Does anyone use OKRs (Objectives and Key results) for goal setting?
Hey Indie Hackers.
I wonder if indie hackers or small (mid) startups are using OKRs for goal setting, for aligning the company toward common goal?
And if you are using it, where do you do that? Is this specific tool or just spreadsheets or something else.
It would be interesting to hear any tips based on your experience with it.
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You can use Weekdone (https://weekdone.com/).
I created my own with Airtable.
Why did you choose Airtable?
Is this free for you?
Are you using it just for yourself or the whole company?
I use Airtable often and I don't want to switch between tools. So, I decided to create OKRs with Airtable.
To me, OKRs is just one of the tools for project, program & portfolio management. I also included others, such as strategy proposal, experiment plans, kanban board, etc. I try to make all interconnected so that my team and I can view from both analytical and holistic perspective.
So far, the free version of Airtable is sufficient for me and my team. Small team by the way :)
How big is your team so far?
We use OKR in our marketing team (8 members). It works for us and keeps everybody on the same page. Previously we have used BookStack wiki and review the OKRs every month or so.
At present we are using our own tool - AirSend(Team Chat + Files + Wiki). But any simple wiki will work.
What are the most important features in a tool for OKRs?
we use it in a very rudimentary way. If you ask me recording OKR review results periodically is an important one.
Are you the marketing team in a certain company? Can you give more context about it?
Why did you stop using BookStack? What was the problem?
No issues with BookStack. AirSend is a contextual workspace and we use it for group chat. So showing the OKR in the face reminds the team what needs to be done. That is the main reason we have moved OKR to AirSend.
if you want it visually you can check the image here: https://www.airsend.io/images/airsend_okr.png
I use OKRs - but they are just in a word document. No need to get too fancy at this time. 😎
Are you using it just for yourself? Or in your startup / business?
I've tried making them work at my ol' job; but OKRs were kinda pointless due to their inability to focus on something. I use them in my startup. I think they are a good way to streamline strategy, departments, goals in a digestible and SMART manner.
How many people are working in your startup?
I was wondering the same thing this morning. And found out a tool made another indie hacker @spittet ( https://tability.io/)
I have ended up setting some quarterly goals where I want Pentos to be in 3months.
But it spent my afternoon trying to figure out what should be my Northstar metrics.
Hey @tibozaurus thanks for the mention! I'm pushing a new update today that will put tasks closer to your KRs (progress vs. work).
I agree that the most difficult part is to find your North Star! We're going to work on providing ready-to-use templates for different stages of a project. You should also join our Slack community via — there's a bunch of other folks in your situation.
Yeah, in OKRs it's really important to define really meaningful metrics and then set objectives and key results based on it.
Is this tool free? Why did you choose this particular tool?
Hey @andreibaklinau, we give users 50 check-ins per month for free, which is enough for most small teams. You won't have page permissions and exports but I'm sure you can do away with it.
We see ourselves as an accountability platform rather than a true OKRs tool. We try our best to keep things light, and have built-in reminders. We also focus more on outcomes and product rather than HR functions.
Happy to answer your questions if you have any!
We use OKRs at doopoll. We use a basic Google spreadsheet (actually, I think I use Google's own template but I can't find a link to it now).
We set goals quarterly. Usually three Objectives with three Key Results each.
We've done this for three quarters now.
Quarter one was a total disaster. My cofounder and I came up with the goals and then just told the team that's what we were going for (management fail.) Lesson learned: involve the team in your goal setting. It increases buy in.
Quarter two was better. But this time round we set overly specific Objectives and the Key Results sort of jarred against them. Lesson learned: Don't get too specific with the objectives. Leave that for the Key Results.
Quarter three has been almost spot on for us. We actually only set two Objectives this quarter and have one with four key results and the other with three. At the start of the quarter we set an unspecific Key Result for one objective and ended up replacing it with a really specific one a couple of weeks in. This had genuine impact. Lesson learned: sometimes you should break the rules in a system.
Wow, so interesting feedback)
How many people are in your team?
And why did you decide to start using OKRs?
It's interesting how your approach to OKRs evolved within time. It's especially interesting when on Q3 you embraced that something was wrong and just changed it against all rules. Nice move!
We are 3 people at the moment.
We decided to use OKRs because it seemed like a good way to quantify progress and prevent us chasing fun ideas which might not align to the overall strategy.
Definitely, for us, it is an iterative system. Maybe @JamesVitaly can give his ideas too.
Btw, are you fully satisfied with Google Spreadsheet for OKRs?
And which team management tool (like Trello, Asana, etc) are you using in your startup?
Yes. It works perfectly for our size. We don’t use any of those tools. We just communicate directly when it’s necessary — we tried loads of different solutions (including the ones you mentioned) and found that just picking up the phone was more effective.
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There's even a "breathe" app that tells you to stop and take a breath :-)
We're not using OKRs in a 3.5 person company but we did in 12. I didn't like them and thought they're useless for devs. I think it's a nice thing to have for sales people, maybe marketing, but for development I just prefer to use some proven metrics (number of errors in sentry, number of failed deploys, etc) that we can easily monitor and measure against.
Even as I do (or rather try) a lot of sales pitches I don't do OKRs for myself.
Was it absolutely useless for the team of 12 when you used it?
For the dev team yes. At least that was the feeling of every developer including myself. You cannot really influence customer engagement, sales, or anything as a developer. There are certain things that developers need to do: reduce the amount of bugs shipped to production, have smooth release cycle, avoid downtime, improve estimates. There are more but that's the gist. And when you have a set of features planned for the quarter, as a developer what is the point of all these OKRs?
It's very interesting view on OKRs from developer side.
Need to talk about it with other developers to hear what they think about it. I guess that such opinion can be quite popular.
Very interesting feedback.
I completely agree with what you said about huge companies / departments. When I worked in a company with 150 people and we tried to implement OKRs, it was really tough and one of the most important thing that persuaded other departments to apply that processes is that it was pushed from the top management.
So, you are not using OKRs in your company. Right?
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Got it.
Interesting and reasonable opinion regarding to it. Thanks for sharing it.
So how do you manage goals setting in your day job right now?
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