How We Implemented a Company-wide OKR Monitoring System
One of the most interesting projects that I have worked on during my time with my current employer, a German fintech Startup, is to implement a company-wide OKR (Objectives & Key Results) monitoring system in the year 2019.
The main challenges we were faced with are:
- How should we break down the Objectives into meaningful Key Results and Health Metrics, to ensure that when we look at them every month we know very well if we are on the right track to our Objectives?
- How should we make sure everyone in the team truly understands and owns his/her goals, so that he/she knows how to contribute to the company and team goals?
- How should we present and communicate the Company OKRs so that they are not something that only gets mentioned in quarterly all-hands, but fully visible and accessible to everyone on regular routines (without information overloading of course 😉)?
As the then only data person on the team, I worked together with every team lead to design and implement a company-wide OKR system that helped us well tackle these challenges. Together we achieved the following:
- Throughout that year, everyone was looking at the same OKRs every day as those that were presented on our board meeting decks.
- All OKR sheets were used in the teams’ weekly planning throughout the whole year, which is already an amazing thing given that at a startup we are always curious and want to try out new stuff. 😅
- At the end of the year, we managed to achieve almost all the goals.
With this post I’d like to share some practices that we have adopted and found helpful in building a structured, comprehensive and well-communicated company-wide OKR system. Here I would not touch much on breaking down Objectives and defining candidate KPIs — my work on this area was heavily influenced by Pyramid Principle and Lean Analytics, on which hopefully I will expand with another post.
With the current post I want to focus on:
🙌 Adopt a bottom-up approach and define KPIs and targets together with team leads, so that everyone truly owns his/her goals.
👀 Ensure that the up-to-date figures of Company OKRs are visible to all team members at any time instead of sharing them only on quarterly all-hands.
🔔 Have someone (ideally in a central role with a good knowledge of data) to ring the bell every month and remind everyone about the monthly highlights/lowlights to help the team stay focused.
🚢 Embed the concept of Company OKRs into the new joiners’ onboarding journey to increase the sense of ownership.
Here you can find the two template Google sheets that are used in the following sections.
Enjoy!
Help all team members understand and own their goals.
Although back then I was the only data person in the whole team and the project leader, I did not define these Key Results and Health Metrics all by myself. Instead, we adopted a bottom-up approach, i.e., each single KPI was defined together with the stakeholders (usually the team leads).
Before I sat down with stakeholders we usually had at a hand a draft of candidate KPIs as well as target lines (usually derived from L12M data plus an X% uplift). During these OKR sessions, we would walk through the draft together and clarified any questions or doubts.
I really enjoyed these conversations. On one hand, from a technical perspective, I enjoyed these conversations as I learned a lot from the team leads who have the best knowledge about our business process and kept clearing up my blind spots.
On the other hand, we believe that no one would own a goal unless he/she fully understands how the goal is defined and how his/her work can contribute to it. Hence, these OKR discussions are in my view the most critical part of the success of building a company-wide OKR system.
Another notable feature of our company-wide OKR system is that each Key Result is assigned to one and only one team whereas no Objective is assigned to a dedicated person or team. Instead, the owners of all Objectives are “All” — this is clearly marked on both the company main sheet and team OKR sheets.
This makes perfect sense in terms of both logic and morale. On one hand, it did not take long before we realized that the higher-level the goals, the harder it is to accurately assign them to one individual or team. Take customer growth for instance: at the first look this goal belongs to marketing, but strong customer growth won’t be possible without a functional application, a well-designed onboarding journey, and satisfactory customer services. On the other hand, marking all Objectives as goals for “All” (rather than “None”) definitely helped make every team member feel that they are the ultimate contributors and owners of the company success every time when they open the team OKR sheets and see the Company OKR tab.
Ensure that the up-to-date figures have high visibility to all team members.
To ensure that our company-wide OKRs system is not something that just sits on the board meeting decks and only gets mentioned on the quarterly all-hands meetings, but what is visible and accessible to the team on a more regular basis, we created a set of inter-connected Google Sheets and used them for weekly planning.
Our main company goal sheet is a big, wide sheet that looks like the following. We used cell colour, font size and boldness to distinguish Objectives vs Key Results (and Health Metrics) as well as target values vs actual ones. Whenever possible, a link to an automatic dashboard should be linked to each KPI so that one can always go there to check the latest performance.
Each team has a team OKR sheet that consists of three tabs:
- Tab “Company OKR”: this is created using the Google Sheet function
IMPORTRANGE()and automatically fetches the latest data of the Objectives from the main company goal sheet.
- Tab “Team OKR”: this is also created using the Google Sheet function
IMPORTRANGE()and automatically fetches the latest data of the team-specific OKRs from the main company goal sheet. Right under the reporting, we define the TODOs for each week and monitor the progress.
- Tab “History”: once TODOs and decisions are closed from the tab “Team OKR”, we moved them to this tab so that we can free spaces on the tab “Team OKR” for new ideas and keep records for future review at the same time.
By doing so, we ensure that the top company Objectives have high visibility to every team member. This transparency brings a sense of inclusion and trust to the whole team.
On top of that, I also took the responsibility of updating our company goal sheet on a monthly basis. Of course, we can try to automate this process as well. We did not do so because even with automation someones needs to do a regular check over these numbers anyway. In addition to copying & pasting numbers from our BI tools to the company goal sheet, I would also do a quick sanity check (e.g., are some numbers off? how about the YoY growth? is it worth a future investigation?) and send a newsletter to the group of team leads, mentioning highlights, lowlights as well as next action items from my end. In my view, this is not some time-consuming manual labour, but a valuable chance to gain a dynamic, holistic view of our business performance — far beyond what a single BI analyst learns if he/she stays within his/her own scope.
Embed the concept of OKR into the new joiners’ onboarding journey to get buy-in from the very beginning.
The last practice that I believe is really helpful in building a strong sense of ownership is to ensure that every new joiner truly embraces our Company OKRs. In other words, our goal is that at the end of the day, if you ask any coworker in the team, he/she can share with you what the top Company Objectives of the year as well as how his/her contributes towards those objectives.
To achieve this, I decided to embed the concept of Company OKR into the new joiners’ onboarding journey.
Back then, when a new joiner started his/her journey with the team, he/she would have an onboarding marathon week where all team leads would give a brief introduction into their own departments and goals. As the only data person on the team, I also had my own slot. :)
During my part, in addition to presenting my work area, I also gave every new joiner a walkthrough into our company OKR system and an introduction to the Top Objectives of the year. In addition, I would also take a team OKR sheet as one example to show them how their team OKR sheets are connected to the main sheet and how they can always access the up-to-date figures of the company OKR.
The most challenging part of this journey is to tell a good story about our company's OKR system in front of a group of audiences who come from very diversified backgrounds and have various levels of data literacy. The only thing that they have in common is that they are all new to the business. Therefore, I try to design my storyline in a way that is engaging to most people: “…as an employee, I am concerned whether I will receive my paycheck every month so I am interested in learning how much money comes in every month and that is why we look at revenue…”. If you’re interested in learning more about how I do data storytelling, feel free to check out my first post!
One last note: you may notice that in the template company OKR sheet there is a KPI called “# Payback Months”. If you are interested, check out my post on how we developed a payback calculator that won us a €69m Series C!
That’s it!
Thanks for reading my post. Feel free to share your thoughts and questions!
