Direction is how Hamster turns speed into velocity: movement toward outcomes your team actually cares about. It connects Goals, Metrics, targets, and per-period Results so people and AI can reason from the same orientation before work moves into Discovery and Delivery.
Here, strategy becomes operational context. You pick the frameworks your company already speaks, such as OKR or North Star, and define how progress should be understood over time. Hamster then gives the rest of the product a shared model to read from in Goals, Hamster Chat, Plans, and Delivery.
A Goal is an outcome with a measurement story: what you're trying to move, how you'll know whether movement is happening, and how each period rolls up. Good Goals keep the team oriented across many loops of Discovery and Delivery, not just toward a single finish line.
Goals give Initiatives their reason to exist. Initiatives collect the work aimed at moving a Goal; Briefs define the shippable units inside each Initiative. The flow goes Goals → Initiatives → Briefs → Plans → Tasks → PRs. Without Goals, Delivery can look busy without creating velocity; with Goals, every Initiative can be understood against the outcome it is meant to move.
Hamster ships with six measurement frameworks built in — OKR, OGSM, V2MOM, AARRR, HEART, and North Star. You pick the one that matches how your team already runs reviews; Hamster enforces the shape (a Key Result lives under an Objective in OKR, not under a Strategy) and you fill in the substance. You can run more than one framework at a time — a company-level OGSM alongside team-level OKRs — and switch later without disturbing downstream work.
A Metric is the quantitative shape attached to a measurable Goal: what unit you use, which way is good, how numbers roll up, and what you're aiming at. Set it once per Goal so every period's Results land against the same definition.
A Metric pins down five things:
sum, avg, last, max, min).OGSM Measures can additionally be tagged as leading (an early signal) or lagging (an outcome). Mixing them is how strategies stay honest — you can see whether early indicators are moving before the lagging numbers prove the strategy worked.
Metrics inherit their measurable eligibility from the framework template — Key Results, OGSM Measures, AARRR/HEART Metrics, North Star and Input Metrics. You don't attach a Metric to a non-measurable Goal type; the hierarchy enforces that for you.
A Result is the per-period row for a measurable Goal: the target you intended, the actual you achieved, a status (On Track, At Risk, Off Track, Achieved, Missed), and optional confidence (0–1) when the team is still forecasting.
Your active Goals framework has a cadence — quarterly, half-yearly, monthly, or continuous for always-on growth frameworks. Hamster generates periods from it (Q1 2026, H1 2026, April 2026) and gives each measurable Goal one Result row per period. Targets and actuals can be logged as you go, so when review time comes, history is already there — no parallel spreadsheet.
Results always read against the Metric defined on the Goal, so "35% vs 40%" means the same thing in stand-ups, in the Goals view, and in Hamster Chat. When an actual lands outside the band you care about, status makes "off track" visible without anyone curating a deck.
An Initiative is how a Goal becomes committed work — owned, tracked, and broken down into Briefs that ship. Link one or more Goals to each Initiative so Delivery ladders clearly to outcomes; the link is many-to-many with optional weights, so an Initiative that serves Activation 70% and Retention 30% can read honestly.
As Initiatives ship, the Goals they serve move. The Initiative view is where you see what work is driving each outcome.
Set a Goal and attach a Metric, and the AI assistant can suggest Initiatives to move it; new Briefs can be created from it. As Initiatives ship and Metrics update, Goal Results roll forward and statuses stay in sync with Delivery — reviews start from live data tied to the work in flight.