The Ultimate Coda Handbook for Planning & OKRs

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The Ultimate Coda Handbook for Planning & OKRs

Integrate to drive execution

How to integrate planning into execution and hold the team accountable.

The most important aspect of planning happens right after planning is finished: Switching into execution mode and getting sh*t done. Unfortunately, getting sh*t done is harder than it sounds.

The most important aspect of planning is executing the plan.

I find that leaders mostly struggle with a few key themes during this period:

Leaders lack insights into how execution is tracking against their plan. As a result, it’s nearly impossible for them to immediately identify when things are stuck or off track. Some leaders overcompensate here, requiring time-intensive manual progress updates or ineffective check-in meetings.

Plans don’t survive contact with reality, causing teams to abandon their OKRs instead of adjusting them.

Teams get sucked into one part of their plan and forget the other pieces.

Leaders don’t maximize their impact because they don’t spend time where they’re needed.

There’s a lack of accountability for teams and the goals they set.

In this section, I’ll address those issues and go through four important aspects when transitioning into the execution phase.

1. Clarify responsibilities so everyone knows their role.

Achieving the key results is rarely a solo job. It takes a village to move the needle, so before you get to the execution period, you should clearly capture which team(s) are responsible for jointly accomplishing each key result. However, this is a double edged sword because as soon as you add a group of people as “responsible” for a key result, it becomes unclear who specifically is in charge of maintaining the KR. Who is driving? Who escalates if things are stuck?

In our planning process at Coda, we require each key result to have a single DRI (directly responsible individual) or driver who feels accountable to move the goal forward until it’s achieved.

It’s important to note that the driver is responsible for maintaining and updating the plan, but they are definitely not the only person responsible for executing. You can, and will, have many people involved in the execution, but having one specific individual in charge of driving it forward creates clear accountability and eliminates ambiguity in the mind of your team and leadership. I’d highly recommend prioritizing this level of detail during the planning period as it will simplify your efforts when you switch gears to executing.

Teams + Driver + Sponsor = A village

Beyond the teams and driver, it can be helpful to identify a sponsor for each KR. Sponsors are senior leaders who support the driver and broader team with advice, resources, and feedback. Sponsors often act as a sounding board and the first point of escalation if execution gets blocked.

How to do this in Coda.

Coda also lets you create personalized, custom views of your OKRs. For instance, I created a page in our OKR doc that shows each Codan the OKRs they are driving or sponsoring, which makes it easy to cut through the noise. You can also do this by team, OKR status, and more. It’s completely customizable!

I’ll go through what these examples look like in practice in my

companion tutorial doc⁠

. Feel free to jump over there if you’d like to see some examples before moving on.

2. Bring plans and execution together to stay on track.

OKRs represent action-oriented, metric-driven plans that align day-to-day execution with the strategic objectives of an organization.

Unfortunately, many companies don’t reap the full benefits of OKRs because they separate planning and execution into two unrelated phases. Most organizations keep their OKRs in a spreadsheet or a dedicated OKR app while their team’s daily execution lives in an array of other tools. When you silo these phases across different tools, you’re creating a disconnect for your team that diminishes the advantages of OKRs.

When you do this, the best case scenario is you create unnecessary process overhead for your team. As progress is made, your team will need to manually copy-paste updates back into your OKR spreadsheet. Your OKRs won’t be updated immediately, so you’ll likely need to develop a clear cadence with all your project leads on when to update their OKRs so you can get a fresh view. But even then, there will likely be delays due to human nature.

Worst case scenario, your team doesn’t support this process overhead well. Entire OKRs are lost in the transition from planning to execution or teams lose track of the overarching objectives they set out to accomplish during planning.

If you really want to reap the benefits of the planning process, you should have your OKRs neatly embedded into your team’s day-to-day, so that they can continuously reference, make updates, and track progress throughout the quarter. To put it simply, OKRs should live where you are executing. Some view of your OKRs should live in almost all of your docs, whether that’s a leadership meeting, 1:1 doc with direct reports/skip levels, strategy writeups, and more. When your OKRs live in the same tool as your daily execution, you can easily create views of your team’s plans for more effective conversations on what’s next, progress, and blockers for each initiative.

How to do this in Coda.

Creating an experience that eliminates process overhead for your team comes through using the right tools. We built Coda as a platform that can house your organization’s work from planning through execution, meaning you can integrate your OKRs neatly into your day-to-day without copy-paste or added manual effort.

In the

companion tutorial doc⁠

, I’ll actually walk through how to use Cross-doc with two-way sync to integrate your OKRs into your execution environment.

3. Track progress and confidence so you know what to expect.

Every company tracks progress of OKRs as a percentage of progress made. For example, if an OKR is to increase users from 1M to 2M over the course of the quarter and you currently sit at 1.8M users, then you have achieved 80% of your goal.

Before we dig into tracking OKR progress, it’s important to understand the two schools of thought on setting OKR targets:

There’s not a right or wrong way of setting goals, but I’ve found realistic goal setting is an easier approach. Either way, make sure you communicate–and reiterate in each planning cycle–what’s expected when setting key results.

Why tracking progress is not enough.

Tracking progress with percentages is helpful, but it doesn’t give the entire picture. For example, an OKR might get stuck at 95% with no chance of completion, but it looks like things are running smoothly for those glancing at progress scores. On the other end, an OKR might sit at 10% halfway through the quarter and look like a failure, when in reality it’s contingent upon other OKRs being completed or it’s an achievable goal that the team knows they can hit in the third month.

For this reason, it’s best to have teams capture their confidence in achieving the key result separately. At Coda, we prefer to do this by a simple color code, which lets leaders quickly get a sense for how things are going.

My advice is to always track both progress and status. It is minimal extra effort and makes it a lot easier to pick out the OKRs that leadership should spend their time and effort on.

Continuously update KRs.

OKRs should be updated early and often, but many companies–even Google–only update their OKRs once in the middle of the quarter. This makes it difficult for leaders to track progress against plans, identify roadblocks, and invest the appropriate resources to help their teams progress.

The solution to making OKRs easy to update, and thus allowing leadership to stay close to OKR progression, is to integrate these multiple views so that updates can be made once at the task tracking level and passed through to the OKR view.

How to do this in Coda.

With Coda you can define any OKR status definitions you want. For example, you can color code every OKR depending on its status with conditional formatting. With this, we’re also able to add a view in our leadership dashboard that shows how many OKRs are green, yellow, orange, and so on. Instead of scanning through the list of OKRs for each color, we’ve bubbled up an instant overview for leaders to get a sense of how things are going across the business. In the

tutorial doc,⁠

we will explain in detail how to set up the progress and status columns, formatting, as well as how to build OKR dashboards for quick reference by leadership

4. Steer leadership attention to where it is most needed.

Pointing leaders to where they can be most helpful is key to a successful execution period. This requires summarizing OKR information in easy to process dashboards that gets reviewed regularly in leadership meetings.

Although every team can integrate OKRs into their execution differently, great teams make sure they are reviewed and up-to-date early and often.

Spotify is famous for starting their leadership meetings with an OKR dashboard that displays how OKRs are progressing using colors and shapes.

Miro takes an interesting approach to this as well in a meeting named TRACTION. Here’s how it works: They plan OKRs six months at a time with OKRs being updated every other week by the driver. Miro’s leadership team then hosts a monthly TRACTION call–a formal, action-oriented OKR check-in–where leadership goes through each initiative prioritized by status and priority to derive actions needed.

At Coda, we do something similar, starting with a quick review of our OKR dashboard by embedding it into our leadership team hub. We typically look at two types of dashboards—one shows the key results of the entire organization sorted by most progress made, and the other displays which OKRs have turned red/orange since our last meeting.

Looking to implement similar dashboards into your day-to-day? I’m putting the finishing touches on

Coda Tutorial for Planning & OKRs⁠

—a step-by-step tutorial on how to create these dashboards and more in Coda. I’ll be publishing it soon, but if you want early access

fill out this form⁠

⁠

Optimize the process How planning output is only as good as the process by which you create it.⁠

Why Coda for planning? How Coda can make planning simpler and more effective than spreadsheets and apps.⁠

⁠

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