How should I use Goals and Actions in Pando?

Pando has two goal types, and choosing the right one matters.

Company Goals are visible to everyone in your organization. Use these for OKRs, strategic priorities, revenue targets, and anything tied to a shared outcome. Anyone can create a company goal, and anyone can be assigned as a contributor.

Career Goals are private to you, your manager, and your management chain (plus admins). Use these for personal development, skill-building, or role-specific objectives that don't need to be visible company-wide.

Tags are available on company goals only. When creating a company goal, you'll optionally choose a tag to classify it:

Tags are organizational — they help structure and communicate how goals relate to each other, but they don't change how goals function in Pando.

Click "New Goal" from the Goals page. You'll fill in:

When creating a goal, you'll choose one of two progress tracking methods:

I'll update myself (manual % input) — You update the progress percentage manually as you go. Use this for goals where progress is self-directed and doesn't break down into discrete child goals.

Auto-calculate based on weighting of child goals — Progress is calculated automatically based on the completion of child goals. By default, each child goal is weighted equally. You can adjust the weighting manually if some child goals represent more work than others.

Goals can be nested. A child goal links to a parent goal and contributes to its progress. You can add a child goal to any existing goal using the "+" button on the goal row.

A goal can have up to two parent goals. This supports situations where work legitimately contributes to two different priorities. Set parent goals during creation using the "Select up to two goals to attach to" field.

Pando Perspective: How deep should you nest? Keep it shallow. One or two levels between company priorities and individual goals is usually enough. The deeper the hierarchy, the more maintenance it requires — and the harder it is for people to understand where their work fits. A clean top-level view with a handful of company goals, and individuals linking their one most important goal underneath, is often all you need to start.

Note: When you apply a filter (like filtering by status), the goal hierarchy flattens into a list. The parent/child structure reappears when you clear the filter.

Keep your goal status current so you and your manager are aligned. Available statuses:

My Goals is where you'll spend most of your time. It shows only your goals — a focused view ideal for 1:1s, self-check-ins, and status updates.

My Team shows goals for your direct reports. If you're a manager, this is your view into what your team is working on and how it's progressing.

Company shows all company-wide goals. This is most useful for understanding how individual work connects to organizational priorities — but it can get busy if the goal structure isn't well-maintained.

Child goals break a larger goal into smaller, trackable pieces. Add them using the "+" button on any goal row. They contribute to parent goal progress automatically when you choose auto-calculate.

Actions are the most granular level — the specific steps you're taking to move a goal forward. Only the goal's assigned contributor (not managers) can log actions. Actions can also be linked to specific competencies for use during assessments.

Use child goals when the work is big enough to track independently. Use actions when you want a checklist of steps underneath a goal.

Use the duplicate button (clipboard icon) on any goal row to copy a goal. This copies the title, settings, and configuration — it does not copy child goals. Use this as a starting point for a new goal that's similar to an existing one.

Company Goals are visible to everyone.

Career Goals are visible to you, your manager, and their management chain, plus admins.

Creating goals — Anyone can create a goal, including company-wide goals.

Editing goals — Only the goal owner can edit or delete their goal.

Contributing to someone else's goal — You can be added as a contributor to a goal someone else created. Contributors must approve the assignment before it becomes active.

Creating goals for others — You can create goals for direct reports. You cannot create career goals for peers or anyone outside your reporting structure.

If goals are new to your team — or if you've had rocky experiences with goal-setting in the past — start simple. Consider asking everyone to identify one goal for the quarter rather than three or five. This removes the pressure to fill a form, makes the exercise more honest, and gives you a baseline to learn from before expanding.

It's easier to add goals in Q2 than to repair the frustration of over-complicated tracking in Q1.

A goal has real value when it gives someone permission to deprioritize other things. If a goal is basically someone's job description, it probably isn't the right thing to track here.

A useful question before setting a goal: if this project disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice? Would anything actually change? If the answer is no, the goal probably isn't worth tracking.

Your company goals page should reflect your 3–5 most important organizational priorities — the things you'd put on a slide for the whole company. Everything else should live underneath those, or stay in career/team goals.

If the company tab gets crowded, people stop using it as a navigation tool and start ignoring it entirely. A clean, readable company tab is worth protecting.

A goal that says "publish a whitepaper" is an activity. A goal that says "establish thought leadership in our space by publishing a whitepaper that drives 50 inbound leads" is an outcome. The difference matters — especially when you're reviewing whether the work actually moved anything forward.

When writing goals, push to include what success looks like, not just what will be done.

For questions, contact support@pando.com or use the in-app chat.