Project Compass Strategy

Source Summary

Document Metadata

• title: Strategy
• description: What Portfolio Command (Project Compass) is trying to solve and the high-level "strategist" logic it uses to judge alignment and focus.
• status: evolving
• lastUpdated: "2026-02-13 07:23 ET (America/New_York)"
• owner: Product/Engineering # Strategy ## The Core Question Portfolio Command exists to answer: > What am I actually

Imported Context

Document Metadata

• title: Strategy
• description: What Portfolio Command (Project Compass) is trying to solve and the high-level "strategist" logic it uses to judge alignment and focus.
• status: evolving
• lastUpdated: "2026-02-13 07:23 ET (America/New_York)"
• owner: Product/Engineering

Strategy

The Core Question

Portfolio Command exists to answer:

What am I actually working on across all my projects, and is it the right stuff?

"Right stuff" is defined by the user's strategic intent (KPIs/OKRs), not by activity volume.

The Problem It Targets

Across a multi-repo portfolio (side projects, OSS, freelance, internal tools), most engineers hit the same failure modes:

• Work is fragmented. Evidence is split across GitHub activity, docs, and private notes.
• Strategy drift is invisible. You can be "busy" while making no progress against what matters.
• Health issues are detected too late. Stale PRs, runaway issue intake, and neglected repos accumulate quietly.
• Manual portfolio management does not scale. Spreadsheets/Notion require constant upkeep and still do not interpret signal.

Who It's For (and Not For)

• Primary user: a solo engineer or small-team lead managing multiple repositories who wants a portfolio-level view with strategic alignment.
• Non-goals (current):
  • Multi-tenant enterprise reporting.
  • Replacing a project manager or ticketing system.
  • Fully automated "always-on" monitoring (refresh is intentionally user-controlled today).

Strategic Outcomes (What "Good" Looks Like)

The product is successful when it:

• Creates a single source of portfolio truth by unifying GitHub activity, repo docs, and user notes.
• Extracts intent and goals from evidence, so goals represent what the work indicates (not what the user hopes is happening).
• Measures focus and health in a way that is actionable, surfacing the specific levers a user can pull.
• Closes the loop between strategy and execution by injecting the user's KPI framework into analysis, then evaluating progress against it.
• Maintains trust through transparency (full prompt/response visibility, cost tracking, evidence references).

"Strategist Logic" (High-Level Decision Rules)

The system is built around a small set of strategy-first heuristics:

1. Strategy must be explicit.

   • The user defines a KPI tree (Vision -> Objectives -> Key Results -> Tasks).
   • That hierarchy becomes the system's "north star" context for interpreting work.

2. Evidence beats narrative.

   • Goals are synthesized from observed activity + documentation + notes.
   • Docs like CHANGELOG.md and ROADMAP.md are treated as high-signal for planned vs shipped work.

3. Quality of progress beats quantity of activity.

   • "Lots of commits" does not necessarily mean "good focus."
   • Focus scoring penalizes common failure modes (scope creep, too many stale items) and rewards shipping discipline.

4. Portfolio-level view matters more than repo-level optimization.

   • Cross-repo patterns (overcommitment, neglected projects, conflicting priorities) are treated as first-class signal.

5. Trust requires auditability.

   • AI outputs must be explainable: evidence references, transparent scoring breakdown, and logs for every AI call in the ops pipeline.

Key Constraints and Product Posture

• BYOK (Bring Your Own Key): users bring OpenAI and/or Gemini keys.
• Single-user optimized: UX and security defaults favor one owner account today, with guardrails that keep multi-user safe-by-default patterns possible.
• Self-hostable: can run on local/hosted Supabase today; the target stack is migrating toward a standalone API + Neon.

Where This Strategy Is Implemented

• Product loop and feature intent: docs/features/FEATURES.md
• Business framing: docs/features/LEAN_CANVAS.md
• AI pipelines + scoring: docs/development/AI_COMPONENTS.md
• End-to-end architecture: docs/development/ARCHITECTURE.md

Provenance

• Source file: project-compass/docs/STRATEGY.md
• Source URL: https://github.com/maggielerman/project-compass/blob/main/docs/STRATEGY.md