Course 2: Creating an OKR cycle

There are two different goal cycles to understand:

• Annual OKRs

• Quarterly OKRs

Annual OKRs are useful for metrics where you know you'll track it throughout the course of a year. These are long-term goals that are always top of mind— revenue, numbers of users, other operational efficiency goals that will take more than a quarter to accomplish.

Quarterly OKRs are good for when you need to make an impact quickly. If things need to improve immediately or if one of your annual OKRs is significantly lagging, your quarterly OKRs offer a chance for a focused improvement.

In both of your OKR cycles, you'll do three main steps:

• Writing - this takes a few weeks at the end of the previous quarter or the beginning of the current one.

• Tracking - This is where you'll spend the entire quarter

• Scoring - This happens at the very end of the quarter

During the tracking step, you'll do different tasks at different cadences.

Weekly, your team will update each key result with the change in metric, the likelihood of success (in Tability, we call this confidence), and any relevent details about how you are maintaining momentum or getting back on track. (Check out our guide here)

Bi-weekly (at least), you'll want to talk about your OKRs as a team. Since you're giving asynchronous updates, you can have your team read each other's updates ahead of a meeting, and spend your time together solutioning instead of catching up.

Monthly, each team should deep dive into their progress: What, about the goals or the process, needs to change? What can stay the same? And Executive leadership should report to the broader company about the key OKRs. If these are important goals, leadership should be talking about them.

And quarterly, you should score and write a retrospective on your OKRs. What went well? What didn't? Did you hit your goals? What are you going to do differently next quarter? (See our retrospective masterclass here.)