How Miro bridged the planning and execution gap.

With too much complexity in their planning process, Miro needed to step back and find a solution that fit their unique needs.

Ilia T

Goal-setting frameworks like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) should work as guide rails to bring clarity, alignment, and focus to a company.

Yet, too often, they do the opposite as companies lose sight of their intent when they overemphasize the mechanics—the structure becomes either too rigid or barely followed, resulting in nothing being properly tracked. This can leave leadership struggling to understand the reality of the business, while teams feel scattered, leading to mistrust in the larger strategy.

We encountered this at Miro with our own implementation of OKRs—a system of quarterly planning filled with three or more levels of OKRs (company, functional, and team) which leaders discussed in monthly meetings. Instead of a smooth transition to execution, all the focus on planning actually created even more time on planning and left us feeling misaligned in key areas. We needed to simplify.

While we liked OKRs as a concept, we stepped back and worked on an application that would work better for our process and needs. We decided on three courses of action:

Reduce and amplify OKRs: Focus on a few OKRs that the entire company can align with.

Improve our tracking rituals: Implement weekly async updates and functional leadership check-ins.

Link strategy and execution with the right tools: Build out the right tool set to help us transition from plan to action.

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1. Reduce and amplify OKRs to increase focus.

With the traditional method of cascading levels of OKRs adding too much complexity, the first step was to shift to a company-wide set of OKRs that are known by everyone at the company. From individual contributors to the CEO, we centered everyone on the same goals. And with those solidified, we’re able to create the initiatives and their projects that actually drive our Key Results (KRs).

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Ultimately what we changed is less important than why. Our previous process was slowing down our ability to innovate and move fast with high alignment, which is dangerous for any company, but especially a startup.

Hopefully you’re not quite at that stage, but if you’re shifting to a model that fits your company better, I’d strongly recommend working to avoid added complexity. It may feel like more is better, but we’ve seen it usually brings chaos instead of the desired alignment.

As for our scenario, while the top-level shift helped us back into execution faster, we still needed leaders closer to that process.

2. Improve tracking rituals to keep every person and work item connected.

After the reduction in OKRs, our leaders were able to focus better on implementing our strategy, but they were still separated from the daily work being done on the initiatives and projects that drove the KRs. Without a full picture of reality, it was difficult for leaders to grasp what was happening at the execution level.

To address this, we needed to revise what we call our “traction rituals,” which are weekly meetings where C-level staff and functional leadership discuss urgent initiative issues to keep momentum going. We updated them to include monthly OKR reviews and weekly asynchronous updates for all initiatives and projects.

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Before the change, we’d set our OKRs, go off and “do work,” then come back at the end of the quarter unsure of what brought us to this point and where we maybe should’ve course-corrected.

After implementing, we did a much better job of keeping our goals in sight since they were top of mind for leaders and teams, and the initiatives and projects were clearly connected to the KRs.

In practical terms, these meetings act as a way to make small adjustments to our input initiatives and projects as well as actively unblock whatever might be prohibiting us from moving forward. And for leaders it creates a firm link between our OKRs and what’s driving them.

The final piece was to make sure we’re able to execute on all the plans we’d setup. And what better way than tools like Miro.

3. Link strategy and execution with the right tools.

Being so focused on building a clear path from plan to action, we knew we needed the right combination of tools to make sure we succeeded in actually achieving our objectives we’d worked so hard to set.

The pure number of tools out there can be daunting, but similar to a framework that works for you, finding the right ones for the way you work is key. It’s obviously no surprise our favorite is Miro (because we are Miro!). But while we’re biased, it’s hard to argue with Miro’s ability to organize unstructured information. We run nearly all of our planning processes in Miro, from team brainstorms, to building out roadmaps, and creating presentations.

But there’s a point where we need a tool that’s better at structured data, like the kind we use in the traction ritual meetings. This is where we’ve found Coda to be a nearly perfect complement to Miro. They support each other in ways few tools can. For example:

Brainstorming OKRs with a close-to-freeform-format? Miro is best. We have huge boards with tons of objects and comments.

Keeping the source for OKRs and adding all needed details? Coda is great with having everything up to date and connected.

Presenting OKRs at an all-hands meeting? Visualizing only what's needed for OKRs and building slide format works great in Miro. For async sharing, there's also an amazing Talktrack feature for recording video and voice-overs.

Tracking weekly progress with automatic archives, update templates, and notifications? Coda is very powerful for all of these things.

We’ve found that when used together, Coda and Miro give us the best opportunity to achieve our goals. Pro tip: they work even better together when you

link them⁠

so your data syncs.

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Stay open to the why.

The biggest learning from our framework optimization process was less about the frameworks themselves and more about the mentality it reminded us to keep—which is to stay open about why we’re doing what we’re doing. And why we it may need to shift.

Ideally you’ll learn from our mistakes, but even if you’re already in a similar position, I hope sharing our experiences helps get you unmoored in some way.

If you’d like to learn more about my experience with turning planning into execution as well as my time spent with tools like Miro and Coda, I’m doing a

fireside chat⁠

with John Scrugham, the Principal Solutions Architect at Coda, and we’d love to have you. And thanks for reading!

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