The number at the top
The one number the company is judged on. If you can't name a single one, that is the finding — resolve it before mapping anything below.
Two halves of one rule. Every department and person carries one number that reaches the number above it. Every quarter's goals are drawn from those numbers — never invented alongside them.
New here? to see a filled-in ladder, then clear it and build your own. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Department metrics are long-lived. They describe what a team is permanently accountable for, and they should look the same next year as they do today. If one of these changes every quarter, it was a target, not a metric.
The one number the company is judged on. If you can't name a single one, that is the finding — resolve it before mapping anything below.
OKRs are quarterly and they change every cycle. They name the few things the business is actually pushing on right now. Every metric key result has to be drawn from the first tab — if it is worth committing to this quarter, it was worth measuring before.
Not the company vision — company visions are written to be unobjectionable and are useless for deriving anything. Test: if it could sit on a competitor's homepage unchanged, it's the wrong one.
Break the vision into outcomes big enough to matter and small enough to size. If you can't size it, it's still a slogan. Then mark the one that is blocking the others — that chunk becomes this quarter's objective.
Each numbered row is one commitment, and every row can be named. A row is a single number, a single project, or a bundle of several that only mean anything together — make the world's best methods is one key result even when two numbers and a project sit under it. Leave a lone number unnamed and it goes by the number's own name.
Every number on the ladder is here — a department's and a person's alike. You still cannot invent one: a metric goal that doesn't trace to a number somebody already carries is the ad-hoc goal this whole instrument exists to prevent.
Work that is done or isn't. It needs an owner and a date, not a fake percentage.