Coda Tutorial for Planning & OKRs

Explore

2. Support your planning process

2.1 Top-down guidance

Make it easy to provide clear guidance in context.

Top down guidance is typically a writeup shared by leadership to guide the bottom-up planning towards the company priorities. This typically involves setting the objectives and explaining them. As explained in

Part I⁠

it is important to make the top down guidance easy to find and store it in the planning document.

In this section of the tutorial, we will create a welcome page that you can use to describe the OKR planning process, and a page that stores the top-down guidance to all teams. Given the objectives are often used as top-down guidance, we will also add a canvas column to the objectives, that you can use to fill with more direction around the objectives. To make the guidance for each objective consistent, we are showing you how to create a template that gets used for all the columns.

⭐ What you’ll get

A welcome page that outlines your OKR document.

A canvas for each Objective with detailed notes and background.

💼 What you’ll use

Pages

Canvas columns

Reactions

⁠

1. Create a welcome page.

Create a welcome page as the first page of your OKR doc for a concise overview and easy navigation.

Add a page and name it Welcome and move it to the top of the doc (uncollapse for detailed instructions).

Click + New page at the bottom of the Page list on the left-hand side

Name your page

Replace “Untitled” with the page name of your choice. “Welcome” should work.

Move the page to the top of the doc

The first page of the doc is where users land when they open it, so be sure that your new welcome page is first!

Create some instructional content

Every company does things a little differently, the welcome page is a great place to describe the planning process and planning timelines

⁠

⁠

Tip: You can add type @ to quickly link to pages and rows within your doc. Here’s an example →

2. Support your planning process⁠

2. Add a page for top-down guidance.

After the welcome page, add a new page and name it 1. Top-down guidance. On that page add some general top down guidance as text, images, or even video.

On this page, add a view of the Objectives table and name it Top-down guidance.

Type “/Objectives” and selecting Objectives.

Double click into View of Objectives and type “Top-down guidance”.

⁠

⁠

Change the table layout to a detail view.

Click on Options in the header of the table. In the sidebar on the right, select Detail.

⁠

⁠

Tip: you can customize your detail view by clicking Detail display in that same sidebar. We recommend making your Guidance column the focal point of this view, for example by hiding the Key Results and Average KR Progress columns.

3. Set-up your Guidance column in your Objectives table.

Remember the column you named Guidance on your Objectives table in 1.1? We will use it for writeups about the objectives - those writeups can be used to provide top-down guidance for each objective.

In this step, you are going to build a template for that per-objective guidance, so your writeups are consistent in format and easier to create.

Create a simple template page to use as a template for you Objective writeups.

Add a page and name it Objective guidance template.

Click + New Page at the bottom of the page list on the left-hand side.

Title the page Objective guidance template.

Turn it into a template for how your leaders should give guidance

In my opinion, a good guidance template structures answers to these questions:

What do we mean by this objective?

Why is it important to us as a team/company?

Who should be involved in driving this?

Where do we want to be by when?

Add a callout.

Type “/callout” and fill out the callout informing users that they can use in-line commenting to ask any questions and provide feedback on writeups.

Add a reaction: The Done reading

⁠

reaction is a staple of any writeup in Coda.

On your Objective guidance template page type “/Done reading button” to get the

⁠

Delete the grey callout instruction for readers to click the button when they’re done reading.

As your team reads, they can click this reaction; that way you can have a pulse on who and how many people have read your guidance.

⁠

⁠

Add any additional universal formatting and structure that your company will want to be included in all writeups above the reaction.

Tip: You can find a great writeup template to get started with just type “/product requirements” it has some great structure you can use to inspire

4. Use your template as the default value in the the Guidance column.

Now that we’ve created a template for objective writeups, we need to setup the canvas column to automatically populate this template for each new objective.

Navigate to your Objectives table in the Database page.

Modify the Guidance column.

Right click the column title and click Column options.

Modify Value for new rows to be your new page, Objective details template, you created above in step 3. You might have to click on Show more to see more options.

If you already have a few rows in your Objectives table, go ahead and click Apply to 3 blank rows.

⁠

⁠

Tip: Remind your writeup authors they can us AI to help write their writeups. Type “/write” and get feedback from AI.

Now what?

Congratulate yourself on setting up a foundation for objective writeups in Coda! The doc now has a welcome page that describes how to navigate the doc, and you’ve already saved time and reduced document sprawl by keeping your objective writeups in a centralized table.

In case you are getting worried about all these new pages cluttering up your doc, don’t fret! We will show you later in

3. Run the process⁠

how to hide pages like the Objective guidance template before sharing the document with your organization.

But before we do that, we’ll first go over how to set up

2.2 Bottom-up planning⁠

Gallery

Want to print your doc?
This is not the way.

Try clicking the ⋯ next to your doc name or using a keyboard shortcut (

CtrlP

) instead.