What is a goal?
Overview
Goals in TheyDo are specific, outcome-focused targets that help your team define what success looks like. They sit at the top of your workspace and connect directly to the work being done across journeys — giving everyone a clear view of what you're working toward and why.
What a goal is
A goal represents a strategic target your organization is working toward. Examples include improving customer satisfaction, increasing retention, or reducing time-to-resolution.
In TheyDo, goals are linked to opportunities and solutions — not to other goals, metrics, or insights. This means goals don't have a parent-child hierarchy; instead, they connect outward to the building blocks that represent your path to achieving them.
Why it matters
Goals create a shared reference point for teams. When opportunities and solutions are linked to a goal, it becomes easier to:
- See how individual work contributes to a larger outcome
- Prioritize what to focus on based on strategic impact
- Keep stakeholders informed with a clear view of progress
- Bridge customer needs (journeys) with business objectives (goals)
Without goals, opportunities and solutions can feel disconnected from strategy. Goals make that connection explicit.
How goals work in TheyDo
Goals live in the Goals section of the left sidebar and can be viewed as a library across your workspace.
Each goal has:
- Properties — including status, owner, type, group, and color. Status is required and must be set before any updates can be saved.
- A progress bar — automatically calculated based on the workflow status of linked opportunities and solutions. When you set a manual status, the bar reflects that instead.
- A Tree tab — where you link opportunities and solutions and explore the opportunity-solution structure for that goal.
- A Journeys tab — a read-only view showing which journeys relate to the goal.
- A Details panel — for editing the goal's description and properties. This opens as a side panel by default, but can also be viewed as a modal or full page.
Progress updates automatically as the status of linked building blocks changes. When a goal reaches Completed status, a short celebration animation plays.
Note: Goals link to opportunities and solutions only. There is no goal-to-goal hierarchy, and goals do not link directly to metrics, insights, or personas.
When to use goals
Use goals when you want to:
- Define a strategic outcome your team is actively working toward
- Connect opportunities and solutions to a shared business target
- Track the cumulative progress of work across multiple journeys
- Give stakeholders visibility into how customer-facing work maps to business outcomes