Context

Otis brings what it knows about your product to each piece of work it does. That knowledge is its context: the facts you gave it, your priorities and guidelines, your team's roles, recent changes, and its own earlier findings.

This page explains which context reaches each kind of work and what it can influence. The short version is that context shapes what Otis chooses to say and how it says it. It never changes a number.

Purpose of context

The same measured fact can be urgent for one team and irrelevant for another. A drop in exports matters if exporting is how your customers get value, and matters less if you are retiring the feature. Context is how Otis tells the difference.

Context by kind of work

• Investigating. Otis has the most context here: the facts about your product and business, your guidelines and priorities, your team's roles, recent changes, its own earlier findings and the knowledge base.
• Writing an insight. Otis writes from what the investigation established, the facts about your product, and your guidelines.
• The daily briefing. Your guidelines, your priorities and recent changes shape what is featured.
• Chat. Otis has the facts about your product, your priorities, your team's roles and recent changes, and it can search the knowledge base. It also sees your own role and focus, and your personal guidelines.

Chat means Otis in the Otis app, in Slack, and through the MCP server. In Slack, link your Otis account by running /otis signin, so that Otis has your full context there.

Effects of context

• Whether a finding is published. Otis weighs a finding against your team's focus and the mix of roles on your team. It is told to give more weight to the topics you asked it to pay attention to, and not to raise the topics you asked it to steer clear of.
• How a finding is framed. Otis uses the words of a priority when a finding touches it, and it can set a movement in a measure against a recent change.
• What the briefing features. A finding that touches a priority wins a close call for a place in the briefing.
• How far an investigation goes. When a recent earlier finding already answers a question, Otis can rely on it and spend its effort elsewhere.
• How Otis answers in chat. Otis follows your guidelines for tone, audience and language, and it aligns its recommendations with your priorities.

The confidence setting is a hard rule. With "Only strong signals", a finding below the bar isn't published and can't appear in the briefing. The other effects are instructions that Otis follows when it reasons and writes.

Limits of context

• Numbers. Every figure comes from a query over your telemetry. Otis is instructed never to work out a percentage, a trend or a comparison by itself, and a figure it can't trace to a query result doesn't count as established.
• Evidence. A priority is treated as a choice your team made, and not as a claim to be proved. Otis is told never to state that a finding advances or threatens a priority, and that a finding matching no priority is no less important for that.
• Otis's rules. Nothing in a memory or a document can make Otis take an action. Only your request in a conversation can make it save a fact, change a setting or fetch a web page.

One kind of stored configuration does change numbers, because it defines what is measured. Your funnel definitions, the settings of each measurement and your investment events decide how the figures are computed. Otis records each edit to them as a change.

Size limits

When there is more context than fits, Otis keeps the most useful part.

• Facts. Otis keeps the facts it trusts most, and then the most recently updated. A fact that doesn't fit is left out whole, and never cut short.
• Priorities, changes and earlier findings. Otis keeps the most recent.

Freshness

Otis is shown how old its context is. A priority carries the date it was stated. The summaries of your users and of recent changes carry their age in days, and so does each earlier finding and each document found in a search.

Memory aging describes when a fact stops being used.

Visibility of context

To find out what Otis knows, ask it in chat. To check where a figure came from, follow the links from the insight to the tasks, sessions and spans behind it. Evidence describes them.

Related

• Memories and knowledge base covers where this knowledge comes from and how to correct it.
• Customization covers the guidelines and priorities you can set.
• Insights covers how a finding is investigated, checked and published.