Inside Atoll: KPIs, Goals, and Initiatives for AI-first teams

Atoll connects goals, KPIs, initiatives, milestones, and issues so a team can relate an outcome to the work intended to move it. Goals state outcomes. KPIs record measures and targets. Initiatives describe bets. Teams plan and execute the work with issues and milestones.

The examples below use a fictional company called Hedgerow. Hedgerow has a founder, a designer, and two coding agents. The names, values, and issue numbers illustrate the model; they do not describe a real Atoll workspace.

Goals describe outcomes

A goal records a directional outcome with an owner and an optional target date. Teams can attach KPIs and initiatives to it. A goal gives agents a reason to connect a piece of work to the business outcome.

• Reach $5K MRR by the end of Q3 has a target date and a founder as owner.
• Improve delivery success rate describes an operational outcome.

Teams choose the outcomes they want to track, then use the strategy views and audit to find missing KPI or initiative links.

KPIs record the measure

A KPI has a name, unit, target value, direction, and optional source or freshness settings. Direction tells Atoll whether the value should rise, fall, or stay at a target. Teams can record snapshots on their chosen schedule.

• mrr_usd can measure revenue against a target of $5,000.
• delivery_success_rate can track delivery success against a target of 99.9%.

KPI snapshots form measurement history. Agents can attribute a snapshot to the initiative or issue that produced the measurement, then inspect that history with the KPI commands or heartbeat explanation. A KPI status provides a signal for the next decision; it does not prove that a single task caused the change.

Initiatives describe the bet

An initiative groups a bounded body of work that the team expects to move one or more KPIs. It can link to a goal, projects, milestones, issues, KPI impacts, and initiative targets. The expected impact records the team's hypothesis. Snapshot attribution records the source of a measurement later.

For the Hedgerow example, one initiative might rebuild self-serve onboarding. Another might improve webhook delivery. Their issue counts, stalled work, blocked work, target dates, and expected KPI impacts give an agent evidence for the next action.

Issues and milestones carry out the work

An issue has a title, description, status, priority, assignee, and optional links to an initiative, milestone, or initiative target. An assignee can be a human or an agent member. The activity record keeps the acting member visible.

Milestones group dated work. Teams can link their issues to a milestone and use milestone health in heartbeat signals. Dependencies add another constraint: the agent can inspect the blocker and the release condition before it starts dependent work.

How the records connect

Atoll computes signals from the records and their links. An off-pace or stale KPI can point the agent toward the initiatives expected to move it. Initiative health includes linked issue counts, stalled work, and blocked work. Issue and milestone signals identify the execution condition that needs attention.

A strategy-backed heartbeat recommendation can propose creating work, starting linked work, escalating a blocker, refreshing a metric, or investigating the current state. The agent still checks access, the current board, and any human approval required before it writes.

Illustrative agent workflow

An agent could use those relationships in this sequence:

1. The agent runs atoll heartbeat --json and reads direct attention and compact signals.
2. A kpi_off_pace signal points to an initiative expected to move the KPI.
3. The agent inspects the initiative and its linked issues, targets, and dependencies.
4. It starts an approved unblocked issue with atoll issue update, preserving the strategy evidence in its progress note.
5. It reports progress, records a KPI snapshot when it has a valid measurement, and stops when the current action ends.

A human can review the issue, the change, and the measurement. The strategy records keep the reason for the work beside its execution.

Why agents need the relationships

A human may remember why a task matters. An agent receives current context through its authorized reads. The strategy chain gives it a way to compare work by the outcome it supports, the KPI state, the expected impact, and the execution constraints.

Access still limits the view. Project-bound strategy and work appear only for projects the caller can access. Organization-wide KPI reads and writes require the roles documented for those operations. A project assignment does not grant access to every KPI or every project.

To try the model, create a free Atoll workspace and add one goal, one KPI, one initiative, and one issue. Then read the heartbeat with an agent that has the required access.