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Outcome Hierarchy

Organize outcomes with parent/child relationships.

Not every goal exists in isolation. A company-wide objective like "Increase revenue by 30%" breaks down into team-level outcomes like "Launch enterprise pricing tier" and "Expand to European market." Joyous lets you model these relationships with parent and child outcomes, creating a natural hierarchy that maps to how your organization actually thinks about goals.

Parent and child outcomes

Any outcome can be a parent to one or more child outcomes. This creates a tree structure where high-level strategic goals sit at the top and more specific, actionable outcomes sit below.

For example:

  • Parent: "Ship Q3 product roadmap"
    • Child: "Launch mobile app v2"
    • Child: "Revamp onboarding experience"
    • Child: "Build analytics dashboard"

Each child outcome has its own goal, success signals, work cards, and health status — they're full outcomes in their own right, not just sub-tasks.

An outcome hierarchy showing a parent outcome with three child outcomes, each displaying their own progress bar and status badge

Creating child outcomes

  1. Open the parent outcome

    Navigate to the outcome that will serve as the parent.

  2. Add a child outcome

    In the outcome's overview, add a new outcome and set its parent to the current outcome. The child appears nested under the parent in outcome lists.

  3. Set the child's goal and properties

    Each child outcome gets its own goal, context, directives, success signals, team assignment, and work cards — just like any other outcome.

Use hierarchy for strategic alignment, not for grouping tasks. If you just need to organize work under a single goal, use work cards within one outcome. Reserve parent/child relationships for goals that genuinely decompose into sub-goals.

How progress rolls up

Child outcome progress contributes to the parent's overall picture. When you view a parent outcome, you can see the status and progress of each child, giving you a roll-up view of how the larger goal is tracking.

This makes parent outcomes natural dashboards for leadership — a single page that shows whether "Ship Q3 product roadmap" is on track by showing the health and card completion of each child outcome.

OKR-style hierarchies

Outcome hierarchy maps naturally to the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework:

  • Objective = Parent outcome with a broad goal
  • Key Results = Child outcomes with measurable success signals

For example:

  • Objective: "Become the market leader in developer tools"
    • KR1: "Reach 10,000 monthly active users" (child outcome with cards for growth initiatives)
    • KR2: "Achieve NPS score of 60+" (child outcome with cards for product improvements)
    • KR3: "Launch 3 enterprise partnerships" (child outcome with cards for partnership work)

Each key result has its own work cards, sprints, and health tracking, while the objective provides the strategic umbrella.

An OKR-style hierarchy with a parent objective and three key result child outcomes, each showing progress percentages

See OKR Tracking for a complete guide to using Joyous for objectives and key results.

Viewing outcome trees

Parent outcomes display their children in context, letting you see the full tree from any level. Navigate up to the parent from a child, or drill down into children from the parent view. The sidebar and outcome list pages also reflect the hierarchy.

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