Running NCTs in Friyay

NCT in one breath

NCTs, popularised by Ravi Mehta, are an answer to the two ways OKRs go wrong: key results that turn into vanity metrics, and objectives so vague nobody can act on them. A quarter gets one Narrative (a short, qualitative story of what you’re trying to make true and why), three to five Commitments (specific, time-bound things you will have done by the end of the quarter), and the Tasks that deliver each commitment.

That is exactly the shape Friyay keeps: a why, a how-you’ll-know, and the work. Only the names differ.

How it maps

Narrative

→ Objective. Put the one-sentence version in the objective title and the full narrative on the Strategy page, where it reads top-down for anyone who asks. Squads are optional, as always.

Commitment

→ Key result. Commitments are usually statements with a date: “Address autocomplete live for all mobile users by 30 Nov.” That is a qualitative key result in Friyay, tracked by confidence and by the Latest and Next on the work beneath it. If a commitment has a real number, tick “Track it with a number” and you get a bar as well.

Task

→ Initiative. Each task gets a Latest and a Next, an owner and an honest health, and can be pinned to My Week. This is the level you update daily. A commitment with no tasks moving it looks exactly like a key result nobody is working on, which is the point.

What it looks like

Narrative → Commitments → Tasks. Read it top-down for the story, bottom-up for status.

Three things to know in practice

1. Keep the date in the commitment.

   Friyay’s quarter switcher handles the outer deadline; put the commitment’s own date in its title so it stays visible on every row and in every Slack summary.

2. Three to five commitments, not fifteen.

   Friyay nudges for a second and third key result under an objective and goes quiet after that. The nudge works the same for commitments.

3. You can mix the vocabularies.

   A squad running OKRs and a squad running NCTs sit in the same workspace. The tree doesn’t care what you call the levels; it only asks that the work points at something.