The four altitudes

APO organizes product thinking into four altitudes. Each one is a different conversation, and the whole point is to never mix them. What we believe about the product is not the same conversation as what we build next sprint. Hold them apart and both get sharper.

The four levels

Vision is the north star — the multi-year reason the product exists, the audience it serves, the change it intends, and the bets it will not make. You revisit it rarely. It is a PRD, not a backlog.

Saga is a theme that spans quarters. It groups a body of work under one strategic intent — “self-host onboarding”, “the billing ledger”. A Saga decomposes into Epics.

Epic is a feature slice you can finish in roughly one to four weeks. It is concrete enough to plan, big enough to matter. An Epic decomposes into Stories.

Story is the implementation unit — a one-to-three-day slice with acceptance criteria and a build-ready plan. This is the altitude the Build pipeline consumes.

Why the separation matters

When direction-talk leaks into a sprint Story, you get analysis paralysis. When sprint-talk leaks into the Vision, you get a roadmap pretending to be a strategy. Keeping each conversation at its altitude means the right people argue about the right things, and nobody drowns a two-day ticket in five-year questions.

How the plugin maps it

The we plugin ships each altitude as a Solo skill:

/we:vision    # write or refine docs/plans/<vision>/PRD.md
/we:saga      # write or refine the SAGA.md theme doc
/we:epic      # write or refine an Epic plan (CONCEPT.md or Jira Epic)
/we:story     # write the build-ready plan for one feature slice

The rule of thumb: Solo formulates an item at one altitude; a Council meeting decomposes it into the next. Vision breaks into Sagas, a Saga into Epics, an Epic into Stories, a Story into a build.