Compass
Compass is a living map of how your organization works. Instead of a one-off audit deck that ages out, you build a shared, structured picture — the workflows people run, who owns them, the systems they touch, where time leaks — and Compass keeps it queryable as the map grows. The payoff is changes: concrete things worth trying — an AI build, or a simpler fix — anchored to the real workflow they'd affect.
The model
Compass is a small graph. Two primitives, plus the things you hang off them.
Pages
A page is one subject in the map — the surface you'll see labeled Map in the app. Every page has a type. These nine come with Compass, and you can invent your own when none of them is the noun your work actually uses:
Workflowpage typeSomething your team does, end to end — claims intake, ticket triage, RFP drafting. Workflows are where changes live.
Personpage typeA role or individual involved in the work.
Systempage typeA tool, app, or data store the work touches.
Audiencepage typeWho the work is for — a customer segment or user group.
Offeringpage typeWhat the business delivers — a product, service, or plan.
Valuepage typeSomething the business won't sacrifice, no matter the metric.
Prioritypage typeAn outcome the business is pushing toward right now.
Pain pointpage typeA known friction — a delay, an error-prone step, a bottleneck.
Documentpage typeReference material — a policy, a spec, anything written down that the work depends on. Files themselves live in your workspace and can be attached to any page, whatever its type.
Connections
Pages link to each other with typed, directed connections, so the map carries meaning you can traverse rather than a pile of loose notes:
owns · involved_in · uses · serves · delivers · affects · documents · relates_to
A Person owns a Workflow; a Workflow uses a System; an Offering serves an Audience; a Pain point affects a Workflow. Follow the edges and the shape of the work appears.
Changes
A change is something worth trying — an AI build, or a simpler fix, that could improve a workflow. Changes attach to a Workflow page (and can point at a particular step within it), so an idea is always tied to the concrete work it would affect, not floating in a backlog.
How you build it
- Map the work
Create pages for the workflows, people, systems, and pain points that make up an area, and connect them. Search across the map as it grows.
- Interview stakeholders
Send a share link to someone who knows the work — no account needed. The transcript is saved to your workspace and attached to the person it came from, ready to draft pages out of.
- Surface changes
Attach changes to the workflows they'd affect — where an AI build, or a simpler fix, could improve the work. The map turns "we should use AI somewhere" into a grounded list of specific things to try.
Want to do it rather than read about it? The quickstart walks you through mapping your first workflow end to end. For specific tasks, see the guides on extracting a map from a document and running a stakeholder interview.
Access
Compass runs in the browser at compass.zerowidth.ai — sign in and pick the Compass tile from your workspace. There's no separate install.
For programmatic access — an agent building the map while it interviews someone, or a script reading pages into another tool — Compass is reachable through the MCP server, not a REST API.