Goal Setting Retreat Guide
The most effective way to ensure that your team gets stuff done - and the right stuff done - is to have a formal goal-setting process. Once you get your goal-setting process up and running, you’ll be creating your annual goals at the start of each new year. You’ll also pause from sprinting every three months to align the team on what needs to get done for your quarterly goals.
Your schedule will look something like this:
January: Annual goal setting + Q1 goal setting
April: Q2 goal setting
July: Q3 goal setting
October: Q4 goal setting
Although you may be ready to launch the goal-setting process with your team, it takes time and a little finesse to get your team ready to dig in with you. We’d encourage you to think about warming your team up to begin this process at least a month before you want to actually begin. This is true whether you have two people on your team or twenty.
INTRODUCING OKR METHODOLOGY TO YOUR TEAM:
Change is hard - even for people who have chosen to work at an early-stage startup! You’ll have a lot more success if you warm folks up to the idea of goal setting. Here are some change management steps you may want to consider:
Socialize goal setting in 1:1 meetings:
In individual meetings, try to introduce the needs you’ve identified for beginning a more formalized goal-setting process. This should be a soft introduction; consider using language like “I’m exploring…” or “I think it’s time to pilot…”
Get leadership team buy-in: If you have any senior leaders on your team, you probably want to get their buy-in and support in a team meeting after you’ve socialized the idea individually. This is a great opportunity to surface questions and make it clear what you need from them, as leaders, to support the rollout of the goals-setting process.
All-hands or town hall meeting: Once everyone on the team has been made aware that we’re likely to begin a formalized goal-setting process, it’s time to bring everyone together and talk about why we’re going to begin an OKR/goal-setting process and what success will look like if we are doing a great job. You will want to walk them through the timeline and process so they understand what’s about to happen.
Consider sharing your last fundraising deck to remind your team of the technical goals your investors are expecting you to achieve before you need to fundraise again.
Have everyone watch these introductory videos:
These videos will help everyone understand the basic framework of OKRs. They are short and easily accessible.
John Doerr: Why the secret to success is setting the right goals (11 min)
Why OKRs? (2 min)
What is an OKR? (3 min)
What makes good OKRs? (3 min)
Set aside time for a few important meetings:
One 2-hour block of time for your team to brainstorm
Your quarterly board meeting (if you have them) in between team meetings
One 1-hour block of time to finalize the OKRs 2-4 days later with your team
Pre-thinking for the meeting:
Ask people to think, in advance, about what they think the 5 most important company-wide goals should be for the next year.
Who should attend goal-setting meetings?
Until everyone on the team can no longer sit at the same table together (~15 people), you can have everyone on the team participate in goal setting. Once you get too big, though, you’ll have to scaffold these meetings so that leaders have pre-meetings with their teams and then come to the goal-setting meeting ready to share out what their team thinks. Leaders will then relay back what happened in the meeting to their respective teams. This is how you scale the goal-setting process as you grow.
RUNNING YOUR GOAL-SETTING MEETING:
At the beginning of your goal-setting session, take a minute again, to remind people of what makes good Objectives (O) and Key Results (KRs) - and any big technical milestones we need to achieve. Then, have everyone brainstorm individually:
What are some potential objectives that we need to achieve this year?
Share out ideas: Go around the room and share ideas until all ideas have been exhausted. Consider going around in a circle to keep everyone’s voice in the conversation equitably.
Organize ideas: You may want to use a Google doc or a whiteboard and post-it notes. Either way, make sure that everyone can visually see all of the ideas so you can start to pull concepts together thematically. You’ll want to eventually end up with 2-5 objectives total.
A few reminders:
Discovery teams should focus on process above outcomes.
Not all of your goals should be scientific or technical - you’re not just a lab, you’re building a company.
OBJECTIVE 1:
OBJECTIVE 2:
OBJECTIVE 3:
OBJECTIVE 4:
OBJECTIVE 5:
Identify relevant key results: You can ask folks to work in small groups or individually, but the next step is about identifying the right key results for each objective. You’ll want to end up with no more than five key results, ideally, for each objective.
You likely want to have a similar process to that which you had for surfacing your objective: have people go around the room and share and then refine until you get it right. This may take a while since the details really matter.
OBJECTIVE 1:
Key result 1:
Key result 2:
Key result 3:
Key result 4:
Key result 5:
OBJECTIVE 2:
Key result 1:
Key result 2:
Key result 3:
Key result 4:
Key result 5:
OBJECTIVE 3:
Key result 1:
Key result 2:
Key result 3:
Key result 4:
Key result 5:
OBJECTIVE 4:
Key result 1:
Key result 2:
Key result 3:
Key result 4:
Key result 5:
OBJECTIVE 5:
Key result 1:
Key result 2:
Key result 3:
Key result 4:
Key result 5:
You can use this form here or you can create a page in Notion, Asana, Airtable - or whatever tool your team already uses. The document should be accessible to everyone in the company and shared.
BOARD MEETINGS + FEEDBACK FROM ADVISORS
If you have formalized board meetings, you’ll want to schedule one for the period between brainstorming and finalizing your OKRs so that you can get feedback and buy-in from your board members.
If you don’t yet have a formalized board, you still may want to ask for feedback from advisors and trusted mentors in between your team’s brainstorming session and operationalizing your goals. It’s enormously helpful to have outsiders and people with more experience chime in before you go heads down and sprint for 12 weeks.
REVISIT AND FINALIZE YOUR OKRs IN 2-4 DAYS:
Your team will get the best results when everyone has time to sit with the drafted objectives and key results, do some final thinking about what are feasible and ambitious goals, and then come back to finalize them together. The details really do matter here.
Make sure you add the following to your objectives and key results:
Timelines: Which key results are due when? Give them a deadline. Look at the dates visually so you can anticipate any overlapping or conflicting dates.
People: Who is responsible for what? Consider using an accountability matrix to make it clear who is Accountable (A), Responsible ( R), Consulted ( C), and Informed (I) for each key result.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER:
Your final OKR goals document may end up looking something like this. Make sure everyone has bought into them and the following information is present:
Objectives
Key Results
Timelines
People
TRACKING PROGRESS:
Goals are relatively useless if we don’t use them daily and weekly as our map and compass. Individuals should translate team OKRs into personal tasks. Managers should be asking about how goals are going in every weekly 1:1 meeting with direct reports.
Consider bringing up your goals in every team meeting and asking for a quick “red” “yellow” or “green” report to flag any potential roadblocks that may be getting in the way of staying on track. Use whatever software or tool will be most easily adopted and used by your team. Fan favorites are Asana, Airtable, and Notion.
Ideally, when you surface your goals on a weekly basis, small issues can be nipped in the bud so that your team can successfully stay on course for a successful quarter crushing your goals.