OKR Alignment

Overview

Defining OKRs is probably one of the most time-consuming processes in any company.

We start with a team-level brainstorming and data gathering, get a first draft ready, present them to the main stakeholders for feedback, polish our draft, and then present it to the whole company. It requires a lot of back-and-forth and time spent in meetings.

It’s also one of the processes where we are most likely to lose information along the way.

When each team presents their final version, they will explain why they chose those OKRs. But for the sake of time, it will be a short explanation. Even if they share documentation to read offline, no one really reads it. The lack of context makes it hard to fully understand and give relevant feedback.

Claap solves these problems.

You can cut on meeting time by recording a claap walking your stakeholders through your proposals, and asking for feedback. You can also share your recording first with a small group of people and then share it with a broader audience.

What’s the benefit? Because it’s the same recording, the second group will have access to the discussions that happened before, without anything getting lost in translation.

When to use the OKRs Playbook

The OKR Playbook was designed to help you reduce the time it takes from OKR ideation to approval, ensuring everyone has access to the same information and context.Two types of teams will get the most value out of an asynchronous OKR review:

• Distributed teams: we all know how hard it is to find a meeting slot across timezones to share feedback and get alignment. Even if your team does overlap for a couple of hours, it will be very hard to coordinate agendas so everyone can meet.
• Large teams: a squad in a medium-large company can easily reach 8-10 people, including Product Manager, Product Designer, Software Engineers, QA, Data Analysts, etc. And we’re not even including here other business stakeholders. Or presenting the OKRs to the entire company. That’s another level of calendar Tetris.

How to get started

Record your proposal

Start by connecting your objectives to the overall company goals. Why did you decide on these objectives? How do they contribute to the company’s goals for the quarter? Then explain the expected Key Results. What do you have that supports your assumptions? What projects do you have in mind to move the needle on those metrics?

When recording your claap, we recommend having supporting documents open in different browser tabs. This way, you can easily switch tabs while recording as you walk them through your proposal and the data that supports it.

Ask main stakeholders for feedback

You want to ensure you collect and incorporate the feedback of main business stakeholders first, before sharing your plans with the entire company. Make it easier to give feedback: highlight the moments in the video where you expect feedback and mention the right people, so they know their input is required.

Reply to comments

As feedback starts coming in, ensure you clarify doubts, answer questions, and move forward with decisions. Organize discussions in threads to keep topics separated and resolve threads once a decision is made.

If a discussion starts being too complex to discuss asynchronously, book a short meeting. That’s the beauty of asynchronous collaboration. Align first on the easiest topics then, if needed, book a 15-min sync to tackle the challenging ones. With the most relevant persons instead of having 10 people in the same room for 90 minutes.

Share the final plan with the wider group

Once the first review is done with your main stakeholders, share it with the broader group. We advise sharing the same recording used in step 3. Everyone has access to previous discussions, and you avoid getting the same questions twice.

Move to execution

You did it! You created your OKRs with radical transparency and ensured everyone could give feedback and inputs.

Before moving to your next project, add a label to your claap to make it clear discussion time is over and now it’s time to start executing.