4.1 · Align on strategy

Years of deep content strategy expertise inform your company's content strategy and clusters: you confirm and own the direction, and the platform executes it relentlessly. Clusters are the connection point, the place where your strategy is represented in the product.

If you've done editorial strategy work before, clusters are the topic territories that fall out of a content map. The difference is what happens after: here, each cluster becomes a living surface that generates and organizes opportunities, so committing to one puts a machine behind it.

Where they live

Open Page Creation, then the Clusters view. The page is titled Opportunity Clusters, and its one-line definition is worth internalizing: groups of related page opportunities you pursue together. Commit to a few so your effort compounds instead of scattering.

Clusters sit in priority bands:

Each cluster row shows its demand, how many opportunities it holds, and how many briefs and published pages it has driven, so the list doubles as a strategy scoreboard.

What's inside a cluster

Open a cluster and you'll see its pattern (the page-shape bet, like Pillar + spokes for a hub with supporting pages, or Comparison set for head-to-head pages), its personas and taxonomy chips, and two tabs:

• Opportunities: every opportunity in this territory, with scores and statuses.
• Cluster Brief: the written rationale. If it's empty, Write the brief opens the editor for you to write one. The brief is where the "why this territory" argument lives, and it's worth reading before you back the cluster.

The Find Opportunities button on each cluster is the machine mentioned above: an agent researches the territory and streams scored opportunities into your backlog. That's covered in 4.2 · Generate opportunities.

Your job: back them or challenge them

Your workspace arrives with a proposed cluster portfolio, built from your context and market. Treat it as a hypothesis to challenge, not a plan to approve. For each cluster, ask:

1. Is this a territory we should own? If your strategy says no, delete it or push it to Later. A cluster you don't believe in produces opportunities you'll keep rejecting. Deleting is safe for work already done: opportunities the cluster drove survive, they just lose the cluster link. What deletion removes is the territory itself, its topics and their questions, so a cluster you might come back to belongs in Later rather than the bin.
2. Is it sharp enough? Good clusters are few and specific. If two overlap, use Merge into from the row menu; if one is really two bets, carve the second out with New Cluster: there's no one-click split.
3. Is the priority honest? Now should be small. Cluster priority feeds opportunity scoring, so an inflated Now band blurs the signal that ranking is supposed to give you.

Edit freely: name, description, priority, and brief are all yours to change, and New Cluster adds a territory the proposal missed.

Why backing them explicitly matters

Everything downstream inherits this decision. Opportunities are scored partly by cluster priority, briefs carry their cluster's context, and your portfolio gets read cluster by cluster in reports. A direction you've genuinely backed means the machine works on things you'll actually ship. A direction you rubber-stamped means you'll fight the backlog one opportunity at a time, which is slower and more annoying than fixing the clusters once.

Common questions

How many clusters should be in Now? Fewer than feels natural. Two or three territories pursued hard beat six pursued politely, and you can promote from Next as pages ship.

Our strategy changed. What do I do here? Re-band the clusters, edit the briefs, add or merge territories. The portfolio follows within days: scoring shifts with the new priorities and new research lands in the territories you promoted.