Writing check-ins in Tability

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.

Best Practices

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.

Analysis

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 initiatives 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 initiatives?

  • What is your expected outcome from your initiatives?

• 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?

Template

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.