Getting started with Tability for Enterprise
1. Planning your roll out
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Large organizations will benefit from some pre-planning when it comes to rolling out a new tool to their team. Especially early on in your organization’s OKR or goal setting history, not rushing the roll out to all parts of the org will help avoid under-trained employees and complicated OKR management, two of the killers of OKR processes.
Choosing your sponsors
Even before you write your OKRs, it’s important to establish some guidelines for your OKR implementation. You’ll want to have a clear understanding of who is responsible for your OKR and OKR platform success. We recommend having:
A clear executive sponsor who is championing the process
An OKR program sponsor who manages the OKR process
OKR champions throughout your organization who can answer questions and set a good example
OKR strategy planning
Notes
Owner
Due Date
Completed?
Choose executive sponsor
Executive responsible for the organization's OKRs
Choose OKR program Owner
Person who will manage the OKR program and ensure compliance
Choose OKR champions
Representatives from each function who will become OKR experts
Create OKR playbook
One page overview of contacts and strategy for OKR program
Who will be part of the initial OKR program?
Announce OKRs to organization
In an all hands meeting, done by Executive sponsor
How to write OKRs, update progress, and manage change at the team level
A set of guidelines for your team on how to write and track OKRs is key for ensuring there are fewer opportunities for things to go sideways. Your OKR playbook should include information on how to write OKRs, how to give updates, who to ask questions to (likely your OKR champions and program owner), and why your OKRs matter (how do they tie to the broader strategy of the company?).
OKR Playbook checklist
Notes
Owner
Due Date
Completed?
Purpose of OKRs at the company
Mission & Vision of the company
List of OKR contacts
Adding users to Tability
We’re frequently asked who needs to be a user in Tability. We can think of this as three different user personas:
Users: These are the team members who will actively use the platform week to week. Who on your team will be an owner of a key result– the person responsible for its success? Who is going to be updating metrics and reporting on progress?
Administrators: These are the process owners and tooling experts. Who is focused on keeping the entire OKR process moving forward? Who will be ensuring that goals are updated and that the process isn’t going to fizzle out? Who is the go-to person for OKR process questions from the team? Who creates the reports for the rest of the organizations?
Viewers: This is everyone else. Who should be able to see progress? Who ought to be informed about your OKR statuses?
These are labels that will likely change from quarter to quarter– especially as you roll out OKRs to more teams in your organization. For organizations that are new to OKRs or who are new to using OKR tools, we can think about how this can work in phases:
Phase 1:
Users: The executive team
Admins: Chief of Staff, Head of Strategy, operations manager, etc.
Viewers: Department heads, possibly the rest of the organization
Phase 2:
Users: Executive team, Department heads, possibly one business unit
Admins: unchanged
Viewers: The rest of the organization
Phase 3:
Users: Executive team, department heads, the most enthusiastic (or flexible) business units*
Admins: unchanged
Viewers: Remaining users
Phase 4:
Users: All team members
Admins: unchanged
Viewers: External stakeholders– board members, etc.
*Some business units or teams, particularly those who are output based, will be suspicious of OKR processes, and will benefit from watching how peer teams create and track goals before being asked to do so themselves. Focus your efforts on teams that are willing to try new processes first before you get detractors onboard.
When to add more users
A common mistake with OKR roll outs is to wait until the beginning of a new quarter to add the rest of the team in and start them on the OKR process. This leads to undertrained teams and rushed, underdeveloped OKRs.
Ideally, the next phase of users in Tability would be added in approximately one month before the end of the current quarter. This gives users an opportunity to see the product as it’s being used and updated, and gives them more time to start thinking about and drafting their OKRs for the next quarter.
How to invite users
Once your rollout has been planned, you’ll be able to add users in a few different ways:
Enable SSO or Provision through SCIM with tools like Azure, OneLogin, Okta, and more.
Manually invite users through the platform
Create an invite link or allow users to discover and join your workspace themselves
Organizations who wish to use SSO or SCIM can follow the instructions available here for their provider.
For inviting users through the platform, there are options to control who you’d like to add. Users can be added from the People tab by sending the invitation link or entering their email addresses:
The invitation link can be disabled from inside of your account settings under Access & Security. In this section, you can also restrict who has the ability to invite additional users. By default, anyone in your Tability account can invite additional users, however you can set this to be restricted to Admins only:
Once your users have been invited to your workspace, you’ll be able to update their permissions. Each invited user receives basic user permissions (or read-only permissions if you’ve invited them as read only). If you’d like to upgrade anyone to be an admin, you can do so in the Users section of your admin settings, clicking on the user, and changing their role:
2. Organizing your OKR plans
Once you’ve added your users, you can fully set up your OKRs. This step is possible without adding users, however you’ll need to go back later to set users as owners of key results.
Tability allows you to set a hierarchy of OKR plans to show the relationship between different sets of OKRs. For instance, your individual teams or business units are likely doing work that directly supports your top-level company OKRs. To make this relationship between OKRs clear, there are a few different plans to set up
Annual vs. Quarterly OKRs
Your annual OKRs are the roadmap to success for your business and the basis for what you’ll do each quarter. So when it comes time to add your OKRs into Tability, you’ll want to start at the very top– your company annual OKRs.
To do this, create a new plan from the Plans page. Some things to note about plans:
Each plan should have a clear title. For an annual plan, you might consider a title like “Company Annual OKRs 2025”
All key results in each plan are updated through a process called “Check-ins.” Check-ins will include metric progress, the owner’s confidence in being able to achieve the goal, and comments on what work is being done and why they are or are not confident. By default, check-ins are set to be done weekly, but this can be changed. For annual plans, we recommend setting check-ins to monthly or every three months. This prevents update fatigue with long term goals where not much changes (or where changes don’t need to be reported) week to week.
Our default time periods are for this quarter and next quarter– this is based off of calendar quarters (Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, etc.). For an annual plan, you’ll need to use a custom time period set from the beginning of your fiscal year to the end.
Permissions refers to who is able to add new key results or delete key results. We recommend all plans stay public, but you may want to restrict editing access to yourself to start. You can add editors later if needed.
Adding in your quarterly goals will follow the same process, but you can add the quarter goals in as a sub-plan to show that they support the annual OKRs. You can do this by hovering over a published plan, and clicking + sub-plan on the right, or after creating your quarterly plan by dragging and dropping the plan after it’s been created.
Multiple layers of OKRs
OKRs are organised in layers. You can have the top-level OKRs (L1) capturing the company goals for the quarter, then the department level OKRs underneath (L2), and then the team level OKRs on the third level (L3).
We recommend against doing individual OKRs as it often shifts the focus away from the business and customers. It’s not that personal goals are bad, it is more that they should be stored separately from the main OKR tree.
So, in Tability you can organise your OKRs by creating a plan for the company, and use sub-plans to create the layers underneath. We recommend using the following naming structure for your plans:
<Department or Team> OKRs <Quarter> <Year>
For instance, you could have Product Management OKRs Q2 2025 or Customer Support OKRs Q2 2025 as plan names.
Now here’s below what the workspace structure could look like if you need to have company, departments, and teams OKRs
Importing your OKRs
So far we’ve seen how you can organise your workspace but we haven’t looked at how you can add goals to Tability.
There’s a really quick way to add your OKRs to Tability if you already have them in a spreadsheet. You can use the magic importer to upload a CSV file, and our AI will parse the file to identify the objectives, key results, and initiatives. Once added, you simply need to adjust the targets and assign the owners to complete the process.
How to use the Magic Import
Go to the edit mode of your plan (click on Edit content from your plan dashboard)
Click on Use magic import
Select your CSV file
Click on Import from CSV file
After a couple of seconds you should see all the OKRs added to your workspace.
How to adjust targets and owners
By default, all imported key results have a target that goes from 0% to 100%. It’s a generic target that will fit most use cases, but we always recommend to use real metrics if you can.
For instance, if your KR is to Reduce CAC from $650 to $500, then you can do the following to update your key result.
Click on the target label 0 → 100%
In the form editor:
Set the target to $500 CAC
Set the starting at value to be 650
Save your changes
Note that the target field is a smart field where you can write down your metric with its format (ex: “$500 CAC”, “NPS 60”, “$34/lead/week”).
If you want to adjust the owner you just need to click on the avatar and search for the person that should be owning the OKR.
Writing your OKRs from scratch
A department or team can easily have 15 to 20 objectives and key results in a plan. This would be a lot of fields to fill and submit if you had to submit each goal individually via a form.
Fortunately Tability takes a completely different approach. With our custom-built editor, you will be able to add your OKRs inline with a doc-like experience.
Go to the edit mode of your plan (click on Edit content from your plan dashboard)
Start typing your objective and press enter
Keep adding your objective, or press tab to add key results
Your content is saved automatically as you type it, and Tability’s AI will automatically detect the metrics attached to your key results to set the targets for you.
If things aren’t set up the way you want, or if you want to have access to the advanced options, then you can click on the target field to open up the form mode.
Adding stakeholders to the list of watchers
The easiest way to keep your stakeholders informed is to add them to the list of watchers in the plans that are relevant for them. Once added, they will get email and push notifications whenever progress is shared on the key results.
How to add someone as a watcher:
Go to your plan dashboard
Click on Manage in the watchers widget in the right sidebar of your plan
Click Add watcher and select the right person to add.
Linking OKRs across your workspace
Once your OKRs are added, you might have a situation where you’ll want to link them to a parent.
Ex: The KR “Increase weekly leads from 2,500/week to 4,000/week” contributes to the top-level key result of “Increase quarterly revenue from $2.5m to $2.8m”.
You can do this easily by using relationships.
Click on the contributing KR
Click on Add relationship
Click on Add parent key result
Select the corresponding key result
You can also link a KR to an objective or use the same form to link the selected key result to a dependency.
The relationships are very flexible! You can select a parent KR from any plan, and you just have to use the selectors to find the right items
3. Reducing tool fatigue with integrations
We strongly believe in blending with existing applications. The more Tability can talk to or exist within your existing tools, the easier it will be for people to adopt Tability.
There are several things that you can do listed below.
Setting SSO and SCIM
You can simplify user management by configuring SAML SSO for authentication and using SCIM for user provisioning.
This combination means that you can centralise user management in your identity provider and quickly adjust access and permissions as needed.
Connecting Tability to Slack
You can connect Tability to Slack to bring reminders and reports digest directly in Slack DMs and Slack channels.
Check our documentation to see how you can add Tability to Slack
Adding Tability to Microsoft Teams
If you’re using Microsoft Teams, then you will be delighted with our Tability integration. Our MS Teams app will seamlessly work with Teams:
Users will be automatically signed in when they load the app.
You will get access to all the features of Tability.
Check our documentation to see how you can add Tability to Microsoft Teams
Connecting Tability to your project management tool
Knowing goals is one thing, knowing what people are doing to achieve said goals is another.
Tability makes it really easy to connect outcomes to outputs thanks to its initiative-tracking module. You can go one step further and connect your preferred project management tool to sync tasks instead of using Tability’s initiatives.
Check out the respective docs to see how you can connect your current project management platform to Tability.
Connecting OKRs to data sources
Many key results will require you to pull data from external sources (Salesforce, HubSpot, PowerBI, etc…). Instead of having to switch context all the time you can use the data connectors to add data source to each key result.
Go to the Integrations admin page of your workspace
Connect the tools that are relevant for you
Now click on a key result that you want to connect to a data source
Click on Connect a data source in the top right corner
Select the relevant data source
Follow the steps to complete your connection
4. Creating reports
Tability makes it easy to generate and share reports quickly with your most important stakeholders, starting with our out-of-the-box reporting. Each plan comes with its own dashboard, showing the current status of all key results, but also including trends on completion and confidence:
Teams can also use Presentation mode to quickly see all of their important OKR context at once, from the metric to the confidence to the most recent updates:
For an overview across the organization, our Insights page offers prebuilt options for seeing your team’s activity and finding key results that need your attention no matter where they are in your workspace:
Custom reports
Enterprise organizations will need to surface specific information quickly and easily to ensure their teams stay on track, which is why Tability has a number of options for creating your own custom reporting and dashboards.
Filters and segments
The filters will allow you to find key results in need of help from across your workspace, regardless of who owns them or what plan they’re in. You can filter by confidence, percentage completion, team assigned, tags, and more. Need to revisit these filters in the future? Save them as a segment:
Custom dashboards
After creating segments, you can add them into custom dashboards for a visual overview of how your team is performing. Bring in details about entire plans, segments of key results, individual contributor performance and more all in one place.
Questions?
Our team is dedicated to making your Tability rollout successful. Schedule a demo with our team here to discuss your rollout plan.
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