Initiatives, Process Commitments and Experiments
The three kinds of work under a Key Result: Initiatives are scoped deliverables, Process Commitments are recurring behaviours, and Experiments are tests of a hypothesis.
Most teams lump all their work into one word, "activities", and manage it badly as a result. Under a Key Result there are actually three distinct kinds of work, and naming them changes how you plan, track and learn. The outcome, the Key Result, stays separate from all three: it is the what; these are the how.
Initiatives: scoped deliverables
An initiative is a bounded piece of work with a start, an end and a definition of done: build the referral flow, migrate the billing system, run the launch. The discipline is to remember that completing one is not the same as moving the Key Result; the initiative is a bet that the work will cause the outcome, and that bet can be wrong.
Process commitments: recurring behaviours
A process commitment is an if-then behaviour the team agrees to repeat: whenever this trigger occurs, we do that, no fresh decision required. "Every new enterprise lead gets a same-day response." These are the team-scale version of implementation intentions, and they change a system's default behaviour rather than its one-off outputs. They do not "complete"; they run until the team decides otherwise.
Experiments: tests of a hypothesis
An experiment is a deliberately cheap test of a belief, with a hypothesis, a success criterion and a pivot point written before it starts. Its output is not a deliverable but a decision: keep, kill or double down. Experiments are how a team learns fast without pretending it already knows the answer.
Why the distinction matters
Keeping the three apart, and all three separate from the Key Result, is what stops "we did the work" being mistaken for "the outcome moved". It also makes the weekly check-in a reasoning session rather than a status report. That is the practice behind sharing beliefs and plans.
One line to keep: Initiatives are scoped deliverables, Process Commitments are recurring behaviours, Experiments are tests of a hypothesis, and none of them is the outcome.
Key Result: increase activation from 34% to 55%. Initiative: rebuild the onboarding flow. Process commitment: every drop-off over 20% triggers a same-week review. Experiment: test a guided setup against the default, pivot if it does not beat control in two weeks.
How is this different from just a task list? +
A task list flattens three different kinds of work into one, so teams track deliverables and ignore behaviours and learning. Separating deliverables, recurring behaviours and hypothesis tests lets you manage each properly.
Where do these sit relative to the Key Result? +
Below it. The Key Result is the measurable outcome; initiatives, process commitments and experiments are the work you believe will move it. Keeping them separate stops activity being mistaken for results.
From the ZOKRI OKR Handbook, the methodology we install and maintain. Written by Matt Roberts.
A UK-based strategy and OKR consultant and two-time SaaS founder with a venture-backed exit, Matt turns strategy into execution for teams scaling from tens to thousands. He co-founded ZOKRI in 2018, having previously co-founded Linkdex, a venture-backed enterprise SaaS platform he led to a trade sale. He writes the methodology behind these notes.
Separating the outcome from the three kinds of work is where OKRs stop being to-do lists. We install the distinction and the check-in rhythm that keeps it honest.