The complete Tability guide to OKRs
From understanding OKRs to learning how to use Tability, here's everything we train teams how to do in one easy resource
Whether you’re dedicated to developing a new process to help your team be more aligned or were given the task to roll out a new process you’re still trying to understand to your organisation, we at Tability want you to feel confident in the work that you’re doing.
About this guide
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about OKRs with explicit advice about how to proceed. Collectively, we have over a decade of OKR experience, and we’ve built this guide so that you can follow the best practices we’ve seen work at all sorts of different organisations. Below is a mix of videos, articles, and checklists from our blog, onboarding accelerator, and guides to help you throughout the OKR cycle.
Before you start
Check out these resources about OKRs and Tability that can help you get up to speed before you start crafting your own OKRs.
A deep dive into what OKRs are and how they should be used in an organisation. Includes the benefits of OKRs and how to explain them to your team.
Answering one of the most common questions about OKRs– how is this different from the other metrics that we track?
A full demo of the Tability product.
50 tips for outcome-driven teams
OKRs require your team to think in terms of outcomes, not outputs. We’ve compiled a list of tips on why you should be an outcome-driven team, what outcome-driven teams look like, how to become outcome-driven, and things not to do.
Planning your OKR implementation
As you get started, make a copy of this implementation checklist and follow along with the rest of the series. The checklist includes an expected timeline for a full implementation
In this video and article, we’ll cover how to choose your OKR leadership, the teams that you’ll roll out OKRs to, how to develop an OKR playbook, and when to develop top-level vs. team-level OKRs.
Need more information on why you should develop your top-level goals first? Thinking about bottom up goal setting? Check out our guide on top down vs. bottom up goal setting.
Writing OKRs
Writing good OKRs is key to a successful OKR implementation. There is a ton of advice on how to write OKRs out there, and not all of it will help you fully understand how to craft an OKR. We’ve created a series of tutorials and other resources to help you write great goals.
Watch our Goal Setting Masterclass before developing your top-level OKRs.
Check out our guide on setting Aspirational vs. Committed goals. We’ll cover balancing roofshots and moonshots to make sure your team feels successful without sacrificing their ambition.
Want some real-world examples of OKRs straight from the experts? We published our real OKRs with details about why we chose them and set them up like we did.
Sometimes, the hardest part of getting started is just picking a metric that makes sense. Check out our list of top KPIs and success metrics for different functions.
Want some help turning a big idea into an OKR? Try our the goal-setting AI in Tability. Wrote your goals manually? We have AI feedback as well!
Adding OKRs into Tability
All of your OKRs will go into Plans. Before we can start adding our OKRs into Tability, we’ll need to understand Plans and their relationships to one another. Check out this guide on how plans work.
Check out our guide on adding goals to Tability. Whether you’re writing your goals directly into Tability, using our AI to generate goals, or uploading your goals from a document or spreadsheet, we’ve got you covered.
Want to include the tasks or projects that you’re doing to work on your OKRs? We’ve got you covered. See our guide on managing tasks and syncing Tability with your project management tool.
Tasks aren’t the only thing that can be connected to your other tools. You can automatically keep your key results up to date with data connectors. Teams love the time savings.
Keeping your goals up to date
Without goal updates, your team is likely to forget your OKRs or deprioritize them if there isn’t a mechanism in place to talk about what they need. How do you develop a process that keeps OKRs top of mind? Check out our resources below:
Start with our Goal execution masterclass. We cover choosing the right team member to own the key results, why goal updates are important, how to motivate your team, and how to use their updates to make strategic decisions.
Our guide on running a weekly routine gives you a day-by-day breakdown of what you should expect from your team in order to keep your OKRs on track.
More than just updates, you want to make sure you’re getting good, useful updates from your team. Our guide on getting good updates from your team talks about how to balance leading and trailing indicators and developing a culture of transparency.
Want to give your team a cheat sheet for writing good updates? We’ve got a guide on writing check-ins for your team as well, complete with a check-in template they can use.
We make it easy to get all of your stakeholders the information they need. So check out how to share your goals with anyone who needs updates.
Want an overview of the reporting options available to you? Check out our reporting guide with how to use our out of the box reporting or build your own custom reports.
Ending your goal cycle
OKRs only work if you learn something from them. There are multiple schools of thought on how to grade your OKRs, but may we present the Tability way:
Our retrospective masterclass is the best place to start when it comes to learning from your OKRs. We cover both monthly and quarterly retrospectives and how to use both to push your team forward.
Heard that 70% should mean success? That might work for Google, but tends to confuse other orgs, especially those just getting started. Check out our blog post on scoring your OKRs.
Want to make the most of your Retrospective meeting? Check out our guide to 5 different styles of retrospective meeting.
Last updated
