8 free OKRs templates to supercharge planning
You don’t need to design your planning tools from scratch.
Jordan Milner
Solutions Architect at Coda
8 free OKRs templates to supercharge planning
By Jordan Milner
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After studying the planning processes of over 100 teams, we’ve learned that it is tremendously important to have a powerful but flexible tool to run your planning process. Planning 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. Thankfully, with Coda, you don’t need to design your planning tools from scratch. Some of the smartest people we know, including folks from teams like Aavia and Skillshare, have already published their solutions in our Gallery for you to copy and make your own. Here are nine that we find particularly helpful for teams of all shapes and sizes.
1. 📅 Aavia’s 6-Week OKRs Tracker.
Aavia, a small startup with a grand vision, understands the challenge of having numerous potential products and directions. In such situations, teams can easily get overwhelmed trying to accomplish all their goals. That’s why Aavia emphasizes the importance of prioritization, focusing on the most significant work. For Aavia, OKRs serve as their ambitions, enabling them to identify and highlight the most crucial tasks. To streamline their goal-setting process, they have developed a six-week OKR tracker template that combines macro- and micro-planning into a single document. The six-week tracker template offers various features to support effective planning and execution. The template includes a calendar that outlines the six-week and six-month OKR schedules, ensuring teams stay on track, and a concise reference guide to promote consistency in communication across the organization. The template also provides quick meeting templates to minimize groupthink and encourage diverse perspectives. Finally, modules are available for teammates to update their progress toward the OKRs on a weekly basis. With the six-week tracker template, Aavia has created a framework that enables their teams to align their efforts, prioritize their goals, and track progress effectively.2. 📓 John Doerr’s OKRs Starter Kit.
John Doerr, acclaimed author of the renowned book Measure What Matters, brings valuable insights with the OKR Starter Kit. The primary objective of this kit is to help you and your team focus on a select few initiatives that can truly make a difference, while temporarily deferring less urgent tasks. By establishing a set of top-line OKRs, you provide your teams with a clear direction and a framework for evaluation. Designed to facilitate your journey with OKRs, the Measure What Matters OKR Starter Kit comprises five essential steps:- Brainstorming: Begin by generating ideas and identifying the key objectives that align with your team’s overarching goals.
- Setting Objectives: Once you have brainstormed a range of ideas, refine and define the specific Objectives that your team aims to achieve.
- Setting Key Results: Next, establish measurable Key Results that will indicate progress toward each Objective. These Key Results serve as milestones that guide your team’s efforts.
- Assigning teams and owners: Assign responsibility and ownership for each Objective and Key Result to the appropriate team members. This ensures accountability and fosters collaboration.
- Tracking progress: Continuously monitor and track the progress of your OKRs. This step allows you to assess performance, make adjustments if necessary, and ensure alignment with your goals.
3. 🎓 Skillshare’s OKRs for a Remote Workforce.
In response to the shift toward remote workspaces, Skillshare recognized the importance of maintaining engagement and alignment among their teams. To achieve this, they revamped their OKR planning process, allowing for updates to be made at different cadences. By implementing these defined rituals, Skillshare effectively drove their goals and established predictability in their decision-making processes. The Skillshare operating cadence template utilizes a comprehensive set of annual, semi-annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly, and bi-weekly rituals—each serving a specific purpose in driving goals and ensuring predictability in decision-making. For example, quarterly business reviews (QBRs) are conducted as part of the quarterly ritual, while monthly OKR updates are a key component of the monthly ritual. By categorizing their operating processes into these distinct cadences, Skillshare provides their remote teams with consistency in operations over both the short and long term. This consistency fosters a sense of stability and allows for effective planning and execution.4. 🌓 Coda’s Quarterly Plus OKRs.
It’s not uncommon for teams to confuse strategy planning with OKR planning, but it’s important to recognize the distinctions. Ideally, a clear strategy should be developed before diving into OKR planning. At Coda, we firmly believe that a well-defined strategy is the solution to a specific challenge. When strategy planning is done effectively, it sets the stage for OKRs to drive successful execution. To ensure a comprehensive approach, we encourage teams to engage in planning at two levels. First, teams establish a set of OKRs for the quarter that they can fully commit to achieving. These OKRs represent specific and attainable goals. Second, teams engage in what we call the “quarterly plus” approach. This involves generating loose ideas and projections for the following quarter, outlining potential directions and identifying significant decision points or risks that the company should be aware of. To facilitate this two-level approach, we leverage OKR dashboards such as the “All OKRs" page in the Quarterly Plus template. These dashboards serve as valuable tools for ongoing check-ins with teams throughout the quarter, ensuring progress is tracked and alignment is maintained. By combining strategic planning with OKR execution, teams can foster a culture of purposeful goal-setting and effective execution.5. 📦 Dropbox’s 3-Bucket Product Planning Guide.
In product planning, many teams make the mistake of searching for a single formula to rank all of their product ideas. However, Dropbox introduced a solution called the 3-Bucket Product Planning approach, which provides a simple framework for classifying the features you are considering.- Metrics Movers: These features are designed to have a direct impact on key business metrics.
- Customer Requests: These are features that have been specifically requested by customers.
- Delight: These features are intended to surprise and inspire customers.
6. 💲Coda’s 100-Dollar Voting Exercise.
There are situations where making a significant decision requires dedicated time and careful consideration, such as during quarterly planning. While most priority frameworks are one-dimensional and useful for quick decision-making, there are many instances where a deeper understanding of your team’s sentiments is necessary. The 100-Dollar Voting Exercise template provides a ranked list of priorities and also reveals how strongly your team favors certain ideas over others. To begin, select the participants you want to involve in the exercise. Then, set a timer for five minutes to allow everyone to contribute their ideas. Each participant will distribute a total of $100 across their preferred ideas, with the allocation being revealed to the group after the voting process is complete. Utilize this template to achieve alignment on which initiatives to prioritize for your OKRs.7. 🌐 Coda’s Org-Wide OKR Tracker.
Even with a well-designed planning process, unexpected surprises are bound to occur. It is essential for companies to not only respond effectively to these unforeseen challenges but also ensure alignment across their teams. Keeping track of initiatives across teams is crucial for assessing progress, and this transparency is particularly valuable for leadership to stay informed about ongoing projects. Coda’s Org-Wide OKR Tracker offers a solution to this challenge. The template allows you to integrate your OKRs seamlessly with other pages in your document, such as project briefs and team hubs. This integration ensures that your OKRs can adapt and evolve alongside your team. To begin using this template, simply click on the buttons provided to add teams, Objectives, and Key Results. This will enable you to effectively track and manage your OKRs within a single document.8. 📢 Coda’s OKRs with Epics Tracker.
If your team uses Jira for project management, you may already be familiar with the concept of agile epics. Agile epics offer the advantage of breaking down large projects into smaller tasks, enabling your team to deliver value to customers more quickly. However, maintaining speed and focus on these larger epics can be challenging. Coda’s OKRs with Epics Tracker combines the measurable aspects of OKR tracking with agile epics. In this template, you can add Objectives and Key Results in the status board section. Additionally, you can add the epics in the product roadmap section. By linking Key Results to the synced epics, you and your team can easily track the progress of company-wide goals and have a basic timeline view of all the epics in one centralized location. This integration allows you to effectively manage both OKRs and epics within a single framework.Explore more OKR solutions for your system.
Beyond these templates, there are more ideas and guides on how to use Coda for planning. Whether you are trying to level up your company’s planning cycle, or build one from end-to-end, we have a step-by-step guide to walk you through how to use Coda for OKR planning.Related posts
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