How we prioritize in CoopX

Enabling teams for success is one of our top priorities in CoopX. Without the success of our talented employees and teams, CoopX in total will have a hard time reaching its goals and ambitions. CoopX has grown from a mere handful of people to over 20 people in only two years. How do you prioritize when things are constant in motion not only counting the teams, but when you have to take into account a bigger organization that has their overall ambitions, projects and a complex supply chain to support?

In CoopX we’ve been using and experimenting with OKRs almost since the beginning. Rather than taking on a full-on approach across all teams and the department all at once, we let each team decide on their own when and if it was the right time to start practicing OKRs. Depending on the team maturity, number of interfaces outside CoopX and funding, we’ve made our advances slowly, but steady.

Some key takeaways we’ve learned from introducing OKRs both to our teams, but also to the rest of the organization:

🙋‍♀️ It facilities great discussion to what matters the most, and what can wait

🤗 It’s transparent, and we measure it

🛣 It removes the urgency to discuss endless roadmaps

🙌 It enables greater team autonomy

OK, so far so good. But how do you scale it to an entire department?

The three staged process

Now that CoopX is running on (full) speed, and we face increasing interfaces and shared problems between teams, we deemed it was due time to better align ourselves and begin our journey to more shared ways of working across teams. Issues we encountered inadvertently were such as:

• Agreeing on problem definition and ambitions, unclear time frames and inconsistencies in communication
• How and when do we decide which problems to tackle
• Reduced throughput due to hitting bottlenecks caused by multiple contributors and poor communication leading to overwhelmed engineers
• Too much context switching(!). We can all drive a car and listen to the radio, but when it comes to pure cognitive functions, the cost of context switching skyrockets

We’ll be attacking these issues in an iterative fashion, not expecting to demolishing these issues all in a single hit. But based on this we set out to start, do things iteratively while looking at even greater ways of standardizing ways of working across teams in the future.

So,

1. We dwelved into Coops company strategy, analyzed how we best could contribute based on our current path and talent. So we drew a line in the sand and set 6 overall goals for CoopX in 2021. Our goals were purely based on our knowledge of the current situation, some intuition and where we’d like to be by the end of 2021.
2. Empowered the teams to construct their OKRs for Q1
3. Analyzed, deconstructed bottleneck(s), and got the overview

Visualized, the whole process looked something like this:

Simple, fast(!), and ambitious 😬

After the first round of drafts we realized we managed to get a good view on our situation and ambitions. But we quickly faced this challenge: each team’s OKRs looked OK, but how do they all connect across teams? Are we simply overreaching here just because we want to be ambitious? What are we missing? Simply writing down our goals doesn’t mean they’ll come true.

Enter collaborative and visual tools

In CoopX we aim to maximize transparency and document collaboration , so we use Quip to facilitate this. While Quip solves this very neatly, it lacks a way for us to present information so we can get a bigger picture and overview (at least this feature is oblivious to us 🤷🏻‍♂️).

We have 8 teams that hand in their OKRs, how do you manage to get an overview of which Objectives are connected, what/if any blockers or bottlenecks exists, and are we certain each team can solve most of the objectives on their own or do we have a few key players spread across all of the teams’ Objectives risking personal burnout?

To solve this we used Miro. We sketched up each product & team and their corresponding OKRs. We made a small avatar of everyone in CoopX, and placed them along each team or where we thought they would make a significant impact. We also tried to link each team’s Objective to other teams’ Objectives, in order to link shared Objectives and potential dependencies.

This proved very efficient, we could now better get an understanding to what exactly are our ambitions and better answer the question: are we spreading ourselves too thin or not?

Thankfully, we identified issues both in terms of aiming “too high”, and having conflicting Objectives so we needed to make even stricter prioritizations.

Going forward

This was iteration 1. A few questions we still need solid answers to comes ahead:

• What is the ideal cycle to do this? Many opt for quarterly, so will we to begin with
• How to keep track, measure and make sure we’re keeping focus on our goals?
• Become even greater at writing and communicating OKRs to the entire Coop. What is OKRs, and how to distinguish between aspirational and commited Objectives?

We will hopefully do a review of this early Q2, and improve from there on. We also love comments, feedback or things to consider when doing this. Don’t be a stranger 😎

PS: Want to join our journey? We’re currently looking for talented Software Engineers, Data Analyst, Data Scientists and UX Designers. Drop me a 👋 or here