2021 kick-off

At the end of 2020 we sat down to clarify our goals for the next year (both on company and team level) and defined the way to reach them. We came up with the idea to use OKR for that so we started to get familiar with the methodology and defined objectives and key results for Q1.

OKR in a tiny nutshell

“Objectives and Key Results (OKR) is a critical thinking framework and goal setting methodology that helps companies to align goals and ensure everyone is working collaboratively on goals that really matter.” (source: weekdone.com)

We found that Weekdone offers everything we need at the moment to start our journey so we decided to give it a go. Since every department has a role in reaching the goals, we applied the methodology to the whole company.

Journey so far

We organized a kick-off meeting to define high-level goals then every team specified lower level objectives and key results. Fortunately right after defining these objectives, we started to implement new processes in our day to day work, so for january 2021 we had some practice in this new framework and we got used to monitor the results every week.

Plans for Q1

We’ve set some goals based on the results of last year that we should reach by the end of Q1. These goals include increasing website traffic (more visitors, lower bounce rate) and getting more followers and engagement on social channels. All of these help us promote our new product (SNaaS) and bring new users to the platform. We have defined the target number of new customer repositories by the end of Q1 and the required steps to reach this.

With the help of a marketing agency, we’ve come out with a content strategy for the whole campaign which we will follow to reach our goals in the first quarter of 2021. This includes regular posts to different social media channels, blog posts, paid ads, newsletter and so on. We will of course monitor the results throughout the whole quarter and make adjustments if needed.

Product

Along with sales and marketing strategy, we will keep improving the product itself and optimize our internal processes. We’ll look for possible steps that could be automated like repo registration and email notifications. Right now, the whole process is done manually which is manageable for now but we hope that shortly we will have more and more registrations and repo requests which cannot and shouldn’t be handled manually.

We constatly look for opportunities to make user experience better so we plan to introduce other payment methods for business and enterprise plan customers (don’t worry, developer plan stays free).

Along with the product, documentation was improved a lot during the last year, but this is something that you have to constantly improve to make onboarding and development easier. We need to keep existing docs up to date and discover missing parts then write them.

As an essential part of the ecosystem, we are implementing in-house monitoring tools to be able to see what’s happening with the repos and the whole service. With that, we can keep an eye on the usage of the service and infrastructure (so we can scale it up if needed) and also filter inactive repositories in order to contact repo owners and help them with the next steps.

What’s next

The plan we have is much larger than what we can do in a single quarter so as we get closer to the end of Q1, we will start defining goals for the next quarter based on the big picture we have in our mind for the product and for the company. Of course it’s important to check last quarter results and adjust our goals quarter by quarter.

In the followings we will get back with more experiences and stats to share.

Originally published at https://www.sensenet.com.