Status: Strategic Framework
Author: Ibán López Delgado
Most corporate goal-setting frameworks—including standard OKR implementations—suffer from metric inflation. Teams establish dozens of disconnected key results that measure internal activity rather than economic reality. The result is green dashboards on dying businesses.
The Results-Driven Indicators (RDI) framework replaces vanity tracking with a strict 3+1 metric hierarchy designed for direct inheritance from the executive mandate to tactical execution.
The 3+1 Metric Hierarchy
RDI enforces that no department, squad, or individual may track more than three operational indicators, and every indicator must roll up directly into the primary economic driver:
- Direct Revenue Indicator (DRI): The immediate monetary output of the operational unit.
- Margin Protection Indicator (MPI): The structural efficiency ratio ensuring that delivery costs do not scale linearly with output.
- Velocity / Flow Indicator (VFI): The speed at which an input converts into a finalized deliverable (Cycle Time vs. Lead Time).
- The Guardrail (+1): A non-negotiable quality or compliance threshold that halts execution if breached.
Strict Inheritance
Under RDI, cascading goals is not an exercise in creative interpretation:
- No Unlinked Metrics: If a squad cannot demonstrate the mathematical formula linking their weekly indicator to the executive DRI, the indicator is removed.
- Vanity Metric Elimination: Story points, task completion counts, and attendance metrics are barred from executive review.
- Continuous Reconciliation: Instead of quarterly retrospectives, indicator drift is reconciled continuously against the live backlog.
By constraining the metric surface area to high-leverage indicators, leadership maintains absolute strategic alignment without administrative drag.