Building a Real-Time Goal Dashboard with Goals.do and Your BI Tool

In the world of business strategy, there's nothing more frustrating than stale data. You gather for a quarterly review, pull up a meticulously prepared slide deck, and point to a chart on company objectives. "Our goal was 10,000 active users," you announce, only to have an engineer mention, "Actually, we crossed 11,000 this morning."

The room deflates. The slide is obsolete. The manual effort to track and report on goals has created a time lag that disconnects strategy from reality.

Static reports and spreadsheets are no longer enough. To drive alignment and make informed decisions, your teams need real-time visibility into your strategic objectives. This guide will show you how to move beyond static reports by using Goals.do to feed live OKR data directly into your favorite BI tools like Grafana, Power BI, or Looker for truly dynamic insights.

The Problem with Traditional Goal Tracking

Traditional OKR management often involves standalone software or complex spreadsheets that are disconnected from the systems where work actually happens. This leads to several critical issues:

• Manual Toil: Teams spend hours manually updating progress, copying numbers from one system to another. This is error-prone and a poor use of valuable time.
• Data Lag: By the time data is reported, it's often out of date, leading to decisions based on history rather than the current state.
• Context Switching: Employees must leave their primary work tools to update or check goals, disrupting their flow and reducing engagement with the objectives.
• Lack of Trust: When data is manually curated, its accuracy can be questioned, eroding trust in the entire goal-setting process.

A Paradigm Shift: OKR Management as Code

This is where Goals.do introduces a fundamental change. We believe in Business-as-Code, where your strategic objectives are treated like any other critical software artifact: versioned, automated, and integrated directly into your workflows.

Instead of a separate UI, Goals.do provides a developer-first platform with simple API calls and SDKs. You define your goals programmatically.

Consider how you would define a company objective with Goals.do:

import { Goals } from 'goals.do';

// Define and create a new company objective via the SDK
const newObjective = await Goals.create({
  title: 'Launch V2 of Flagship Product',
  owner: 'product-team@example.com',
  timeframe: 'Q4 2024',
  keyResults: [
    {
      description: 'Achieve 10,000 active users',
      target: 10000,
      current: 0
    },
    {
      description: 'Secure 5 major media placements',
      target: 5,
      current: 1
    },
    {
      description: 'Maintain an app store rating of 4.8+',
      target: 4.8,
      current: 4.9
    }
  ]
});

console.log(newObjective.id);

Defining goals this way makes them machine-readable, auditable, and—most importantly—easily available for other systems to consume. This is the key to unlocking real-time dashboards.

From API to Live Dashboard: A 4-Step Blueprint

Connecting your API-driven goals to a BI tool is surprisingly straightforward. Here’s a conceptual guide that applies to most modern analytics platforms.

Step 1: Connect to the Goals.do API

Your BI tool of choice (Power BI, Looker, Grafana, Tableau, etc.) will have a data connector for web sources, often labeled "Web," "JSON," or "API." Use this connector to point to the Goals.do API endpoint for retrieving your objectives.

It might look something like this:
https://api.goals.do/v1/objectives

You'll configure the connector to use your secure API token for authentication, typically by passing it in the request headers.

Step 2: Model Your Goal Data

Once connected, the BI tool will fetch your goal data as a structured JSON object, just like the one defined in the code. The tool will allow you to parse this data and model it into tables. You'll likely have separate tables for Objectives and KeyResults, linked by an objective_id.

This step transforms raw data into a relational model your dashboard can easily query.

Step 3: Automate Key Result Updates

This is where the magic happens. A dashboard is only as good as its data's freshness. Goals.do allows you to not only read goal data but also update it via the API.

You can set up a simple, automated script (e.g., a serverless function or cron job) that:

1. Queries your source of truth: Fetches the latest active user count from your data warehouse or production database.
2. Calls the Goals.do API: Sends an update request to modify the current value of the relevant key result.

A conceptual update call might look like this:

// This script runs automatically every hour
const latestUserCount = await queryDataWarehouse('SELECT COUNT(id) FROM users...');

await Goals.updateKeyResult({
  id: 'kr_123abc', // The ID for 'Achieve 10,000 active users'
  current: latestUserCount
});

Now, your goal progress is updated automatically, without any human intervention. Your goal tracking system is no longer a passive record; it's a live reflection of your business.

Step 4: Visualize and Share

With live, automated data flowing into your BI tool, you can build powerful visualizations that tell a compelling story:

• Progress Bars: Show current vs. target for each Key Result.
• Gauges and RAG Status: Display overall objective completion with Red/Amber/Green indicators.
• Trendlines: Plot Key Result progress over time to see the velocity of your efforts.
• Ownership Tables: Clearly list objectives, their owners, and their current status in a centralized view.

Embed this dashboard in your company intranet, share it in Slack, or display it on office TVs. Your company's most important goals are now front and center, backed by data everyone can trust.

Strategy Meets Execution

By treating your goal management as code, you eliminate the gap between strategy and execution. Goals.do transforms your strategic objectives from static documents into a dynamic, queryable data source that integrates seamlessly with the tools you already use.

Move beyond manual updates and stale reports. Start building a culture of transparency and accountability with real-time goal tracking.

Ready to turn your goals into executable workflows? Explore Goals.do and discover the power of API-driven goal management.