The OKR Check In

Holding regular check ins is the single biggest indicator of success with OKR. The most successful teams hold them weekly.

The purpose of the OKR check in is quite simply to help us achieve our OKRs. We review progress and decide what we can do next to give us the best chance of success. First and foremost it’s a conversation.

Here are the key steps of a good check in.

1. Update your key results in your tracker

• If they never change, is that because they are lagging metrics, do you need leading metrics? Will they change before the end of the period?

2. Discuss how confident you feel of achieving your key results.

• Green, we are on track and we’re confident of achieving our goal
• Amber, there are doubts we will meet our goal
• Red, unless we do something significantly different, we will fail

3. What’s next? The critical part of the conversation.

• It’s important that no matter how confident we are, we’re intentional about our actions. What will we do this period and why?
• What do we expect to learn, what results do we anticipate?
• If we are amber or red, we think about alternative approaches. Is there something more fundamentally flawed about our hypotheses or are impediments slowing the team down?
• What are we learning, what are we testing, what are we building?

4. Looking further down the line, what’s our 1-3 month horizon looking like?

• e.g. Is there user research or other things we need to plan in advance etc.

The check in shouldn’t be a long drawn out affair, but at the end you should have a shared understanding of what you’re doing to achieve your OKRs in the next period.