Why is it that most goals are set and then forgotten? We fail bring it into out work rhythm. In this article I want to share with you the the number one ceremony for OKR success...
I call it the Weekly OKR Check-in. When I first suggest this most people think that it's too much to discuss weekly. But...
If you follow the OKR Check-in Agenda in this article and answer the 4 simple questions, your team will be wondering how they ever lived without it. Firstly, let's get into why this works so well...
We’ve all been there. Setting our annual goals only to quickly forget them in weeks or even months! The magic of OKR is keeping a close finger on the pulse.
Imagine you're swimming in the ocean and want to get back to your spot on the beach. Like at work, we get caught up in moving fast in what we think is the right direction, without looking up to check we're on track. I found this out the hard way on a recent holiday to Fiji! The weekly check in gives us a moment to understand progress and refocus priorities for the week ahead.
This is how the weekly check-in drives radical discussion on progress. We must get crystal clear on real progress made and align on how likely we are to achieve each Key Result. We measure the likelihood of success with the OKR confidence score. The simple act of discussing where we’re not making progress and what we need to do unlocks accountability and commitment.
How to do a confidence score?
You can do the confidence score as individuals using a survey tool to aggregate your responses or do it while you’re in the team meeting. You’ll want to score each Key Result using a scale which suits your team. Some do this using a High confidence, Medium Confidence or Low confidence score. Others use a scale of 0-10.
Whatever the case may be, the key part is discussing as a team:
- Misalignment: Where are we misaligned on our confidence score and what’s making us hold different confidence levels. Rule of thumb is stick with the lowest confidence score unless the team agrees a higher score should be held.
- Course-correcting: Agreeing as a team what we need to do to course correct the current progress of the OKR in a bid to increase confidence.
The easiest way to do this is answer the following questions for each Key Result:
- What is the confidence score?
- What progress was made on this Key Result over the last week?
- What is the focus to progress this Key Result for the week ahead?
- What is the primary thing slowing down or blocking this Key Result?
As you can imagine, if you have more than one or two OKRs it's too hard to have a deep discussion about progress. This is why we advocate you to have no more than one OKR per team.
The Weekly Impact Meeting
AKA the OKR Weekly Check-in.
It’s critical for the executive team and operational teams to remain constantly focused on operations and execution. This needs to include reviewing health metrics, checking on how we’re progressing towards our goals, and solving problems as a team.
Purpose: The OKR check-in is a 15-30 minute meeting to review OKR progress, uncover blockers and identify priorities for the week ahead. When done well by the executive team, it means strategic priorities are executed seamlessly across the business.
Time: 30-90min
Who: Team members (and occasional invitees where needed, particularly for the executive team)
Agenda for the Weekly Impact Meeting and OKR Check-in
The following agenda is followed and well facilitated. The intent is to move with pace and park topics for discussion at the end of the session.
- Kick-off – Share recent highlights and wins (5 min)
- Health Metric Review – issues parked for discussion (10 min)
- OKR Check-in – Review OKR Confidence Score & discuss priorities for the week ahead. We cover the questions below for each of the Key Results with anything requiring discussion being deferred to Prioritise, Discuss, Act – (15 min)
- What is the confidence score?
- What progress was made on this Key Result over the last week?
- What is the focus to progress this Key Result for the week ahead?
- What is the primary thing slowing down or blocking this Key Result?
- Knockout round – Any other key outcomes not covered by OKR or actions from previous weeks (5 min)
- Prioritise, Discuss, Act – Prioritise meaty topics raised in the meeting so far, discuss the topics in as much depth as needed and take action to make progress on the topic (30 min)
- Wrap – Capture actions, decisions, and communications (5 min)
Next steps: Strategic challenges parked for quarterly planning or strategic meeting. Most importantly, note down anything which may feed into your next OKR cycle
OKR Weekly Check-in Template
For those of us who do not want to use a tool or spreadsheet, we have the template below to capture your team’s Key Result confidence scores. You can copy the Google Slides Template or for something a little more advanced, check out our Google Sheets OKR Scoring Template.
Product and delivery teams
OK, so I hear you. You’re not the executive team. How does this apply to you?
The slicing theory comes in here, but even stronger! Top product managers know how to break down product increments. These increments are small chunks that deliver products focused on:
- Capability: Solving a specific problem the customer has (E.g. Customer is time poor and needs to check out quickly).
- Focus: Solves the problem well for one customer persona or type (E.g. Customers who check out one item in a purchase with a Visa card).
When working on these smaller customer focus points and capabilities, you can break your OKR into smaller chunks. This gives you ultimate focus and enables you to see progress. So for example, if you have a Key Result to speed up the customer checkout, then set short-term goal focused on making a small amount of progress on this. Such as to improve the speed for registered customers who have saved their Visa for a single item checkout.
This focus enables you to test and learn with targeted experiments to validate your ideas quickly and see progress on your OKR. If we see the numbers moving in the right direction, then we can use that to guide our confidence score. The best way to do this is use your team’s existing cadence.
If you practice Scrum, then you’ll find you already plan their activities once a week or fortnight in Sprint Planning. This is the perfect session to check-in on your OKR. In this case, you don’t have to do it weekly. Just make sure your sprints are less than two weeks.
For a full illustration of how to bring together Scrum and OKR (with examples), check out this video:
This is part of a multi-part series exploring the High Impact Rhythm for business. It creates a focused heartbeat for your business operations covering a:
- Quarterly OKR Setting – Review, learn, set. Review how you performed the quarter prior on your goals. Learn by running a retrospective focused on how you work, capturing what went well and what you’d like to do differently next time. Finally, set a clear focus for the quarter ahead with your OKR.
- Monthly Strategic Discussion – Time to deeply explore strategic topics without the time pressure and distraction of operational matters.
- Weekly Impact Meeting – Keep the focus on the health of the business and strategic execution of key priorities.
- Daily check-in – Clarity on immediate focus and collaboration on challenges ensures constant organisational alignment & adaption.