4 reasons high-performing teams don’t track OKRs in spreadsheets
There’s a better way to track your company OKRs—and it isn’t a sheet.
The Coda team
4 reasons high-performing teams don’t track OKRs in spreadsheets
By The Coda team
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Picture the scene: you’re looking at your company Objectives and Key Results, trying to see which ones need resources from your team and when. As you click through a spreadsheet that’s achingly slow to load, you begin to notice the same goals in multiple tabs—but each have slightly different information. Then you notice the unanswered comments asking about progress and start to wonder when this spreadsheet was last updated. Sound familiar? Unfortunately, this is an all-too-common experience due to the prevalence of using spreadsheets for planning. The allure of spreadsheets is understandable—most people have access to something like Excel or Google Sheets already, and probably know how to use them at a basic level. Plus, you can begin setting up your doc by just typing in the cells. But as you build out your OKRs, this promise of ease and simplicity quickly falls apart. While it might work for tracking a handful of goals, the process breaks as soon as you want to scale your OKRs beyond your immediate team. Here are four common challenges we hear from customers who attempt to plan in spreadsheets—and how to solve them with Coda.
1. Spreadsheets force the same view for everyone.
One of the key components of OKRs is that everyone’s should be transparent and visible across the company. But that doesn’t mean everyone is looking for the same level of information. Your CEO who just needs a progress snapshot has very different needs to your project manager who wants all the granular details on dependencies and RACIs. In spreadsheets, it’s very difficult to create different views of the same set of data. So then the copies start. Before you know it, you’re drowning in docs named things like “OKRs marketing team COPY,” with data being copy-pasted over and over again. Every time the data changes—a Key Result gets reworded or a status is altered—it needs updating in multiple places. Chances are someone misses one, and now no one knows which doc is the source of truth. In Coda, tables talk to each other, so you can create different views of the same data without worrying about it getting out of sync. You only have to input the data once (no copy-pasting required!). What’s more, each view can be customized to the needs of each audience by filtering data, showing or hiding details, and using different elements like tables, calendars, charts, and more, which includes many more goal-setting insights from Coda’s Head of Engineering, Oliver Heckmann.- A company-level view with timelines, overall progress so far, and the status of top-level OKRs.
- Team-level views showing overall progress against all OKRs each team owns, as well as details on each OKR, such as driver and dependencies.
- Individual views with all the details for KRs that person owns and progress bars, so they can quickly see and update them without having to sift through everyone else’s.
2 . Spreadsheets lack context.
While OKRs should be short and concise, you’ll usually want to add more context for those who are working directly on an initiative. But adding meaningful text or media is nearly impossible in a spreadsheet, so attaching that helpful Loom you made or the relevant Figma file isn’t so simple. If you’ve ever found yourself creating multiple columns in a spreadsheet full of ugly links, or sending emails linking to multiple docs related to a specific goal, you’ve probably felt this pain.
Bring your docs into Coda
3. Spreadsheets make tracking dependencies difficult and fragile.
We recommend tracking dependencies within your OKR process, because very few teams work in total silos and those dependencies are often essential to the success of your goals. For example, the product team might have a dependency on the research team to complete user testing for a new feature. This is technically possible in a spreadsheet, but it’s complicated and time consuming. Here’s a rundown of how you would do this in Google Sheets but, in short, it involves multiple attribute columns, data validation rules, VLOOKUP formulas, and a high risk of the whole thing breaking if you accidentally select the wrong thing or reference a column that later changes. Or, you could use Coda and simply add a column to select which teams are needed for each Key Result. You can then easily create a view of these dependencies for each team. You could even build a more advanced solution that shows dependencies and their different priorities, and a workflow for the requested team to approve or reject the request for support.
4. Spreadsheets aren’t connected to your other tools.
Spreadsheets weren’t designed for collaboration across the number of people and tools we all use today. That means refreshing data and getting everyone to regularly update their OKRs is a time-consuming, manual process. The best you can do is add comments and hope it doesn’t get too chaotic managing all the threads. With Coda Packs, you can connect over 600 tools to your OKR dashboard to sync data and automate actions. Ilia Tregubov, Head of Product Operations at Miro shares: “Automations help us to bring together actual data on OKRs and send notifications to DRIs (Directly Responsible Individuals) to prepare their updates.” Here’s a few examples of what you can do:- Automatically remind OKR owners to update goals via Slack or email: At Coda, we automate Slack reminders every two weeks to anyone who hasn’t updated their OKRs. This gives everyone confidence the dashboard is up to date and saves someone the work of hunting down updates. Simply set up your message (Coda AI can help you with that!), who you want to send it to and when, and then let Coda automations do the rest.
- Show the status of projects from Jira: Bring in Epic scores and Story progress from Jira to show progress against your Key Results without needing to check multiple dashboards.
- Visualize your sales progress from Salesforce: Display data such as Closed-Won/Lost numbers, qualified leads, pipeline, and forecasted revenue to show progress against revenue goals without requiring everyone to have a Salesforce login.
Coda beats spreadsheets for OKRs every time.
If these challenges sound familiar, it might be time to move on from spreadsheets. Many companies such as Miro and Aavia have successfully migrated their OKR process from sheets to Coda. To get started, you can import your current spreadsheet, customize one of the templates in our gallery, or start from scratch with a fresh doc. And if you need some help, there’s plenty more inspiration and insights in our Ultimate Handbook for Planning & OKRs, by Coda’s Head of Engineering, Oliver Heckmann.Related posts
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