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Quarterly Plus OKRs

A simple guide for aligning team OKRs with the company's biggest bets.
Lane Shackleton
Too often, teams mistake strategy planning for OKR planning. These are separate activities so it’s important to build your planning process accordingly. Ideally, you’re able to generate clear and opinionated strategy prior to doing any OKR planning.
At Coda, we believe that good strategy is an answer to a specific challenge. That simple but powerful idea is inspired by one of my favorite strategy books,
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
⁠
by Richard Rumelt. When done well, strategy creates leverage for your best insights and enables OKRs to drive solid execution.
“A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge.”
― Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
We created a simple system for conducting strategy planning that culminates in company Big Bets. After that, quarterly OKR planning ensures all team-level OKRs ladder up to the company’s Big Bets for the year. The whole process can be summarized in three steps:
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Key Challenges
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(annual): Start by clarifying your company’s key challenges, capturing as many specific challenges from every team, and then voting on the biggest ones.
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Big Bets
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(annual): Next, distill the company’s Big Bets for the year––the most promising strategies against your top challenges, which will serve as the foundation for team-level quarterly planning.
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Team OKRs writeup
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(quarterly): Once Big Bets have been defined, each team can plan their OKRs, and share them through a writeup/presentation.
We distilled our process into this simple planning guide, which you’re free to copy and adapt to suit your team’s needs. For a deeper dive into our process, feel free to check out my conversation with Lenny Rachitsky,
How Coda builds product
⁠
.

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Getting started

Copy and customize this template for quarterly planning:
Copy template
⁠
Share this doc with your team and delete instructions as needed.

Strategy Planning — Key Challenges & Big Bets

We’re big fans of starting with
the right question
⁠
, and our annual strategy planning process kicks off the same way. The goal is to get the hard challenges out first, and stack rank the most important ones that need to get addressed during the planning cycle. Our key challenges form the basis for what our Big Bets will be.
Next, we ask a group of leaders in the company to outline potential strategies to address the key challenges we agreed upon. This exercise helps us quickly envision: how we might address a particular challenge, what success would look like, and how we might organize some initial efforts. We’ll run a few
$100 voting exercises
⁠
to help us calibrate where to focus our discussion. And ultimately, a small group will help decide on the final list. The end artifact is usually a 2-4 page writeup on our Big Bets, with a
Dory
⁠
for questions and
Pulse
⁠
to see how people feel about the reasoning. We also revisit our annual strategy plans regularly throughout the year.

Quarterly Planning — Quarterly Plus OKRs

The Big Bet writeup will give the teams the basic guidance on company-level strategy, and enable each team to run their own planning exercises to get specific about strategies and objectives they’d like to adopt to support the company Big Bets.
Startups are fast-moving, and it’s difficult to commit to long-term plans when markets, customers and the team are evolving quickly. So we ask teams to plan at two levels. First, a set of OKRs for the quarter that they can commit to getting 100% done. Second, a look ahead (the ‘Plus’ in ‘Quarterly Plus’) which is a set of loose ideas of where we’ll head in the following quarter. Here, we ask teams to identify big decision points or big risks that the company should be aware of. We’ll then use OKR dashboards (like the one in
All OKRs
⁠
) to check-in with teams throughout the quarter.
⁠
Screen Shot 2023-01-19 at 11.44.30 AM.png
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⁠
As teams submit their OKRs, you’ll be able to see a master database of
All OKRs
⁠
which can be filtered by team, using team-specific pages or by filtering the master database.
In the end, each team’s key results and input metrics will support their objectives and output metrics, which will ultimately drive the company’s Big Bets against its key challenges.

⁠

Start here →
Key Challenges
⁠



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