We have been using OKRs for a while but it took a few rounds and reading The Team That Managed Itself to really understand how to stay aligned over the course of the quarter. We have two team meetings and each of them has a superpower activity that really helped us as a team.
- Meeting 1: Monday Commitments
- Superpower: OKR Confidence Level Poker
- Meeting 2: End of Week Celebration
- Superpower: Trophies for Team Mates
Don’t end up doing OKRs to set and forget, and don’t just let it be one person’s responsibility. We set OKRs together as a team and we try to achieve them as a team, so monitoring progress should also happen as a team.
Monday Commitments Meeting
I originally based this meeting exactly on what Christina Wodtke describes in The Team That Managed Itself.
As a team, you talk about priorities for the week as well as the next 4 weeks and check in about the confidence levels of the OKRs and the health metrics.
We added on more things like people’s time off, the latest numbers to help inform the OKR confidence and some room for a check-in or icebreaker in the beginning. Check-ins are so important just to take some time to get to know each other more, have fun or set the stage.
After a quarter, we reviewed this meeting and concluded that sometimes it’s still hard to set priorities because we’re not aware of the bigger picture. For me, as the product manager, the roadmap and priorities are clear, this is my day-to-day but for the team members it might not be and repetition really is key here so for the next quarter we added the company vision and mission, company-level OKRs and a lean roadmap to our overview. The weekly priorities that were directly connected to tickets got linked to Jira for quick and easy access.
At the bottom we tracked OKR confidence and health metrics over time to be able to review it at the end of the quarter, while it looked cool, it did not really serve a bigger purpose.
