Simple Tability and OKR setup

For teams who are new to OKRs and want a foolproof setup for their first quarter

It’s no secret that we believe in the transformative power of OKRs, and you’ll find plenty of others that agree with us on their usefulness. And the more you research OKRs, the more you’ll see that having a purpose built tool can help your team be successful with OKRs. This is why many teams come to us before they’ve ever written an OKR– they want to make sure to do OKRs The Right Way.

And while having the right tool is important, what you do with that tool is just as critical. Who you have working on your OKRs, what your OKRs focus on, and how you run your process are just as critical to a successful rollout. We’ve put together this guide to help you develop your goals and processes so you can be successful, all in three simple steps:

• Start with a single OKR built around top business metrics

• Have just your leadership team work on your OKRs

• Discuss your progress in front of the entire organization

What are we working on?

Your OKRs are how you help your team focus on what’s most important for your business. If you’ve never written OKRs before, this can feel like an overwhelming amount of choice– what’s important? What should we focus on? If I don’t include something as an OKR, does it mean we aren’t working on it?

Your OKRs are how you call out what's most important, not everything that’s important. So our first set of OKRs should be geared towards what’s most important for the company. And when we think about the top targets that we have at the company-level, they tend to address some fairly standard questions:

• Are we making money?

• Do we have enough customers or clients?

• Do our customers or clients use our product or service?

• Do our customers or clients like to use our product or service?

This is where we focus for developing our first OKR. We’ll need an Objective, which tells us what we’re trying to achieve, and key results that let us measure if we’re achieved our Objective. Try this for your first OKR:

Objective: Strengthen our business health while maintaining steady growth

Key Results:

1. Increase Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) from $A to $B

2. Grow total active paying customers from X to Y

3. Increase our Monthly Active Users (MAU) by Z%

4. Improve customer satisfaction (CSAT or NPS) by Q%

This is a good jumping off point because we’re focused on one of the most basic needs for all businesses (growth), while focusing on metrics that involve multiple areas of the business– Sales, product, support, marketing, etc.

Now, this is an OKR crafted around B2B SaaS businesses, but you can adapt the key results to your needs. Consider some alternatives like:

• Total new revenue compared to last quarter or last year

• Increasing repeat orders

• Decreasing operational costs as a percentage of revenue

But start with one single OKR for your organization.

Now let’s create a plan

Adding your OKR in Tability

All OKRs in Tability exist within a plan. For our OKR, we’ll create a new plan:

Name your plan Company Q* OKRs (with the correct quarter) so you can reference the plan in the future. Set the check-in reminders to every week– meaning that each week, everyone assigned to a key result will be asked to update their progress. Then choose when the plan is for. This quarter will be the current calendar quarter (so if you’re creating it in August, “this quarter” is July 1 through September 30, next quarter would start on October 1). If you don’t line up with calendar quarters, you can use the custom option to set your correct timeline. At this point, keep the permissions to everyone being able to edit the plan– you can change this later if needed.

To add in your OKR, you can either write it from scratch and type it in manually, or you can use the magic import and copy and paste the text of the above OKR.

Once you’ve added in the OKR, adjust the targets to your actual numbers like so:

From here, click on the purple AI metric button to the right of the metric to set your targets. This makes sure that you’re tracking the absolute number instead of the percentage progress (For the first key result, we’d want to track the actual dollar amount, not convert it into a percentage– so $45,000 would be better than 66%).

We can either publish this plan or keep it as a draft, but the next step is going to be to add the rest of our team to Tability.

Who is working on this?

A strong OKR process can help improve your alignment in your organization. However, moving too fast and trying to force the entirety of your organization into a process they aren’t ready for can end up causing more confusion.

Let’s look at our OKR and think about the people who will be responsible for the success of it:

Objective: Strengthen our business health while maintaining steady growth - CEO

Key Results:

1. Increase Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) from $A to $B - Head of Sales

2. Grow total active paying customers from X to Y - Head of Sales/Head of Marketing

3. Increase our Monthly Active Users (MAU) by Z% - Head of Product/Head of Customer Success

4. Improve customer satisfaction (CSAT or NPS) by Q% - Head of Support/Head of Product

These are the people that you’ll include in your OKR process and will provide you weekly updates on your progress. Add them into Tability so you can assign them to their key results.

Adding your team in Tability

We’ll navigate to the People tab in Tability and click Invite your team:

From here, you’ll invite your team by adding their email addresses. By default, all of your users will come in with the User type. If they need to access your workspace settings, you can change them to Admins from your settings under users.

Once you’ve added your team in, go back to your plan and start assigning the right users to the right key results. Click on the avatar on the key result and select the correct user:

Now, click Publish on your plan and your team can start providing updates.

How do you talk about our OKRs?

Your leadership team will do their check-ins on their key results every week to tell you what’s going well, what needs to change, and what they need. As your team gets started, you can have them use this template to make sure they’re including all of the useful detail:

Last week we [what projects or work did you do towards your goals?]. This moved our metrics from ____ to _____, which is [what we hoped for/just OK/not what we wanted]. Next week, we’re going to [projects or work that you plan on doing], which should [keep or accelerate our momentum/get us back on track]. I need ___________ in order to succeed this week.

As a team, meet weekly or bi-weekly to talk about your OKR progress. Before you meet, however, ensure that everyone has not only written their updates, but also read the other updates. That allows you to spend the time you have together solutioning or strategizing instead of going in a circle reciting your updates again.

Beyond talking about them as a leadership team, show the rest of the organization your progress as well. Especially as you plan to roll out OKRs further throughout the organization, you’ll need to demonstrate to your team what they’ll need to do– how to write useful updates, what OKRs look like, and that this is something you’ve decided is important enough to spend time on. The quickest way to do this is by creating a public presentation of your plan. To do so, click on the presentation mode icon in the upper right corner of your plan:

Here you’ll see a prebuilt presentation for how your OKRs are progressing. This can be used in team meetings, but you should also share this presentation with the rest of the team, regardless of if you’ve added them as users in Tability. First, hit share:

From here, you’ll enable “Public access” (don’t worry– this won’t be indexed and isn’t searchable, but you can also add a password from the link given). Now either give your team the URL, or embed the presentation in Notion or Confluence or anywhere else you can embed an iframe. The presentation will stay up-to-date automatically as new updates come in, so you don’t need to worry about regenerating the presentation.

Discuss in your All Hands meeting

The more you discuss your OKRs, the more your team understands that they’re important. And if your team does monthly All Hands meetings, this is a great time to make sure you’re bringing up your progress. For a quick way to create slides about your OKRs, go to the three dots menu and click Export plan:

You’ll have the option to export your data to a CSV or to generate slides with the most recent update for each key result to add to your All Hands deck.

If you don’t currently do a company-wide All Hands meeting, you should still send out your presentation at regular intervals to highlight the work that’s being done and how the company is progressing towards your OKRs.

Next steps

Once you’ve got the hang of doing OKRs with just the leadership team, you can continue building out your OKR process. Have each department or business unit create an OKR with at least one of their key results connected to a company goal (For example, if you have a revenue target, at least one of your sales team’s key results should be revenue focused).

Want someone to review your setup? Book a call with our team here.