Goals that don’t cascade

Ash Taherian · Product Sales Executive, Revolut People · Week 3

The company has OKRs. They’re in a deck. Departments have “priorities.” Individuals have task lists. At review time, managers invent a story that connects the three. CPOs see the same pattern every cycle: ambitious company goals, busy teams, and performance grades that never quite map to what the business said mattered.

The hurdle is cascade failure — goals that never reach the scorecard.

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What breaks

• OKRs in slides — company goals live in a presentation, not in the system managers update weekly.
• No line of sight — individuals can’t see how their work rolls to department or company outcomes.
• Reviews on vibes — without cascaded goals, deliverables scoring becomes “how hard they worked,” not “what they shipped against the plan.”
• Misaligned effort — strong people optimise local priorities that don’t move the company needle.
• Unfilterable talent — you can’t sort strong / average / below bar if everyone was measured on different private goals.

What the method requires

Nik Storonsky puts it bluntly in How Revolut filters talent: quantify what people, teams, departments, and the company do — then cascade a small set of company goals down so the organisation can filter talent quarterly. The playbook summary treats deliverables as one of three lenses; those deliverables only make sense if goals actually cascade.

Source philosophy for the deeper framework: QuantumLight — Driving High Performance (Ash did not author those playbooks). Method without cascade is still theatre.

How Revolut People helps

The primary product surface for this hurdle is Goals.

• Cascade company → department → team → individual — the same thread managers and IC’s open, not a parallel OKR wiki.
• Visible ownership — each goal has an owner and progress, so “we’re on track” is measurable.
• Feed into Reviews — deliverables scoring lands on cascaded goals, so calibration debates outcomes, not memory.
• Quarterly rhythm — goals reset with the review cycle instead of dying after the annual kickoff deck.

Goals without Reviews is a dashboard. Reviews without Goals is vibe scoring. Together with Skills & culture (talent bar), you get the machine Nik describes: cascade, quantify, filter.

A 30-day start

1. Cut company goals to a small set (5–6) that can actually cascade.
2. Map every department and team goal to a parent — kill orphans.
3. Require every IC scorecard to reference cascaded goals for the deliverables lens.
4. In the next calibration, reject grades that can’t point to goal evidence.

Related: Week 1 — Reviews · Week 2 — Talent bar · All weeks · Andrei — HR Chief cover