Using Jotto for OKRs

OKRs (objectives and key results) focus the team on a few key goals to knock out of the park rather than spreading effort too thin. They give you a sense of progress (or not) that you can externalize to the broader organization.

Most teams can set their initial goals, but struggle with externalization. People get so busy trying to hit their targets that they forget the equally important task of bringing everyone else along with them.

There are lots of different ways to track OKRs. We're fans of Christina Wodtke's approach in her book Radical Focus. She talks about setting quarterly goals, and then tracking them weekly with a simple quadrant. Other organizations have their teams use a standard set of slides updated monthly.

Here's what an example OKR post might look like (the content of the slide isn't real but the format is one we've used):

Example of a Jotto post on OKRs

So why use an internal blog for this purpose? In our experience, OKR updates get buried in email, while Slack is too ephemeral, and on cloud drives like Google Drive, they ironically get lost. Jotto provides a simple, private internal publishing option where you can share whatever slides you want as images, explain the context, and keep the history of OKR posts around so that people can see trends and new teammates can unearth the background.