OKRs cheat sheet: Top 10 best practices for planning
A shortcut to effective planning.
The Coda team
OKRs cheat sheet: Top 10 best practices for planning
By The Coda team
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Measuring business performance is key to the success of your strategic goals. Most organizations are familiar with KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). While KPIs have value, they are standalone metrics—they tell you when a measure is good or bad but don’t necessarily communicate context. This is why many of today’s high-performing teams use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results).
Objectives are what you want to accomplish, and the Key Results describe how you know you’re making progress.
The OKR Cheat Sheet.
1. OKRs are Objectives and Key Results. Objectives are simply what is to be achieved, intended to take significant, concrete, action-oriented, and (ideally) inspirational forms. Key Results (KRs) benchmark and monitor how we get to the Objectives––they are specific, measurable, and verifiable. 2. Set Objectives regularly. As your needs change over time, you will need to update the structure and output of your planning. Your team should set OKRs to support the success of the company’s Big Rocks. 3. Design each KR to be specific, time-sensitive, and measurable. An important part of writing effective OKRs is being able to measure success. Setting specific and measurable KRs ensures being able to track progress toward meeting objectives. 4. Set clear metrics. Clarity creates alignment within the team and shows why the team is working on something. Creating OKRs that reduce ambiguity or impracticality will help teams quantitatively answer, “Are we headed in the right direction?” 5. Create multiple views of the same data. There is no one-size-fits-all or one-view-fits-all for OKRs, which means you need a tool that behaves more like a database than a spreadsheet. Personalized views that render OKRs as tables, cards, timelines, pie charts, and other visualizations, keep everyone on the same page. 6. Spend only 10% of your time on planning. The success of planning is based on the execution that follows. If you budget 10% of your time for planning, then you’re left with 90% of your time for execution. This ratio does not imply that planning is not valuable but that execution is where the majority of value gets created. 7. Combine top-down and bottom-up processes into M-shaped planning. In isolation, bottom-up planning typically ends with teams being overcommitted. M-shaped planning reconciles bottom-up planning with top-down guidance, which helps teams prioritize their KRs while keeping commitments grounded and realistic. 8. Clarify responsibilities and choose a DRI for each KR. DRIs (directly responsible individuals) are charged with momentum toward specific KRs while taking accountability along the way. Choosing a DRI eliminates ambiguity while ensuring that progress toward KRs is maintained. 9. Track progress and continuously update the KRs as you go. OKRs should be updated early and often. Drivers should ideally update their OKR progress on a weekly, or at minimum bi-weekly, basis. Seeing weekly updates, even if the updates are small, allows teams to see around corners and get a sense of where they might run into trouble later on. 10. Celebrate your successes. At the end of the planning cycle, identify what worked well and what didn’t, then fine-tune your OKRs process accordingly. Rinse and repeat next quarter.Simplify your OKR implementation with Coda.
At Coda, we keep these 10 best practices top-of-mind during our planning process, and it helps keep our teams aligned and working toward a shared set of goals. Check out the Ultimate Coda Handbook for Planning and OKRs for more help with implementing OKRs at your company. It’s full of templates, tips, and recommendations learned from 100s of teams.Related posts
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