Principles of bettergoals.ai

These principles guide everything on this site — the content we curate, the features we build, and the way we build them. They come in three groups:

Guardrails — how we build bettergoals.ai together, as a community.
AI Outcome Coach design principles — how the coach behaves when it works with a leader.
Outcome definition principles — what makes a goal a better goal.

They are community-owned: propose a change by editing this file on GitHub and opening a pull request.

Guardrails

How we build bettergoals.ai together. These apply to every contribution, whoever — or whatever — makes it.

Built in the open

Everything on this site — content, features, even these principles — is contributed, discussed, and endorsed in the open. Ideas live as GitHub issues; changes ship as pull requests anyone can review.

Accessible to novices, powerful for experts

A first-time contributor should get from thought to board in two minutes. An advanced contributor should be able to ship a voice-coaching agent. Both belong here.

Accessible to everyone

Better goals are no use to people who can't reach them. Everything we ship — the site itself and the things it helps you produce — is built to work for people using screen readers, keyboard navigation, magnification, or captions. Concretely:

The site meets WCAG 2.0 AA. Sufficient colour contrast, a visible focus state on everything interactive, a sensible heading order, labelled controls, alt text on meaningful images, and never colour alone to carry meaning. Pages work with the keyboard and without JavaScript.
So do the outputs. Goals, templates, skills and coaching conversations leave here as plain, structured text anyone can read, paste and reuse — no meaning locked inside an image, a diagram, or a colour.
Accessibility is part of "done". It's always a fair thing to raise in review, and a fair reason to change a design — not a follow-up issue for later.

Humans endorse, AI accelerates

AI (Claude Code) builds what the community endorses — it never decides what's worth building. Endorsement, review, and shipping to production are human acts.

Safe to challenge

The best predictor of goal quality is whether the people closest to the work felt safe to say "this is the wrong goal." We hold ourselves to the same standard: challenging an idea, a principle, or a shipped feature is always welcome here. Psychological safety is a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have.

Respect IP and give credit

Only contribute what you have the right to share. Acknowledge the ideas, content, frameworks and code we build upon, and be transparent about how contributions will be used. In practice that means three things:

Share only what's yours to share. Client material, confidential examples, paywalled content, and licensed frameworks or code you don't hold the rights to don't belong here. Describe the thinking in your own words instead — the idea is welcome even when the artefact can't be.
Name what you build on. Credit the person, book, framework, or repository behind an idea, and link to the source where you can. Standing on the shoulders of others is encouraged here; doing it quietly is not.
Know how contributions are used. Everything here is public. What you contribute is discussed in the open as issues and pull requests, may be edited, extended, or reused by the community, is read by Claude Code as context when it builds, and ships to a public website under your name or display name. Contribute on that basis.

Anonymised, permission-checked examples beat borrowed ones. If you aren't sure you have the right to share something, ask in the issue before you post it — that question is always safe to raise.

Refuses personal information

Better goals are about roles, customers and outcomes, not about named individuals. So this tool declines personal information rather than protecting it: the safest place for someone's data is somewhere it was never collected.

The site collects nothing. No accounts, no sign-up, no contact forms, no analytics, no tracking or advertising cookies, and no database. What the site can't collect, it can't lose, sell or leak. See Privacy for the specifics.
The coach refuses it too. If a leader offers names, contact details, performance records or anything else about an identifiable person, the coach says so, works with the role instead ("the new starter in support"), and never asks for it in the first place. Coaching a goal never requires knowing who someone is.
New features inherit this. Anything we build here starts from "what's the least we need?" — and the answer is almost always "nothing about a person." A feature that only works by collecting personal data needs a community decision in the open before it ships, not a privacy policy afterwards.

AI Outcome Coach design principles

How the coach behaves in a conversation. Anyone building a skill, prompt, or agent for bettergoals.ai should be able to point at these and show how their work follows them.

Coach, don't dictate

Guide through questions, challenge and reflection rather than simply providing the answer. A leader should leave the conversation owning their goal, not holding a goal the AI wrote for them.

Improve thinking, not just wording

Help leaders clarify the problem, the value and the intended outcome — not just produce a better-written goal. A beautifully phrased output goal is still an output goal.

Challenge assumptions, don't invent them

Probe unclear assumptions, evidence, baselines and targets. Ask rather than make things up. A plausible-sounding number the coach invented is worse than an honest gap.

Create clarity, preserve autonomy

Create clarity on the outcome and the measures of success without prescribing the solution or how it should be achieved. The "what" and the "why" are the coach's business; the "how" belongs to the team.

Human judgement stays in the loop

AI can challenge, suggest and reframe; the leader remains accountable for the final outcome and the decisions that follow from it.

Safe to share

Coaching conversations touch strategy, performance and people. Ask for the least detail needed to be useful, work happily with anonymised or redacted examples, and never require confidential material to give a good answer. Personal information is refused, not merely handled: if it arrives anyway, name it, swap it for a role, and carry on without it.

Better, not perfect

A goal that is meaningfully clearer today beats a perfect one next quarter. Know when the thinking has moved enough, say so, and hand back a sharper goal and a next step rather than coaching on indefinitely.

Outcome definition principles

What makes a goal a better goal. These are the standard the coach coaches to, and the standard the templates and examples on this site are held to.

Start with customer and problem

Be clear about who we are creating value for, what problem or opportunity we are addressing, and why it matters now.

Outcomes over outputs

Define the change or impact we want to achieve, not the project, activity, deliverable or solution we intend to produce. If you can complete a goal without anything getting better for anyone, it isn't a goal, it's a task list.

Outcomes are hypotheses

Treat the outcome as a bet, not a certainty. Make the underlying insight or belief explicit, and leave room to experiment, learn and adapt how the outcome is achieved. Prefer bets you can test in weeks over ambitions you can only judge at year-end — the point of a goal is to create a feedback loop, not a verdict.

Measure movement and impact

Define quantifiable measures of success: leading indicators that show whether we're on the right track, and a lagging indicator of the impact achieved. Where possible, establish the baseline, the target and the timeframe.

Connect to strategy and value

Make the "so what?" clear. The outcome should create identifiable customer or organisational value and connect to the broader strategic direction and Golden Thread.

Better value, sooner, safer, happier

Every goal should be able to answer four questions: What value? How will we see it sooner? What makes this safe — to attempt, to challenge, and to miss? Who ends up happier?

Fewer, bigger, bolder

A dozen goals is a to-do list wearing a strategy's clothes. Set few enough outcomes that everyone can name them, and make each one worth the focus it demands.

Written so anyone can understand it

Say it in plain language, without internal jargon, acronyms or project names. If someone who joined last week can't tell what would be different in the world if this outcome were achieved, it isn't clear enough yet.