Core Concepts
Understanding Align's data model helps you get the most out of the platform.
Decisions
A Decision is any choice made by your team that affects your product, architecture, process, or organization. Examples:
- "We'll use GraphQL for the public API"
- "QA sign-off for release 2.4.1"
- "Approved: increase Redis cluster to 6 nodes"
- "Postponing dark mode to Q3"
Decisions aren't just architecture choices. They include approvals, sign-offs, trade-offs, and prioritization calls.
Decision Snapshots
A Decision Snapshot is Align's structured record of a decision. It contains:
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Title | AI-generated summary of the decision |
| Description | Full context and rationale |
| Decision Type | Architecture, Approval, Trade-off, etc. |
| Status | Active, Superseded, Reverted |
| Participants | People involved in making the decision |
| Evidence | Links to source conversations, tickets, PRs |
| Tags | Categorization for search and filtering |
| Created At | When the decision was captured |
Evidence
Evidence links a Decision Snapshot to its source material:
- Chat messages - The conversation where the decision was made (Slack, Teams, etc.)
- Jira tickets - Related issues or epics
- GitHub PRs - Implementation or ADR documents
- Linear issues - Related tasks
- Documents - Confluence pages, Google Docs, etc.
Evidence provides the audit trail, so you can always trace back to the original conversation.
Capture Methods
Real-time Capture
Mention @align in your connected communication tools when a decision is made:
@align We decided to migrate to Kubernetes for better
scaling. The trade-off is increased operational complexity.
Discover (Historical Import)
Use Discover to scan your existing tools for past decisions:
- Connect a source (Jira, GitHub, etc.)
- Align's AI scans for decision-like content
- Review and confirm suggested decisions
- Import them as Decision Snapshots
Manual Entry
Create decisions directly in the Align UI when needed.
Decision Spaces
A Decision Space is an organizational context that decisions live within. Spaces form a hierarchy that mirrors your org structure:
Organization
-- Engineering
| -- Platform Team
| | -- Q1 Migration Initiative
| -- Product Team Alpha
-- Security
Decisions can belong to multiple spaces. Cross-space relationships (e.g., Platform Team's decision affecting Product Team Alpha) are the highest-value edges in the graph - they reveal hidden dependencies, conflicts, and alignment patterns across your organization.
Spaces have types: organization, department, team, project, and initiative. Hierarchy depth is limited to 4 levels.
See Decision Spaces for the full guide.
Decision Tiers
Decisions are automatically classified into three tiers:
| Tier | Scope | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Strategic | Org-wide, long-lived | "Migrate to microservices" |
| Tactical | Team-scoped, medium-lived | "Use Redis for session cache" |
| Operational | Individual, short-lived | "Name this endpoint /v2/users" |
Classification uses a gradient boosting model trained on structural signals (link count, cross-platform references, participant count, language analysis) - no additional LLM calls. Tiers update automatically as relationships change.
See Decision Intelligence - Tiers for details.
Relationships
Decisions are connected through typed relationships that form the decision graph:
| Type | Meaning |
|---|---|
relates | General relationship (most common) |
supersedes | This decision replaces an older one |
conflicts_with | Contradictory decisions |
duplicates | Same decision from different sources |
refines | Adds detail or narrows scope |
clarifies | Resolves ambiguity |
supports | Reinforces or implements another decision |
questions | Raises concerns about a decision |
Relationships are detected both deterministically (cross-platform reference matching) and via LLM analysis (semantic similarity).
Organizations & Tenants
Align uses Organizations (also called tenants) to isolate data:
- Each org has its own decisions, users, and integrations
- Users can belong to multiple organizations
- Data is never shared between organizations
User Roles
| Role | Permissions |
|---|---|
| Admin | Full access, manage integrations, invite users |
| Member | Create and edit decisions, view all decisions |
| Viewer | Read-only access to decisions |
Decision Lifecycle
┌──────────┐ ┌──────────┐ ┌────────────┐
│ Captured │ ──▶ │ Active │ ──▶ │ Superseded │
└──────────┘ └──────────┘ └────────────┘
│
▼
┌──────────┐
│ Reverted │
└──────────┘
- Active - Current and in effect
- Superseded - Replaced by a newer decision
- Reverted - Decision was rolled back
Search & Discovery
Find decisions using:
- Full-text search - Search across titles, descriptions, and evidence
- Semantic search - Natural language queries matched against decision embeddings
- Filters - By type, status, tier, space, date range, participants, tags
- Related decisions - AI-suggested related decisions
- Timeline view - See decisions over time
- Relevance feed - Personalized feed based on your spaces and graph proximity
Decision Intelligence
Align provides several analytical views on top of the decision graph:
- Health Scores - 4-component scoring (freshness, evidence, conflicts, connectivity) per decision and per space
- Graph Analysis - Clusters, centrality (PageRank), orphan detection
- Cascade View - Track how strategic decisions flow into tactical implementations
- Temporal Analysis - Decision velocity, anomaly detection, trend analysis
- Impact Simulation - Blast radius analysis before changing a decision
- Space Benchmarking - Compare teams on health, velocity, and conflict metrics
- Drift Detection - Surface decisions that have gone stale or diverged from intent
See Decision Intelligence for the full guide.