Okapi
Empowering teams through strategic goals focused on results
I've seen so many teams, including mine, struggle to reach their potential due to lack of alignment and transparency around goals. OKRs only go so far so I'm developing my own version.
As Okapi has been in development, I've spent some time working through future iterations, doing customer interviews, and getting a better grasp of "MVP".
Definitely a fine line of investment before launch but but loving the process and evolving the product.
Love to hear your thoughts!
With development now underway, I knew I had to start focusing on my GTM planning and first thing on my list was getting a blog setup so I could start creating content for a) the problem I'm solving and b) help users understand the product.
I've never been much of a writer but I started just outlining a bunch of ideas into a Google Doc anddddd I ended up with a really long good doc with bullet points. So, I decided to pick one and just start writing. Spent about 20 minutes getting a solid two sentences out but just couldn't get it going. Back to the drawing board!
One thing I realized is that I created A LOT of content for my day job but a bit differently. Roughly half my job right now is communicating to internal stakeholders and I'm always designing and creating Google Slides. There it is. So I took my outline and moved to a presentation format. I'm much more able to quickly get ideas out of my head into a short format, accompanied with some rough sketches. While I don't have a long blog article yet, I've got a solid base for about 20 articles that I can deep dive into and articulate. This was much easier for me to get my thoughts down vs just writing them out openly.
Knuckled down and got this website out the door. Love Webflow and was able to get this done in about 48 hours just going off of designs I had done in Sketch. Still a ton of work to do in shaping the content but it's in a good place and gives me somewhere I can continue to capture my ideas and validate my value props.
Check it out, love to hear feedback!
I've used Upwork in the past with pretty solid success and decided to go that route so I can keep my budget down for this initial MVP.
The most important part of the job description was creating a storymap for the product and linked a screenshot to a Trello board it was kept in. I did not post any wireframes or screenshots initially.
I used this as a way to vet applicants, to see if they made proposals or asked the right questions. Pretty quickly I had a few solo engineers respond quickly to my already low-set budget without asking questions. Also had a few small agencies in eastern Europe respond. Two of the agencies I started to prefer indicated they could not propose an invoice without a walkthrough of the screens.
I did screenshares with the top two agencies and walked them through a quick clickable prototype of the screen. Within about 15 minutes, I knew the project manager for one of the agencies would do a much better job. He asked great questions around logic as we walked through steps. Even though there was still a lot to discuss, this gave us both a lot of confidence.
Within 48 hours, I had an invoice that was higher than I had budgeted for but we did some quick negotiations and a couple small scope cuts to get it very close. Off to work we go!
Throughout my career as a product designer, I've almost always moonlighted as a freelancer. With the exception of the last 4-5 years as I've been knee-deep in my full-time company, it's something I've always enjoyed and the extra income is nice.
I've used an LLC in that time and have a business checking account setup. For the last 3 years, I've been able to save about $8000 into that account for projects like this.
Right now I'm hoping this initial deposit will be enough to get an MVP into beta and validate for more future investment.
So my background is in product design and over the last few years have been deep in product management and product strategy as I help my full-time company grow.
Once I had the idea in my head, I couldn't let it go and started getting to work. Some of the steps I took to get my designs ready:
- I'm heavily inspired by OKRs and did a ton of research of competing platforms of other sizes. Took a ton of notes and screenshots.
- I decided to build out my marketing website first, just in Whimsical wireframes. This helped me refine my value props for my target market and get that out of my head.
- Once I felt good about my value props, I started designing the web application. Over the next few weeks, I worked on the UI, combing through designs on Dribbble and Pinterest trying to find the right look for my brand. Bookmarked a ton and starting throwing together some basic pages.
- While I know this product can be huge, I knew my budget would be limited (more on that shortly) so I decided to try to keep scope down to a minimum. I kept cutting and cutting to where I felt it was just enough to validate the solution(and problem) for smaller teams. These target customers should be easier to attack with a smaller product.
- Overall, I spent about 2 weeks of nights/weekends just refining the 6-7 pages of the app that needed designing. Made sure all my components were documented. Kept bouncing back and forth to wireframes and flow charts to make sure a) the model works and b) the product will actually represent the solution.
Feeling good about where I was at, I let it sit for 3-4 days and came back to it, making mental notes during that time. Made a few tweaks and decided I was going to invest more than just time and give it a go.
While building my initial MVP for my first product, Welm, I realized that there's something I currently feel more comfortable pursuing.
Welm was built as a quick proof of concept around helping individuals reach their goals, however, my current company is struggling with this same issue: sharing and achieving our company goals.
As a product leader in my full-time role, this is something I feel very passionately about. I know how big of an impact every individual on my team can have if only they are empowered to do great work. We've implemented(tried) OKRs now for several months but it's just not going that well. The overhead of managing them combined with the reality that most individuals end up "making up metrics" means they aren't serving the purpose intended.
I have an idea around a framework that's built on a foundation of objectives but uses the metrics and actions that most teams are doing already. Hopefully this can be better fit for most organizations and doesn't require teams to bring in consultants.