Track Your Progress

Track Your Progress

Tracking is the ongoing process of checking in on your OKRs over the course of a cycle.

This takes up the largest part of each cycle, and isn’t a simple thumbs up, thumbs down exercise for Key Results. It includes the conversation and debate that grows out of measuring progress.

So what are you looking for when tracking OKRs?Simply put, you’re looking for progress on your metrics and milestones – your Key Results.

Measuring KRs objectively

I like to think about tracking along two vectors: altitude and attitude, just like you’d use to fly an airplane.

To gauge your altitude, you’re asking, “Where are we?” It’s the objective measure of the KR. This is why it’s so important that Key Results have clear measurements attached to them. You should be able to answer easily whether or not you’re meeting the metric, and to determine your distance from the goal.

To gauge your attitude, you’re asking, “How do we feel about achieving our Key Result?” It’s a more subjective look at overall progress. Is our action plan working? Do we feel at risk of falling short?

Next question: How often should you track your OKRs? If you check in on a KR just once a month, it can’t serve as an effective early warning signal. Tracking should be an integral part of every week. Just keep it quick.

An easy way to track OKRs: color coding

Many organizations find success using a “red, yellow, green” tracking system.

Green says, “We’re on track; the things we’re doing are working.”

Yellow says, “We’re at risk; we might need to adjust our approach.”

Red sounds an alarm and says, “We likely won’t meet our KRs. It’s time to take a hard look at what we’re doing and get collective buy-in on how to move forward.”

Evaluate both altitude and attitude to determine if each KR is red, yellow, or green.

Alan Eustace, the former senior vice president of engineering at Google, suggests that any change in color – say, a move from green to yellow or from yellow to red – should immediately instigate a plan to get back on track. A plan with a clear owner.

If we’re at yellow or red, what needs to change to get us back into the green zone?

Approach tracking with curiosity. Present the facts with objectivity and precision, rather than vague descriptions or generic status updates.

We’ve all been in that meeting where everyone goes around the table and recites their to-do list. Weak updates omit or sugarcoat important information.
When people say, “This week I completed my review,” or “We’re doing great,” or “We really messed up this quarter, but I don’t know why,” it doesn’t help the team adjust and move forward.

Best practices for updates

Your updates should be concrete and include direction:

• We grew by this much.
• We’re off track by this much.
• We need help with this specific challenge this week.

And by all means, please do not fudge a metric to make a KR green when it shouldn’t be. That’s unfair and misleading to your team. Everyone’s relying on accurate measures to guide the work.

Tracking shouldn’t evoke fear and loathing. It doesn’t need to be overly formal. Any conversation about meaningful progress can be considered a form of tracking.

I remember the time when we were working on healthcare.gov, and the website kept going down at the same moment each day. And we couldn’t figure out why.

We raised the issue at one of our daily standup meetings, which brought together 40 to 50 people representing every department. We described the issue and asked if the room had any theories on why it was happening.

Way in the back of the room, a hand went up. One of the engineers said, “I think I’m the one causing the website to crash.” Sure enough, he was running a script every day that was triggering the failure.

Instead of getting angry with the engineer in front of the group, we gave him a round of applause. It was just such a relief to know that someone had a hunch about the problem. And that was the only thing we needed to fix to make progress on our OKR.

That’s the culture we’re looking to foster as we track our OKRs. The more people are comfortable in pointing out weaknesses or mistakes without fear of retribution, the faster we’ll all get to a solution that works.