Why Coda for planning?

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

By now, it’s probably evident that planning is never simple. It takes careful consideration from the beginning, and requires buy-in across the organization. The tools you use should further your efforts, instead of being another hurdle to jump.

Throughout the previous sections, I’ve covered how Coda makes it easier for you and your team to run your planning process. Below, I’ll elaborate on why you should choose Coda to perform strategic planning, based on my broader experience, and customer feedback:

1. Spreadsheets are limited, flat, and disconnected. Coda is connected and powerful.

While spreadsheets can store a table of key results, I’ve seen many teams struggle when scaling beyond the OKRs of their immediate team. Customers that attempt to plan in spreadsheets typically come to us when they feel these pains:

2. Specialized OKR tools are rigid and expensive. Your planning process should be unique.

Specialized tools promise a silver bullet for enterprises to get on the same page, but they often create more problems than they solve. In my time at Coda, I’ve seen countless organizations of all sizes replace narrow, single-use apps with Coda. Why? Because Coda offers teams flexibility, transparency, and value that specialized apps can’t.

“Every time someone wants to bring on a new software vendor, our procurement team asks: ‘Could this be done in Coda instead?’“ — CIO, Enterprise Customer

There are three pains I’ve found specialized OKR apps tend to create:

OKR apps are too rigid and can’t be customized to your needs.

Coda’s flexibility allows you to structure your OKRs exactly as you want. You can create custom views and connect data from other tools. This means you can design your planning to align with your goals, and with your organization’s workflows.

Single-use apps are expensive & don’t provide reciprocal value.

Specialized apps force you to choose between cost and collaboration. Achieving your OKRs requires all team members to have visibility into plans, progress, and updates. But to give this level of transparency, everyone needs access—which is usually an added cost. With Coda, viewers and editors are free, so you don’t have to think twice about sharing with your teams. And because Coda can be your team’s single source of truth from strategy through execution, you’re paying for a single tool instead of many.

Narrow, specialized tools lead to tool fatigue.

Adding another tool to your stack means creating data silos for your team to overcome. When OKRs are tracked in one app and the execution and decisions happen in another, your team becomes the connective tissue to keep everything updated. They might spend hours copy-pasting between apps, communicating updates via Slack/email, and tracking down the latest updates. In Coda, teams can make an update once and have it communicated to other tools, channels, and docs automatically.

3. Plan once, and in one place. You shouldn’t need ten tools to do the job of one.

A common pattern for these planning docs is to have:

4. Connect your plans to execution. Keep the team updated and accountable.

Out of sight, out of mind. As I highlighted in

Integrate to drive execution⁠

, when your OKR planning is divorced from your daily execution, it’s easy for teams to lose sight of their strategic objectives, miss their success metrics, or forget key initiatives all together. This masks actual progress from leaders, making it more difficult to know where you can best plug in.

Coda joins strategy and execution into one place so drivers can easily update their progress from where they’re getting their work done. This gives collaborators and leaders visibility into where they can offer support, and where they’re ahead of target.

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

How to get started Explore a comprehensive tutorial, templates, and case studies on OKR planning.⁠

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