OKRs, plus the work

The gap in plain OKRs

1. OKRs describe outcomes. Your week is made of work.

   A key result tells you where you’re trying to get to. It says nothing about the forty things in flight that are supposed to get you there, so the two live in different documents and drift apart by week three.

2. So the strategy deck and the to-do list never meet.

   Leadership asks how the quarter is going. You answer from memory, because the honest answer lives in tickets, notes and your head, not under the key result it belongs to.

3. Friyay adds one level: the initiative.

   Every piece of work sits under a key result. Every key result sits under an objective. When you write one line on an initiative, the result above it moves, and the objective above that. Day-to-day work and high-level strategy are the same tree, read from different heights.

Squad → Objective → Key Result → Initiative. Four levels, read top-down for strategy and bottom-up for status.

The four levels

Squad

A grouping, nothing more. Use it for teams, for products, for clients, or for the workstreams of one large strategy. Optional: Friyay only offers it once you have two objectives to group.

Objective

What winning looks like this quarter, in a sentence. Ambitious, qualitative, memorable.

Key result

How you’ll know. A number with a start and a target, or a plain statement of what done looks like. See below.

Initiative

The work: the bets you place to move a key result. Each carries a Latest (what just happened) and a Next (what’s coming), an honest health, and an owner. This is what you update daily and pin to My Week.

Key results can be qualitative

Textbook OKRs insist every key result is a number. In practice, a lot of what matters in a quarter can’t be counted honestly by week two, and inventing a metric to satisfy the format produces a number nobody believes.

1. Write the result as a sentence if that’s the truth.

   “Customers finish checkout without calling support.” “The sales team can demo the new pricing unaided.” Friyay tracks these by confidence (on track, at risk, in danger) and by the Latest and Next on the initiatives underneath, not by a percentage you made up.

2. Add the number when you have one.

   Every key result has a quiet “Track it with a number” option. Tick it when the metric exists and you have a real starting point, and the progress bar appears. Until then the row shows how many initiatives are moving it, never a misleading 0%.

3. Mix both under one objective.

   A conversion goal can carry a measured completion rate next to a judgement call about the support queue. Health rolls up either way: an objective is only as healthy as the weakest active work beneath it.

You don’t have to start at the top

Most PMs arrive with forty initiatives and no tree. That’s fine. Start by listing the work, pin three for the week, and Friyay offers the next rung only when you have enough to need it: a key result once you have work to group, an objective once you have two key results, a squad once you have two objectives. Every rung is optional and the tree works at any depth.

• Initiatives without a key result get a quiet nudge until you link them or park them with a reason.
• Key results without an objective sit under “Not yet under an Objective”, visible, never lost.
• The Strategy page reads the same tree top-down, so the quarterly story writes itself from what you logged.

One honest limit

Friyay does not track dependencies between initiatives. What it does is make every drop and every stall visible, with a reason, on the Friday review and on the Strategy page, so the workstream that depended on it finds out that week rather than at the end of the quarter.