Set OKR, what’s next? Or how to monitor for 12 teams

You had such that the set goals were not achieved and were lost in the flow of the routine. In the article I will tell you how I solve this problem in my own and neighboring teams in Tinkoff Business

My name is Pavel Stoyanov, I’m a product lead at Tinkoff and an OKR expert. I believed in OKR in 2020 and since then I have been leading all projects according to this methodology and enjoying my work

OKR is google’s hype goal setting system. It is good because many artifacts and practices are described around it. Everything described in the article is applicable to any framework

What is the problem?

I have never met a person who would say that goals should not be set. At the same time, people who live by goals and constantly monitor progress are rare.

As a rule, the reason for not achieving the goal lies not in the fact that you or your team do not work well, but that you are not doing exactly what you wanted. This is especially true when the goal was set at the beginning of the year, and two months later you can’t even remember how it was formulated. As a result, both the brain and the team are out of focus and start doing routine simple tasks that will lead you somewhere, but definitely not to the original goal.

What to do with it?

There is a solution and it is quite obvious – you need to regularly (once a month or more) return to the goal and analyze it. Discuss how close you are to your goal and what you need to move forward. This article can be finished, but I really want to tell you how I put this rule into practice in Tinkoff Business and what came of it

Step 1 – Check it out for yourself

Let’s start with the fact that we at Tinkoff are moving to setting OKR goals

You can learn how OKRs work with a simple example – a bot in a cart okr_game_bot

At the end of 2022, I helped my teams set their yearly OKR goals. It is important that the goals were set by the team members, and not lowered from above, so the team’s eyes were on fire to achieve the goals. I immediately prepared the guys that we would discuss the goals once a month, so the teams have no resistance when I come to the team meeting and ask them to go over the goals – fill out the wiki plate.

I like the result: even though we have not grown 10 times in two months, colleagues discuss not only the tasks, as it was before, but the goals for which these tasks were invented. In the course of the discussion, there are tasks that are not aimed at achieving goals, we refuse them, which increases focus. It’s not perfect yet, but we’ll definitely learn in a year.

Step 2 – scaled

It was not enough for me to get to the bottom only of my guys, so I decided to scale the practice to neighboring teams within the business line. Three things prompted me to do this:

• confidence in the benefits that I tested on my colleagues

• request from top management for transparency within the business line

• I want the whole business to grow, and monitoring goals has a good effect on this

I suggested that the heads of neighboring teams conduct a joint public monitoring. The event was scheduled for March 3, 2023 – we had to discuss progress on goals and give an update on key projects.

I prepared a template ahead of time to keep the presentations simple and easy to follow. Here is the format:

• Slide 1: All team goals in OKR format to understand the whole scope of the team

• Slide 2: first goal + progress on key metrics + projects aimed at achieving the goal + team obstacles that put the achievement of the goal at risk

• Slide 3: next goal, etc.

• Slide 4: slide with conclusions + emotions and feelings from work – this is important

As a result, 12 teams gathered, which were supposed to perform on the same day. Such meetings usually last forever and are incredibly boring, strict timing came to my aid – exactly 15 minutes per team. If you prepare well, then during this time you can manage to tell the most important aspects of the work. Hard timing helped to make a schedule so that guys who are far from business could connect in time and listen only to their team

How did it go and what did we get

It is clear that the first such event, and even for 12 teams at once, could not go perfectly. There was not enough drive, numbers and the opportunity to ask all the questions. But the walking one will master the road, so I collected comments from colleagues and will improve the format. In doing so, we have exactly achieved the following things:

• Each team was forced to knock out the results and reflect a little on what is happening – it is always useful to emerge from the operating system

• Transparency has increased – unpleasant moments have surfaced, with which you now need to work

• The management was involved in the work of most teams – they threw ideas based on many years of personal experience

Step 3 – Consolidate the Practice

The most difficult thing is to turn a one-time meeting into a regular one, and not quit when faced with a local negative.

The next monitoring will take place on 07.04. If there are a lot of commands, then I’ll try to start up in two streams. I want the presentation in miro, so that I can comment on the course and all the artifacts of the meeting remain in one place, and not as usual – presentations locally on computers, comments in the chat, conclusions in the heads

Above is a template that lives in the world, you can view, download and comment here – miro.com/app/board/uXjVMaEfR4M=/

Let’s fix the most important:

• Goal setting doesn’t work if you don’t track progress.

• The new format of work needs to be tested first inside in order to broadcast outside with more confidence

• You need to track progress on a regular basis – so the format itself and the teams will be able to evolve

If the article seemed interesting to you, I will be grateful for subscribing to my TG channel OKR_Stoyanov where I share my experience with goal setting from micro businesses to corporations