OKR tools built for Fortune 500s
don't work for everyone else
Most organizations serious about goal-setting eventually look at OKR software — and most of them hit the same wall. The tools that actually work well (Lattice, Workboard, Betterworks) carry enterprise price tags and implementation complexity that simply isn't justified for mid-sized teams.
The result is that goal-tracking ends up scattered across spreadsheets, shared docs, and quarterly all-hands decks — visible to no one in real time, owned by everyone in theory, and followed through on by almost no one in practice.
The core gap: teams needed a way to set, track, and discuss objectives without a six-figure software contract or a dedicated ops team to run it.
Build exactly what's needed,
nothing more
Rather than replicating the feature bloat of enterprise tools, Align was designed around the core loop that actually drives OKR adoption: set an objective, define measurable key results, track progress, and check in regularly.
The platform was built entirely in vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no frameworks, no backend dependencies, no infrastructure overhead. This kept it fast, portable, and maintainable without needing a dedicated engineering team.
A role-based login system allows executives, managers, and individual contributors to see the views most relevant to them, while a built-in AI assistant surfaces contextual suggestions and surfacing blockers across active objectives.
Key features
Built lean, on purpose
One of the deliberate constraints of this project was keeping the stack as simple as possible — no build tools, no npm, no deployment pipeline. The entire platform runs as a single HTML file, which makes it trivially easy to share, host, and update.
What this project taught me
Building Align reinforced something I've found consistently true in HR systems work: the best tools match how people actually work, not how a vendor thinks they should work. Enterprise OKR platforms are full of features that look impressive in demos and go unused in practice.
The constraint of building without a framework pushed cleaner thinking about state, UI interactions, and data structure. Every decision had to be deliberate — there was no library to abstract it away.
Align is also an ongoing exercise in talking to the people who would use it. The role-based views, the confidence scoring, the 1:1 agenda format — all of these came from asking real managers what they actually needed at the end of a quarter, not what a product roadmap said they should want.