OKR Journey — Meetings

When we finally agreed to try OKRs, I knew that one of the hardest parts will be keeping everyone in the company engaged and up to date with the progress. For exactly this reason, we introduced two weekly meetings — Monday Check-ins and Friday Wins.

Monday Check-Ins

Every Monday at 10 am, management, on-boarding team and tech team leads meet for a short meeting to go over the progress from last week and to talk about the upcoming week.

In this meeting we go over each KR and try to come to a consensus on where on the confidence scale we currently are. Is it higher or lower than previous week? We also state a reason for our decision.

Note To Self: Currently, we use the recommended OKR scale, from 0.0 to 1.0. When I think about it, I honestly don’t see any value of using such a granular scale. Maybe, in the future, we will try colors — red, yellow, green — or smileys — ☹️, 😐, 🙂 — to keep things simple.

After we’ve discussed and graded all key results, we talk about important
upcoming events that we need to pay extra attention to. Do we need to
re-prioritise something or change plans?

We try to keep these Monday meetings short, around 30 minutes. It forces us to keep both the pace and concentration high. We want to respect people’s time and we want to make sure that nobody starts dosing off or playing with their phone.

The output of the meeting is a company-wide email status report that contains our shared OKR — objective and each key result together with its confidence grade and a short paragraph motivating the current value, plus other noteworthy stuff for the upcoming week.

I think that the email report is a good way to remind everyone about our common goals and our progress towards them. It helps us promote transparency with-in the company and improves the communication.

Friday Wins

Every Friday at 2 pm we hold my favorite meeting of the week — the Friday Wins meeting. This is also, in a way and in my opinion, the most important OKR meeting because it makes you feel that you are a part of the winning team.

We don’t have any specific agenda for this meeting, we only ask if someone wants to share some kind of win from the past week with the rest of us.

It’s important to talk about what we have accomplished and not what we are
going to. It doesn’t have to be anything big or special, as long as it’s a win.

I feel that many people are still shy or having a hard time coming up with a win. For example, one developer Tobiasz found and fixed a bug in our API. His fix improved the response times by at least 1/3 for specific scenarios. That’s a big win, if you ask me, but he did not mention it during the Friday Wins meeting.

Some examples of things you can treat as wins:

• Number of support tickets closed
• New contract signed
• New customer live
• New employee started
• A bugfix or code improvement
• Someone shares a personal goofy example

The last example can make people laugh and can sometimes even set the tone for the whole meeting. Which is good. Because Friday Wins suppose to be relaxed and fun. It’s not an official meeting, it’s just for the team, a way to wrap up another awesome week. Friday Wins is also a good time to thank everyone for the past week and wish everyone a nice weekend.

Friday Wins core idea is to create a feeling that we are all in this together, we are the company and it’s up to us all to get things done, to win. Hopefully, many more of our colleagues will want to share their wins with the rest of us in the future!

Open Questions

We are still learning and trying to find a way that works for us. Here are some questions that I’ve been thinking about lately.

• Health metrics. OKRs recommend to keep track of some metrics like team
  health, codebase health, etc. We still haven’t found something interesting or useful to track, but do we need too just for the sake of it?
• Development process. We are still not totally aligned with our development process, which is two week sprints with start on Tuesdays. Where do OKRs fit in?
• Not battle-tested. We haven’t faced any stressful situations since we started with OKRs. Being a startup you have to shift your focus fast — drop everything you are doing, and run the other way. We have a track record of abandoning things, or we drop them “temporarily” to never come back to them again. Are OKRs our next victim?

Final words

I notice that more and more of my colleagues are referring to the OKRs when discussing work related matters. It makes me really glad! For this to work, we all have to believe in the power of OKRs.

It is important to keep things super-simple at first. If something is too complex, you simply won’t do it, or you will abandon it very quickly.

One of the important things is to keep a steady heartbeat, to pace yourself and adjust the course as you go along, and this is where Monday Check-ins and Friday Wins come in.