You leave the quarterly with a clean set of rocks. Everyone’s bought in. Six weeks later, half of them have barely moved — and nobody can quite say why.
Strategy is rarely what stalls a growing company. The work gets stuck one layer down, in the gap between a rock and a finished result. That gap is where projects live, and it’s the step most teams skip.
We sat down with EOS Implementer and fractional integrator Suzy Joeckel, along with Strety’s Derek Weaver and Drew Zolper, for a working session on how to close that gap — by running your rocks as real projects, with the ownership, visibility, and cadence that move work through your organization.
Table of Contents
Watch the session
Suzy Joeckel — EOS Implementer & Fractional Integrator. A four-time founder and longtime COO who was building EOS from scratch inside companies before she ever read Traction.
Derek Weaver — Strety. Walks through a new-hire onboarding project built to be templatized and reused.
Drew Zolper — Strety. Fields the live questions on linking rocks to projects and keeping your team’s board clean.
Hosted by Samantha Ngo — Head of Marketing, Strety.
The short version
Suzy’s framing is one most operators recognize: vision becomes rocks, rocks become projects, projects become tasks, and tasks become completed work. Skip the project layer and the chain breaks. Rocks tell your team what matters. Projects define how the work actually moves.
She named the four places execution tends to break — oversized rocks that turn into 90-day mountains, shared ownership that becomes nobody’s ownership, status that lives in one person’s head, and the same issues resurfacing quarter after quarter. A real project answers all four. It has one clear outcome, one owner, real milestones, weekly visibility, and a link back to a rock.
The session is built around three live walkthroughs in Strety.
A CRM migration cleanup. Suzy showed a project she built on the fly when a company’s CRM migration went sideways — duplicate records, a stalled pipeline, and a backlog of 55 issues. Instead of carrying all of that in her head or scattering it across a spreadsheet and a separate tool, she pulled every issue into one project board, pinned a kickoff message so contractors and teammates could get up to speed instantly, stored the original scope-of-work as a doc, and built two scorecard metrics to burn the backlog down toward zero. By the third week she could answer “is this rock on track?” with actual numbers instead of a gut feel.
A repeatable onboarding project. Derek walked through a new-hire onboarding project organized by phase — before they start, first day, first week — so anyone can open it and instantly see what’s happening. He added custom to-do fields for owners and effort, checklists for light subtasks, and team-specific task lists, then saved the whole thing as a template. The next hire takes minutes to spin up, because everything carries over except the due dates and assignments.
A home for your Visionary’s ideas. Suzy’s favorite use is also the most counterintuitive. She sets up a project for every Visionary she works with and asks them to drop ideas there rather than onto the team. It gives the integrator room to say “not now” while keeping the idea alive — and when a Visionary sees their ideas captured and moving, they stop shopping them around the company and start helping finish the quarter.
The thread running through all three: the work comes out of everyone’s heads and into a system the whole team can see.
Cadence is the part that’s easy to skip
Even a well-built project stalls without rhythm. Suzy’s rule is simple — inspect what you expect. Projects stay visible weekly, owner-to-owner check-ins keep momentum, and when something goes red, you IDS it instead of looking past it. Her test for whether work is truly visible: if your best salesperson won the lottery and vanished to Bali tomorrow, would the team know exactly where things stood? If the answer lives in one person’s head, it isn’t real yet.
See it in your own account
The full session covers more than we can fit here — linking a rock to a project so the status flows straight into your weekly L10, using spaces to switch context between teams, and a few other setups like EOS rollouts and event planning. It’s worth the watch.
If you want to go deeper, Suzy will be at the Strety Integrator Summit this September in Park City — two days focused on execution and connecting with other integrators. And if you’re ready to run your next rock as a real project, you can try Strety free for 30 days.