Decision Spaces

Decision Spaces organize your decisions into meaningful groups that mirror your organization's structure. As your team grows, spaces prevent the decision graph from becoming noisy by scoping decisions to the right audience while preserving cross-team visibility.

Why Spaces?

Without organizational scoping, a flat list of decisions becomes overwhelming at scale:

Scale	Problem	Spaces Solution
1 team	None - everything is visible	Optional grouping
5 teams	Noise - 80% of decisions irrelevant to you	Filter by your spaces
20+ teams	Invisible conflicts - Team A and B make contradictory choices	Cross-space edges surface hidden dependencies
50+ teams	Strategic drift - no one knows if teams are executing on org-wide decisions	Cascade view tracks alignment

Space Hierarchy

Spaces form a tree structure with up to 4 levels of nesting:

Organization (tenant root)
 -- Engineering
 |   -- Platform Team
 |   |   -- Q1 Migration Initiative
 |   -- Product Team Alpha
 |   -- Product Team Beta
 -- Security
 -- Architecture (cross-cutting)

Space Types

Type	Level	Example
Organization	Top-level	"Acme Corp Engineering"
Department	Division or group	"Platform", "Security"
Team	Working team	"Platform Team", "Mobile Team"
Project	Time-bound effort	"Q1 Migration", "Auth Rewrite"
Initiative	Cross-team program	"Zero Trust Rollout"

Creating Spaces

Manual Creation

Create spaces from the Settings page or via API:

POST /spaces
{
  "name": "Platform Team",
  "slug": "platform-team",
  "space_type": "team",
  "parent_id": "<engineering-space-id>",
  "description": "Core infrastructure and developer experience",
  "color": "#6366f1"
}

Slugs must be lowercase alphanumeric with hyphens (e.g., platform-team).

Auto-Assignment from Connectors

When you map connector channels to spaces, decisions captured from those channels are automatically assigned:

Connector	Mapping Source	Example
Slack	Channel	#platform-team maps to Platform Team space
Jira	Project key pattern	PLAT-* maps to Platform Team space
GitHub	Repository	org/platform-service maps to Platform Team space
Teams	Channel	"Platform Engineering" maps to Platform Team space
Linear	Team	"Platform" maps to Platform Team space

Configure mappings in Settings > Connector Mappings or via the API.

Decision Membership

Decisions can belong to multiple spaces simultaneously. This is common for cross-cutting decisions:

• "Adopt OpenTelemetry for all services" might belong to both Platform Team and Architecture spaces
• A security audit finding might belong to Security and Product Team Alpha

Membership Types

Type	How It's Created
Auto-assigned	Connector mapping matched the decision's source channel/project
Manual	User explicitly added the decision to a space

Cross-Space Edges

The most valuable relationships in your decision graph are often the ones that cross space boundaries. Align highlights these automatically:

Platform Team                    Product Team Alpha
┌──────────────────┐            ┌──────────────────┐
│ "Deprecate REST  │───relates──│ "Build new API   │
│  gateway v1"     │            │  client for v2"  │
└──────────────────┘            └──────────────────┘

Cross-space edges reveal:

• Hidden dependencies - Team A's decision affects Team B's roadmap
• Conflicts - Two teams making contradictory technology choices
• Alignment - Multiple teams independently converging on the same approach
• Duplication - Teams building the same thing without knowing

Viewing Cross-Space Edges

The Graph View highlights cross-space edges with distinct colors. Filter by space to see how your team's decisions connect to the broader organization.

The API also exposes cross-space edges directly:

GET /graph-analysis/cross-space-edges?limit=100

Returns edges where the source and target decisions belong to different spaces, along with their space names and relationship type.

Space-Scoped Analysis

All of Align's analysis features can be scoped to a specific space:

Feature	Tenant-Wide	Space-Scoped
Health Score	Overall org health	Health of decisions within a space
Graph Analysis	Full decision graph	Subgraph within a space + cross-space edges
Temporal Analysis	Org-wide velocity	Team velocity and anomalies
Drift Detection	All drift signals	Drift within a space's decisions
Impact Simulation	Full blast radius	Blast radius within space context

Use the space-scoped endpoints (e.g., /spaces/:spaceId/health, /spaces/:spaceId/graph, /spaces/:spaceId/velocity) to scope analysis results to a specific space.

Permissions

Space access is controlled through space membership roles:

Role	Capabilities
Owner	Full control - manage members, settings, delete space
Member	View decisions and tag decisions to the space

Additional access can come from organization-level roles and explicit permission grants. For example, an org Admin has access to all spaces regardless of space membership.

API Reference

Endpoint	Method	Description
/spaces	GET	List all spaces (flat)
/spaces	POST	Create a space
/spaces/:id	GET	Get space details
/spaces/:id	PUT	Update a space
/spaces/:id	DELETE	Delete a space
/spaces/tree	GET	Get spaces as hierarchical tree
/spaces/:id/health	GET	Health score for space
/spaces/:id/graph	GET	Graph analysis scoped to space
/spaces/:spaceId/velocity	GET	Temporal analysis scoped to space
/graph-analysis/cross-space-edges	GET	Cross-space relationship edges
/spaces/benchmarks	GET	Compare spaces side-by-side