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A goal is what your team is trying to achieve, written down where Squad can read it. “Cut enterprise churn below 8%”. “Ship SSO by Q3”. Goals give Squad the frame it needs to tell an interesting finding from a relevant one.
GoalsGoals
For where goals sit in the chain, see The evidence pipeline.

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What a goal does

Squad reads your goals in two places.

When an insight is created

Squad decides which goals it supports and writes those links itself. You’ll find them already attached on the insight’s Goals panel.

When Squad proposes actions

Squad sees your goals and their importance, and ranks what it hands back by relevance to them. An insight that supports a 5-importance goal is treated as more urgent than an equally-evidenced one that supports nothing.
A goal never changes an insight’s score. Insight scores come from evidence alone (volume, source diversity, recency). Raising a goal from importance 3 to 5 won’t move a single number on the Insights page. It changes how Squad weighs relevance when choosing and ordering work.

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Creating a goal

Click New on the Goals page

Squad creates an untitled goal and opens it immediately with the title selected, so you can type straight over it.

Write it in place

Title, description, and importance are all edited in place. There’s no save button.

Set importance

Importance is five squares, 1 to 5. Set it by clicking the square you want. Use the range honestly. If everything is a 5, importance tells Squad nothing.

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The Goals list

The Goals page opens as a card grid. Switch to the list view from the toolbar if you prefer rows. Each goal shows its GL- reference, title, importance, and the date it was created. Search and filters work the same as everywhere else in Squad, and the state is held in the URL. Right-click a card or row for Open, Copy ID, Copy URL, Copy content as JSON, and Delete.

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Inside a goal

Insights. The top five insights linked to this goal, as a table. Manage (or Add insight when there are none) opens the full list in a dialog where you can search for insights and attach them, or remove ones that don’t belong. Removing a link leaves both the goal and the insight intact. See Relationships. Info. Importance, the number of linked insights, and the creation date. Referenced by. Any brief or knowledge document whose body cites this goal. History. Every change to the goal, and who or what made it.

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How many goals to keep

Enough to cover what the team is actually working on, few enough that the importance scale means something. Five to ten active goals with honest importance values give Squad a usable signal. Thirty goals all set to 5 give it none.

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Cookbook

Set up a quarter. Create one goal per quarterly objective. Write the description as the outcome you want, not the feature you plan to build. Set importance so the top two are 5 and the rest sit lower. Then open your highest-scoring insights and check which goals Squad attached. Find the strategy gap. Open a goal with zero linked insights. Either your evidence says nothing about it (which is a signal in itself) or the goal needs rewriting to be specific enough to match. Build the case for a goal. Open the goal, read its linked insights top to bottom, and use the strongest one to generate a brief. The document will cite the evidence back to individual customer quotes.