OKR Planing Meeting Template

What Is an OKR Planning Meeting?

An OKR planning meeting is a gathering of teams to map out their objectives and key results for a given timeline. These meetings are usually held at the beginning of a project, quarter, or year to ensure everyone involved has the same understanding of expectations for the upcoming period of activity. 

During an OKR planning meeting, team members discuss core goals, define measurable outcomes, and commit to execution plans that will result in successful achievement of identified targets. 

This process helps to orient everyone on the objective, as well as provide accountability for successful completion by assigning tasks to ensure delivery. By engaging in structured OKR planning meetings, teams can better track progress and stay focused on objectives over time.

What Topics to Cover in an OKR Planning Template?

To ensure everyone is on the same page and push the organization’s agenda forward, it’s important to facilitate structured planning sessions. 

An OKR planning template is a great way to kickstart the process, as it serves as a detailed and comprehensive guide on setting measurable objectives, key results, and interrelated assumptions and constraints.

Company Vision

With a clear understanding of the company's vision and goals, it can be easier to align your team's OKR with the bigger picture. 

By reviewing the company's vision and goals, you can ensure that your team is working towards the same with proper communication and smooth collaboration. What happens a lot of the time when you’ve been working on something for a long time is you forget the main goals and mission of the company. A succinct OKR meeting can put things back into perspective and stop you from digressing.

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a great way to generate ideas and identify areas of focus. After a common understanding of the company visions, sit down with your team to decide what our team should focus on in this OKR cycle. Then, start narrowing down the list to the most important or achievable items.

When it comes to setting OKRs, it's important to involve your whole team in the process. After all, everyone will be working towards the same objectives, so it makes sense to get everyone's input. 

Set Objectives and KRs

Setting objectives and key results is an essential part of the OKR planning meeting - they give us actionable steps to get there and help keep us on track. 

According to Doerr, who introduced OKR to Google, the OKR formula can be described by 

I will (Objective) as measured by (Key Results).

Objectives are short descriptions of what you want to achieve and should be both inspirational and attainable.

With the objective set, your team will start breaking that down into key results that guide how we achieve the objectives. Effective KRs are specific and measurable. For each objective, you should have 2-5 KRs.
Example:

Objective: Increase customer satisfaction

KR 1: Increase Net Promoter Score from X to Y

KR 2: Reduce customer churn rate by X%

KR 3: Increase the average customer response time to Y seconds

Final OKR set 

Setting OKRs for a team is an important exercise to align the team with company goals and inspire engagement toward those goals. 

It's essential to take the time to discuss the set and examine if they are ambitious but achievable, specific and measurable, and relevant to the company mission and vision. 

Additionally, it's important to identify any risks or potential problems that could prevent the team from achieving its objectives - these should be addressed early in order to ensure everyone on the team is properly informed and aware of any external factors affecting their progress. With collaboration and clear communication during the discussion phase, teams can ensure they create successful OKRs that accomplish their desired goals.