Core Concepts

Understanding Complexus

Complexus is built on a few core concepts that work together to help your team manage projects and deliver work efficiently. Grasping these will unlock the full power of the platform.

Stories: The Unit of Work

Stories are the backbone of your work in Complexus. Think of them as individual tasks, bugs, features, or any piece of work that needs to be tracked from start to finish.

Key aspects of a Story:

• Clear Title & Description: What needs to be done and why.
• Sub-Stories: Break down larger stories into smaller, manageable parts.
• Properties: Assign status, priority, assignees, due dates, and link to Sprints or Objectives.
• Collaboration: Attach files, add comments, and see a full activity log.

Stories flow through your customized workflows, giving everyone visibility into progress. Learn more about Managing Stories.

Objectives: Your Strategic Goals

Objectives represent the high-level goals your team or organization is aiming to achieve. They provide the "why" behind the work.

With Objectives, you can:

• Align your team around shared outcomes.
• Link stories to show how day-to-day work contributes to bigger goals.
• Track progress towards your targets.

Objectives ensure your team is always focused on what truly matters.

Sprints: Focused Work Periods

Sprints (you might call them Cycles or Iterations) are short, time-boxed periods where your team commits to completing a set amount of work. This iterative approach helps deliver value consistently.

Sprints in Complexus help you:

• Plan and prioritize work for the upcoming period.
• Visualize your team's workload and capacity.
• Track progress with burndown charts and other sprint-specific views.
• Review and improve your process with sprint retrospectives.

Sprints bring rhythm and focus to your development process.

Key Results: Measuring Success

Key Results (KRs) are specific, measurable outcomes that define what success looks like for your Objectives.

How Key Results work:

• Directly linked to an Objective.
• Quantifiable metrics (e.g., "Increase user activation by 15%").
• Can be updated manually or automatically based on linked story progress.

Key Results help you track if you're actually achieving the desired impact.

Teams: Collaborate and Organize

Teams are groups of users in Complexus, often reflecting your organizational structure. They are central to how work is assigned, managed, and tracked.

With Teams, you can:

• Organize users into functional units (e.g., Frontend, API, Growth).
• Assign Stories and Objectives directly to specific teams.
• Filter views and reports by team to understand workload and progress.
• Facilitate focused collaboration and ownership.

Teams help ensure the right people are working on the right things.

Labels: Organizing and Categorizing

Labels are flexible tags you can apply to Stories (and other items) to categorize, filter, and organize your work.

Use Labels for:

• Identifying types of work (e.g., bug, feature-request, tech-debt).
• Marking priority or urgency.
• Grouping related items across different projects or sprints.
• Creating custom views and reports.

Labels provide a powerful way to slice and dice your information.

Custom Terminology: Speak Your Team's Language

Complexus understands that every team has its own vocabulary. You can customize many of the terms used throughout the platform.

For example, you can rename:

• "Stories" to Tasks or Issues.
• Workflow states to match your team's specific process.

This ensures Complexus feels familiar and intuitive for everyone.

How They Fit Together

These concepts are designed to be interconnected:

• You set Objectives.
• You define Key Results to measure progress towards those Objectives.
• Work is assigned to Teams.
• Teams break down the work needed to achieve those KRs into Stories.
• You organize and complete Stories within Sprints (or Cycles).
• You use Labels to categorize and filter everything.
• All while using your team's preferred Custom Terminology.

This integrated system provides clarity from high-level strategy down to individual tasks.