From Zero to Goals
Learn to set goals your team actually finishes: with yourself, with other managers, and with your team. 17 lessons, one realistic company, an exam, and a certificate worth putting on LinkedIn.
You run a real company’s quarter
Brightside, a 12-person agency, sets goals, and things go wrong. You make the calls and see the consequences. No definitions to memorise.
A certificate that is earned
Every decision in the case, your own mission past the veto test, your own goal through the checker, and a 15-question exam. No certificate for watching.
Free, and stays free
Every lesson is public, no email wall. A free account only saves your progress and results, so they survive a change of device.
No sign-up to learn · 17 lessons · 8–10 hours of real work over a week or two · certificate requires a free account
Seven skills, practiced, not defined
Every one of these is trained on decisions with consequences, not on vocabulary. And because the tasks run on your own company, you leave with more than skills:
Diagnose a broken goal in a minute
Five failure patterns (the task in disguise, the wish, the vanity metric, the ownerless goal, the missing baseline) and the habit of checking before writing.
Point the company before you plan it
Mission, vision, BHAG, strategy, goals: five floors, five different sentences, each tested its own way. Most planning arguments are two people on different floors.
Write goals an outsider could verify
From X to Y, by when, one owner, plus defining the words that rot (“qualified”, “active”) before they start flattering the quarter.
Cascade with arithmetic, not vibes
Area goals that CAUSE the company goal instead of echoing it, and the napkin math that proves your ladder holds.
Cut priorities without politics
Capacity-honest boards, the pet-project trap, and a parking lot with revisit dates that loses gracefully.
Run the weekly rhythm and smell theatre
Ten-minute check-ins, three questions, zero adjectives, and the nose for the update that performs progress instead of reporting it.
Rescue, score and compound
The week-six playbook (cut scope, swap, push or kill), closes that teach instead of celebrate, and reading two cycles side by side.
- Your mission, passed through the veto test
- Your ladder on one page: vision, BHAG, and a road that forbids something
- One real goal rebuilt from X to Y, labelled stretch or commit
- A 90-minute planning-session agenda with pre-work
- Your check-in template and a booked weekly slot
- Your week-six trigger rule for stuck goals
- A growth tripwire for when the team scales
Written by you, about your company, saved as you go, plus the certificate once the exam is passed. The course leaves artefacts, not notes.
Built for small teams, like everything we make
Founders & CEOs of 5–50-person companies
You set the direction; nobody taught you the machinery that turns it into a quarter people actually finish.
Team and area leads
You just inherited a board of goals and a quarter to survive. Modules 2 and 3 are your job description.
First-time managers
The course assumes zero prior knowledge: lesson one starts before the first definition.
Experienced managers
One path for everyone, no skipping, but modules 3 and 4 are built on the mistakes ten-year managers still make.
You run a 500-person org with a PMO: our case is a 12-person company and there is not an approval chain in sight. You want the theory and history of OKR: we teach decisions, not definitions. Or you want the certificate without the work: there is no fast track, deliberately: every certificate is earned the same way.
Starts from zero, ends past intermediate
No prerequisites: lesson one assumes you have never written a goal. The decisions then get harder on purpose: sandbagged targets, status theatre, the week-six call, reading cycles. Having a real team helps, because the tasks run on your own material, but pen, paper and a calendar are all the tooling you need.
Four modules, 17 lessons
In order: each module ends with an exercise that uses a real Celorly tool, not a quiz about definitions. Your progress is saved in this browser. Keep it on a free account, and it stops depending on this one.
From zero to a goal that survives contact
One direction instead of silos
Keeping goals alive to an honest score
Where goals start to compound
15 scenario questions · pass at 12 · retake after 24 h → certificate
The academy is run by Celorly
Celorly is a goal-setting tool for small teams of 5–49 people: OKR or SMART per goal, a cascade from mission down to the quarter, ten-minute weekly check-ins and honest scoring at the close. The course exists because most goal problems are method problems, and no tool can fix what nobody taught.
So the course is free and tool-agnostic: every lesson works with a spreadsheet and a calendar. If somewhere around module 3 you want the rhythm without the busywork, that is what the product is for, but no lesson requires it, and the certificate never will.
Start with lesson one: no account, no card
Twelve minutes, one whiteboard, five goals, four of them broken. See if you can tell which is which.
Questions people ask before lesson one
How long does From Zero to Goals take?+
Plan for 8–10 hours over one or two weeks: 17 case lessons of 12–14 minutes each, a closing screen of optional further reading in every lesson, and short exercises you do on your own company. Your position is saved, so you can stop mid-lesson and pick up exactly where you left off.
Do I need to know OKRs or SMART goals before I start?+
No: the course starts from zero. You meet both frameworks in module 1 and learn to pick per goal: commitments as SMART sentences, stretch goals in OKR shape. If you already run one of them, modules 3 and 4 (managing goals mid-quarter and compounding across quarters) are where the new ground is.
What is Brightside?+
A fictional 12-person B2B marketing agency you steer through a full year: writing its mission and vision, cascading and cutting its goals, running its check-ins, rescuing a stuck quarter and closing it honestly. Every lesson puts you inside one of its decisions and shows the consequences of each answer.
What exactly do I have to do to earn the certificate?+
Four things, all real work: write your own mission and pass it through the veto test, run one of your goals through the SMART checker, complete the case decisions across all four modules, and pass the final exam: 15 scenario questions, 12 to pass, retake after 24 hours. Reading alone doesn’t earn it.
Can I take the exam without doing the course?+
No. There is one path for everyone, so the certificate means the same thing for every holder: the case was worked, the artefacts exist, the exam was passed. A credential with a shortcut version stops being worth putting on a profile.
Do I need Celorly, the product, to do the course?+
No. The course is tool-agnostic: everything works on paper, in a spreadsheet, or in any tracker. Two free tools from this site appear in exercises (the SMART checker and the OKR score calculator); neither needs an account.
Can my whole team take the course?+
That is the fastest way to a shared language: send the course link, have everyone do module 1, and your next planning session starts from the same vocabulary: broken-goal patterns, commitments versus stretch, one owner per goal. The course is free for each person; there are no seats to buy.