncs are deliberately narrow: GET only, https only, JSON only, exact-host allowlisted, no redirects, no request bodies, no query strings, and no OAuth. Draft creation and config validation require the destination host to already be exactly allowlisted. Agents never receive secret values, API keys, bearer tokens, raw third-party payloads, or response bodies.

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Initiatives

Initiatives are bets expected to move KPIs. They can link to:
  • Goals
  • KPI expected impacts
  • Targets
  • Projects
  • Milestones
  • Tasks
Initiatives are visible from Strategy, project overview, and issue detail when they connect execution work back to a strategic objective. Use initiative detail pages for deeper management of KPI impacts and linked execution.

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Initiative targets

Targets are commitments inside an initiative. They keep execution promises separate from business KPIs.
  • Use a progress target for initiative output, such as publishing 10 comparison pages.
  • Use a gate target for a prerequisite, such as getting 5 retailers live before a launch date.
Gate targets emit stateful signals like due soon, overdue, blocked, or complete. They do not emit KPI pace messages such as needing a fractional number of retailers per day.

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How agents use this context

The heartbeat endpoint computes:
  • Goal days remaining
  • KPI pace needed versus actual pace
  • KPI stale/off-pace status
  • Initiative stalled and blocked work
  • Initiative target due/blocked state
  • Assigned issues
  • Prioritized signals
Paused and cancelled goals are kept for historical context, but they are not treated as active operating context in heartbeat or strategy audit signals. KPIs under inactive goals and inactive initiatives stay visible in the product without creating stale, off-pace, or stalled work for agents to chase. This lets an agent choose work based on leverage, not just assignment order.
Create at least one active goal and one KPI before asking an autonomous agent to self-prioritize.