User Guide · Closed Beta

Goals: track outcomes across your boards

A goal is an outcome you want, written with a short done when: the check that tells you it is finished. Tasks are the steps; a goal is the reason for them. Goals live on a Coral board, so they work without the Hub. The Hub's Goals page reads them from your connected computers and shows them together.

Command names may change. If a command below is not found on your version of Coral, run coral-board --help to see the current names.

What a goal is

An outcome, not a step. "Customers can sign in with Google" is a goal; "edit the login page" is a task.
A done when. One line saying how you will know it is true.
One outcome per goal. If a request holds several outcomes, make one goal for each.
A state. Each goal is proposed, active, blocked, done or dropped. A blocked goal says what or who it is waiting on.

Not everything needs a goal. Chat and quick questions do not.

Create a goal and link tasks

An orchestrator, or you, creates the goal first, then creates tasks for it:

coral-board goal add "Customers can sign in with Google"
coral-board task add --goal <goal id> "Add the Google sign-in button"

List goals with coral-board goal list, read one with coral-board goal show, and finish one with coral-board goal close. Use --help on any of them for the options. Tasks linked to a goal count toward it.

Require a goal for every task

Each board has a require a goal setting, which you turn on in Coral's team settings. It is off by default, so plain tasks keep working. When you turn it on, the board refuses a task that has no goal, which keeps everyone's work tied to an outcome.

What the Goals page shows

The Goals page in Coral Hub lists the goals on the computers you can reach. Each goal shows:

State: proposed, active, blocked, done or dropped.
Rollup: how many of its tasks are done, in progress, blocked or waiting.
Done when: the outcome check you wrote.

The Hub reads this live from each of your computers when you open the page, at the access you have on each. Someone with View access to a computer can read its goals but cannot change them, and Coral tries to hide secrets from them. If a computer cannot be read, the page says so instead of guessing.

Work with goals from the Hub

On the Goals page you can add a goal (New goal), add a task to a goal (Add task), and mark a goal Done or Dropped. What you can change depends on your access to the computer that holds the goal. If there are more goals than fit on one page, the page tells you and lets you load more.

Rolling out in the beta. The Hub's Goals page is being turned on during the beta, so you may not see it yet. Goals work in Coral either way.

Goals are local to their machine

In this first version, a goal and the tasks linked to it live on the same board, on the computer that holds that board. The Hub shows what your computers report.

Goals need Coral 2.0 or newer. For connecting computers, see Connect your first machine.