The OKR Stack – Crushing Your Goals With The Four Square
Still one of the best ways to keep your goals and your work all in one place
“Many companies who try OKRs fail, and they blame the system. But no system works if you don’t actually keep to it. Setting a goal at the beginning of a quarter and expecting it to magically be achieved by the end is naïve.”
Wodtke, Christina. The Team that Managed Itself: A Story of Leadership (p. 221). Kindle Edition.
Welcome back to the latest edition of the Upstream Full-Stack Journal, helping you get the most value from the full end-to-end Value Delivery stack, from Strategy through OKRs, Product Management, and Agile Systems of Delivery.
Hope everyone’s enjoying a great holiday weekend.
In this edition:
Managing your OKRs with Christina Wodtke’s Four Square
The Cadence Is The Key To Unlock OKR Achievement
Let’s dig in!
Full Stack OKRs with Christina Wodtke’s Four Square
In my role as an Agile and Product Coach working with multiple teams, I struggled to help them stay focused on the highest-priority work.
After years of trying different approaches, one of the biggest mindset shifts I experienced was learning about Christina Wodtke’s “Four Square” in the first edition of her book “Radical Focus.”
Simplifying OKR management
For anyone implementing Objectives and Key Results, you may find, as I did, that you need a simpler way to keep your team’s most important work front and center. Traditional roadmaps can either be too high-level, or unhelpful to show progress against the metrics you may be trying to move.
Even teams successfully checking in on their OKRs may lose context on shorter-term priorities, overlook key tasks or dependencies, or get blindsided by crucial health metrics that have gone off-course.
If you’re looking for a better way to work with your OKR-driven software teams, read on.
The OKR Stack – The Four Square
The Four Square is divided into four quadrants:
Priorities For This Week (What needs to get done NOW?)
OKR Confidence (How confident are we about delivering against each of our Key Result goals?)
Health Metrics (What we should protect as we push for OKRs?)
Upcoming Big Projects (Highest-priority things to keep in mind and stay ahead of)
As an example, this would be a set of OKRs for a small team running an online whiskey business:
Each quadrant and the sequencing of the items over the Four Square is carefully thought-out to see everything in one place at a glance.
Part 2 in this series goes into the right side of the Four Square, showing you how to use regular check-ins to keep tabs on:
OKR Confidence
Health Metrics
Read the full article on Medium here:
Or on my personal blog here:
Part 3 in this series discusses how you can use the left side of the Four Square to highlight and keep these two elements on your team’s radar at all times:
Priorities For This Week
Upcoming Big Projects
Read the full article on Medium here:
Or on my personal blog here:
Make It Work for Your Team & Context
One of the key pieces I’ve found, and that Christina Wodtke also has frequently shared, is the flexibility to adapt the Four Square to your organization’s and teams’ needs.
The point is just to keep the four quadrants front and center at all times.
The most crucial times for this to happen is during the Monday commitment sessions, and Friday celebrations, or the OKR cadence.
The Cadence Is The Key To Unlock OKR Achievement
While the Four Square can be extremely effective, it’s the combination of the Four Square together with the cadence that provides the most powerful method for helping you and your teams achieve your goals.
Christina Wodtke talks about “Mondays” and “Fridays,” but if your organization starts Sprints on Thursdays and ends on Wednesdays (as we do), feel free to substitute the bookends of your start and end dates.
Monday: Connect team tasks to OKRs
The Monday planning session sets the intention for the coming time box.
Guided by the Objective and the ~3 Key Results, the team lays out the specific things they’re planning on doing during the coming week to move their Key Results.
Make Sure Health Metrics are Part of Your Weekly Plan
The tasks the team choses to prioritize as P1 & P2 in the top-left quadrant should reflect inputs from & awareness of the other three quadrants –
OKR Confidence (How confident are we about delivering against each of our Key Result goals?)
Health Metrics (What we should protect as we push for OKRs?)
Upcoming Big Projects (Highest-priority things to keep in mind and stay ahead of)
Your either choosing something to move your numbers, or proactively getting ahead of things that could drag the team down and bring their work to a halt.
This helps teams stay on track without chasing the “shiny objects” that can frequently distract them.
Friday: Check, grade & celebrate!
Review, retrospection, and appreciation are the focus as the team regroups and goes through how their week’s efforts have helped them reach their goals, and celebrates.
The OKR Confidence Check
With the OKR set as their North Star, the team tracks their confidence towards achieving their Key Results.
This isn’t meant to be either scientific or involved — just a quick check-in, on a 0–10 scale, of how confident the team feels in delivering on that Key Result metric by the end of the quarter.
The point here is that the exact number doesn’t matter – what matters is the conversation and alignment that take place as a result of these collaborative Key Result-level confidence check-ins, and how you take those learnings and use them to adjust activities for the following planning session.
Health Check
Just as important as checking in on Key Results Confidence is how the team is tracking with their Health Metrics.
For them to deliver great work over the long term, they’ll ultimately need to be clear on what they want to protect as they push for progress.
Health Metrics benefit from being chosen strategically, and shifted as necessary. The key point is they focus on people first:
Team Health
Client Satisfaction
Retention
Daily Active Users
Keeping as much focus on Health Metrics as on Key Results progress is the whole point of the right side of the Four Square.
Celebration & Recognition
Regardless of their role or specialty, each member of the team takes the opportunity to share their weekly “wins.”
A big part of this process is also reflecting on and sharing what they’ve learned in the process, or what they’ll need to discover in the week ahead to get one step closer towards achieving their Key Results, or protecting their Health Metrics. This is also the opportunity for the team to recognize their teammates for their contributions.
While harder to do in virtual and distributed working environments, the cadence of pausing and celebrating is a deceptively powerful method of boosting engagement by validating and recognizing people for their contributions.
🎉Now you and your team can create your own Four Square!🎯
Figma Template
See the FigJam starter template file in the Figma Community here:
https://www.figma.com/community/file/1228814772812219348
Miro Template
If you’re more of a Miro person, you can find the template in the Miroverse here:
https://miro.com/miroverse/okr-four-square/
Please give them a spin and reach out to me with any advice on how to make them better for your needs!
And use the Four Square for your Personal OKRs
You can also use the templates above to craft your Personal OKRs, as outlined in the Christina Wodtke section of my Personal Strategy / Personal OKRs piece, which you can read on Medium here:
Or on my personal blog here:
Personal Strategy / Personal OKRs was also the main subject of my last newsletter.
That’s it for this edition!
Join me next time as we continue to go Up- and Downstream to explore the Full Value Delivery Stack.
