North star, strategy & focus

Tell Annsa what the team is steering toward — a north star and the strategy behind it — and aligned priorities surface higher. Above the priority list, focus re-reads the same feedback against a different goal: User Growth, Revenue Growth, Retention Risks, Delighters, Bug Fixes & Quality or New Features.

Settings → Memory & AI tuning → North star. One line, 200 characters: what does success look like in 12 months? Annsa surfaces aligned priorities higher — the field's own description says exactly that.

Two ways in. Paste it — the Strategy field takes what you're focused on this quarter and why. Or import it: Add your direction accepts a strategy doc (.md, .txt, .csv) and saves it to Memory → Strategy without adding a single priority. Annsa reads it when ranking; it never acts on it behind your back.

A focus does two things: it narrows the list to its kinds of feedback, then orders what's left. So a focus can come back empty, and that is an answer rather than a fault — Delighters is empty until customers say something kind, and Bug Fixes & Quality is empty when nothing is broken. Switch focus to see the rest; nothing has been deleted.

Praise asks you to build nothing, so build-oriented focuses leave it out — counting it would pad the list with work that doesn't exist. It has its own home: Delighters, where what customers love is the whole point.

On the default views — All Priorities and User Growth — ranking reads how many accounts a theme touches first, then the revenue behind them, then urgency. Volume is shown on every row — it's evidence, not the sort. A request from 3 paying accounts can sit above a request 40 free users mentioned once. Focuses with their own axis sort by it: Revenue Growth by revenue, Bug Fixes & Quality by urgency.

Three levers. Switch focus above the priority list to re-rank against a different goal. Set your north star and strategy at Settings → Memory & AI tuning so aligned work surfaces higher. And correct any ranking directly — Annsa remembers why, and the correction feeds future ranking.

One line describing the outcome you're steering toward — "what does success look like in 12 months?" Annsa uses it to surface aligned priorities higher across every focus. It lives at Settings → Memory & AI tuning, next to the longer strategy it steers by.