Chaos Prevention: Cadence, Cadence, Cadence

The Gtmhub Technical Success Team helps our clients leverage the Gtmhub Results Orchestration System to achieve individual, team, and company goals.

In this series, the TS crew shares insights on everything from using individual product features to integrating Gtmhub into your technology stack to using Gtmhub to address business problems and opportunities.

If you are interested in adding this or any of our other standard Insightboards to your Gtmhub account contact your Technical or Customer Success Manager or contact us directly.

Getting good at creating effective OKRs takes time

…even with help. Once you have created them, they shouldn't be left to waste away. Here’s how a regular OKR update cadence makes your OKRs as effective as possible:

Keeping regular

At the individual level, regularly updating OKRs helps the owner to stay attentive to their goals and constantly aware of how they should be tackling them. Without these regular interactions with their OKR, it’s easy for owners to lose that vital power of OKRs, Focus.  

At the management level, OKRs make it easy for leadership teams to apply resources based on which Objectives are falling behind schedule. Without regular updates on OKRs, leaders can’t get an exact view of the current situation, suddenly the Transparency that OKRs gift is taken away. 

The three crucial aspects of an OKR’s current status are the current attainment, the plan to improve that status, and the confidence the owner has that they can action that plan and that it will move the needle in the way you hope it will.

Confidence ratings provide context beyond the actual attainment, which is important when you are expecting a KR to do well even though the progress is low. But how can we be sure about our confidence ratings?

Am I too confident?

Ensuring updates are accurate comes with difficulties.

It's straightforward to spot if a single person is consistently over or underconfident, but how can you see if everyone is?

At Gtmhub, our Technical Success team has designed the OKR Update Analysis Insightboard to keep track of how regularly Key Results are updated and how accurately their confidence rating tracks with their eventual attainment.

The Insightboard gives an overview of all Key Result updates and whether their confidence rating is aligned with their attainment — any outliers will be flagged. As the OKR’s deadline comes closer, the allowed margin of error reduces.

Translation: it’s okay to have mismatches early on, but as deadlines approach, confidence and attainment must be well-aligned.

Does one team or department consistently overestimate its success?

Are there some teams that don’t update their KRs until late in the quarter and fail on their Objectives because there wasn’t enough lead time to spot shortcomings?

This Insightboard helps you detect inaccuracies and inactivity so that you can tackle them. 

If you are interested in adding this or any of our other standard Insightboards to your Gtmhub account contact your Technical or Customer Success Manager or contact us directly.