Tracking OKRs and tasks with Tability
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This post will tell you everything that you need to know to start tracking OKRs and tasks with Tability.
This video has quick tutorial for each of the topics covered in this post. Click on the link "Jump to video" to go to the right timestamp.
Achieving ruthless prioritisation with OKRs and Tability
A simple way to create effective OKRs
Adding your OKRs and tasks to Tability
Writing check-ins in Tability
Monitoring OKRs for a specific department or team
Getting an overview of your entire org
Seeing dependencies between key results
Tracking the progress of your direct reports and teammates
Using tasks with OKRs
How to create custom views
The job of Tability is simple:
To make OKRs extremely easy to manage, and
To help you and your team achieve ruthless prioritisation
Teams cannot stay focused on their objectives unless you force them.
Not because people aren’t serious about their work, but because work produces distractions as a by-product.
Here’s a simple example:
You’ve just finished the beta of your product and decide that you can now start charging people
You set an objective to get 100 paying customers in 90 days
But you haven’t implemented billing yet
Your team looks at options and decides on using Stripe
But wait, we haven’t talked about the billing cycles… Do we offer monthly payments? Annual payments?
We decide we’ll do both, but wait… What’s the cancellation process? Do we cancel immediately, or after the billing cycle?
And what if annual customers want to reduce the number of seats?
And what if we want to apply discounts?
Oh, we also need to offer trials, how do we handle that?
Etc, etc, etc. Those are all legit questions that will lead to legit meetings that will lead to legit specs that will lead to… You see the picture
And days go by while you’re solving these issues
And the number of paying customers stays at zero
Work makes you busy, busy takes you away from your goal
The better way is to start the week by looking at the number of paying customers and reporting it on a chart. Don’t make the mistake of just replacing the latest update with a new one. It is imperative that you keep the history of the updates, and even better if you can show trends on a graph.
In this case, it’d be obvious that we’re flatlining at zero customers. And everyone should feel the pain of not moving the needle on the core goal.
That’s how you keep the right urgency, and that’s when you can start making effective trade-offs.
Do we need to build all the cancellation features or can we ask people to contact us for now?
Do we need to let people upgrade to an annual subscription or can we ask them to contact support?
Do we even need to wait for the Stripe integration to start charging customers?
When done right, OKRs push teams to make the right critical decisions every week.
Before we start exploring Tability, we need to talk about the weekly routine that you’ll need to support your OKR process.
As mentioned in the previous section, you will need a forcing function to bring the core objectives back to the center of conversations. Do not underestimate how quickly meetings, calls, emails, projects, etc can make goals disappear.
Here’s what you need to do for every department and team that has a set of quarterly OKRs:
For each department or team having a set of quarterly OKRs:
Add an OKR review meeting to your calendar, preferably on Monday or Tuesday (the latest)
Call that meeting “<Department/team> OKR review”
Invite all key results owners
You can add other stakeholders, but keep the meeting to 10 people max
Before the meeting:
Progress on the KRs should have been updated prior to the meeting (see section)
During the meeting
Have each KR owner talking through their updates
Keep it light and quick when things are green
Dive into challenges when KRs are yellow or red
Don’t forget to capture and discuss the strategic tasks attached to the OKRs
These meetings can absolutely fit into 30 minutes if you run them weekly. The more often you talk about something, the faster you can get to the important points. You will quickly notice the quality of the discussions increase after 3-4 weeks.
By contrast, if you only discuss OKRs once a month you will observe that 30% of your meeting will be spent on bringing people up to speed.
The OKR review meetings are not a replacement for Monthly Business Review meetings (MBRs) and Quarterly Business Review Meetings (QBRs).
During the OKR review meetings, we mostly focus on the key results and tasks, and the meeting is limited to the core team working on that set of OKRs.
MBRs and QBRs will focus more on the objectives and include a larger set of stakeholders. It’s a time to communicate outside of the team about the progress made.
Quick summary
Tability will only be valuable if you track progress on OKRs every week.
You must commit to the check-ins process. People must do it seriously, or not at all.
Every department and team that owns quarterly OKRs should have a weekly review meeting.
Don't have your OKRs yet? Check out our guide on writing OKRs to find a step-by-step approach for defining your quarterly goals.
You will most likely have to add your strategy to Tability at some point.
Check the following guide (with video) to understand how to organise your OKRs in Tability, how to import data from a spreadsheet (it’s magic), and how to write your OKRs and tasks from scratch:
Each week, your team will be asked to do a check-in for the outcomes that they own. Check-ins look for three things: Progress, Confidence, and Analysis.
Progress is for your metrics– it’s wherever you are currently. If you’re going from $1 million in ARR to $1.3 million, you’d include your current revenue number in the progress section.
Confidence is how confident your team is on being able to hit this goal by the end of the quarter (or whatever period you’re using for your goals). This is a qualitative assessment based on not just the metric progress, but any other information they might have. If, for your revenue goal, your team hasn’t made much progress, but they know they have an extremely large deal that’s almost certain to close, they might mark a goal as On track, despite the numbers looking low.
Analysis is where your team will give context for their rating. Using the same example, if they’ve marked their goal as On track despite low progress, they’ll want to include those details about the pending deals in the analysis section. If they’re blocked on the deal because of a security review, this would also be the right place to add that information, and to possible tag someone who can help or ask for someone to help them find the right person to reach out to.
When filling out a check-in, the progress rating is fairly straightforward. But there are a few things to note for the rest of the check-in.
How to choose confidence
Confidence is not only a way to show the likelihood of success, it’s also a way to help the team prioritize goals. Goals that have lower confidence, ones that are marked At risk or Off track, likely need more resources than ones that are On track. You can think of confidence levels as:
Green/On track - You’ll likely achieve your goal
Yellow/At risk - There are issues that are impacting your progress and could cause you to miss your target.
Red/Off track - There are issues blocking your ability to achieve your key result.
These confidence levels aren’t permanent and shouldn’t be seen as a final grade on your work or your progress towards your key results. This is just to let the team know how goals are tracking and help you signal if you need help on your key results.
Avoid marking a goal yellow/At risk for three weeks in a row. After three weeks, chances are that the goal is improved, but the owner is feeling nervous about maintaining momentum or that the goal has gone off track, but the owner doesn’t want to be seen as “failing” at their key result. Keeping goals marked as at risk for long periods of time prevents your team from having the proper sense of urgency.
Marking a goal as red is one of the most important things that an outcome owner can do. When goals become off track, signaling that to the rest of the team can both create that sense of urgency and allow for an updated set of priorities that lets the outcome get unblocked and back on track.
Metrics and Confidence can only tell the team so much, especially if they don’t seem aligned (the metric is low but confidence is high, for example). This is where a comment in the analysis section will help shorten the time it takes for other teams to get context on your goal. A good comment contains the following:
What got you to where you’re at?
What projects or tasks have you done to make progress?
What external factors have played a role in your progress?
What blockers have you dealt with and gotten around?
What do you have planned moving forward?
What are the next steps that you’re taking?
What is the timeline for your in-progress tasks?
What is your expected outcome from your tasks?
What should the team be aware of?
What blockers do you currently have?
What help do you need from other team members or teams?
Is there anything you or the team need to do differently to stay/get on track?
If you’d like a template for writing your check-ins, try this:
Last week we [what projects or work did you do towards your goals?].
This moved our metrics from ____ to _____, which is [what we hoped for/just OK/not what we wanted].
Next week, we’re going to [projects or work that you plan on doing], which should [keep or accelerate our momentum/get us back on track].
I need ___________ in order to succeed this week.
In Tability, OKRs are contained in plans. A plan will usually map to a department or a team, and we recommend naming them using the following format:
<Department or Team> OKRs <Quarter> <Year>
Each plan has a built-in dashboard that will show you:
Summary of progress and confidence
The OKRs data (title, confidence, metrics…)
Progress charts
Alignment map
Here’s how you can find the OKR dashboard for a specific team:
Go to the Plans section
Expand the items to find the plan that you’re looking for (or use the name filter)
Click on the plan
You will be redirected to the plan dashboard where you will be able to see all the corresponding OKR data.
You can click on the expand icon next to each key result to see dependent OKRs as well as the tasks attached to the key result.
You can also click on any key result to open up a detail panel that will show you:
Progress chart for the key result
Latest check-in
List of attached tasks
Cascading map for that specific key result
OKRs are all about alignment and it is crucial for leaders to be able to quickly understand how the different departments and teams contribute to the upper level goals. This is something that can be done easily by using relationships in Tability.
For instance, you could have a top-level KR about aggressive revenue growth. With Tability, the Sales team will be able to link the relevant KRs back to that revenue goal, and make it easy to have a complete picture of the progress made during the quarter.
Check out this guide to see how you can link a key result to a parent
If you’re in a OKR dashboard for a specific team or department, you can simply click on the expand button at the beginning of a line to show the dependent key results and tasks.
There’s no limit to the number of levels that you can have. You can keep on expanding dependencies as long as they exist.
You can also visualise dependencies in a map by clicking on a specific key result. Once the detail panel is open, you can scroll to the bottom to see all the surrounding key results.
If you need to zoom out, you can go to the Strategy Map to see all the OKRs that are currently active, grouped by departments and teams.
The Strategy Map replicates the hierarchy of plans that has been established in the Plans section of your workspace.
From the Strategy Map you can click on any KR to open up its detail panel.
So far we’ve looked at OKRs from the perspective of an entire department or a team. But if you’re a manager you’ll often want to see how your direct reports are doing – and they can have key results and tasks spread across multiple plans.
You can set up your direct reports in your Focus page and Tability will then show you a map of your reports (as well as your manager). From there you will have the ability to show the KRs and tasks attached to each person
How to set up your direct reports:
Go to your My Focus page
Scroll to the Org network section
Click on Update your network
Select your direct reports and manager
If you want to see the goals attached to a teammate that isn’t directly linked to you, you can open up their Tability profile to see all their active key results and tasks.
Go to the People section of your workspace
Use the filters to find your teammate
Click on their name
The task module in Tability will allow you to track the work that teams are doing to achieve the OKRs. Tability also syncs with platforms like Jira, ClickUp, and Linear to allow the team to use their preferred project management tools while also increasing transparency and alignment.
How to connect your project management tool to Tability
Tability can also connect to Asana, but unfortunately we are not able to sync statuses across the platforms.
Each plan in Tability also has task-centric views designed that will help you see at glance the tasks that are currently in progress, the list of blockers, and the things that are ready to be released.
How to go the task view of your plan:
Go to your plan dashboard
Click on the Tasks tab
Tability comes with a lot of pre-built dashboards, views and filters. The goal is to minimise as much as possible the amount of configuration and setup steps, and to provide answers to 80% of your questions within 2 or 3 clicks.
For the remaining 20%, you will be able to use the filters and custom dashboards to create your own views.
How to use the filters:
Go to the Filters section of your workspace
Select the tab that you’re interested in (objectives, key results, or tasks)
Use the filters to find the relevant items
Optional: save your combination of filters as a segment to be able to load it quickly the next time
How to use custom dashboards:
Go to the Dashboards section of your workspace
Click on Create a dashboard
Add the widgets that you need to make your own dashboard
Save your dashboard
Tability can turn any OKR plan into a beautiful presentation that is easy to digest by anyone who’s not familiar with the tool.
You can also enable public access for the presentation mode to allow non-users to see the content.
How to share the presentation mode publicly:
Go to your plan dashboard
Click on the button to open the presentation mode
Click on Share
Toggle the option Enable public access
Copy the URL
Share that URL with the audience
That’s it! This guide should have covered most of the features that you’ll need to get started.
Now the next step is to start doing your check-ins!Other articles
