Velocity is speed in the right direction. Hamster helps you set Direction so outcomes are measurable — Goals with metrics, targets, and per-period results your team and the AI can reason about together. From there you Discover what to ship and Deliver it.
Here, intent becomes scoreboard: you pick the frameworks your company already speaks (OKR, North Star, etc.) and encode what "ahead" and "behind" mean in numbers — a living model the rest of Hamster reads in Goals, chat, and planning.
A Goal is an outcome with a measurement story: what you're moving, how you'll know, and how each period rolls up — clear enough that people and the AI trade in the same numbers.
Goals are the layer that sits above Initiatives. Initiatives are the bundles of work that deliver a Goal; Briefs sit inside Initiatives. The flow goes Goals → Initiatives → Briefs → Plans → Tasks → PRs — outcome at the top, shipped change at the bottom. Without Goals, delivery measures itself by tickets shipped; with Goals, every Initiative ladders back to what you're trying 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 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.