Learn about Allo Goals: What are OKRs?

Allo Goals uses the goal-setting framework of OKRs. An OKR stands for "Objectives and Key Results". It was originated at Google and is now used by many of the top tech companies.

Allo decided to implement OKRs as the goal-setting model on our platform because we believe it is the most flexible, efficient, and actionable goal-setting framework for collaborative teams. With OKRs people can easily feel the cohesiveness and the connection with others on different teams.

OKRs are a lightweight framework that can be implemented in many different ways to serve the needs of many different kinds of organizations. 

In Allo, when you first enter the "Goals" tab, you will see all the objectives and key results that are assigned to you. However, everyone on the team has access to all the OKRs the team has. 

Let's use an example to learn what an Objective, a Key Result, and an Initiative are (If you're not much of a reader, watch this short video instead):

• Objectives: Every quarter (or any timeframe you set), the company will set a few higher-level objectives. These are qualitative statements that capture the kind of success we want to achieve. For instance, "Delight our customers".
• Key Results: Under each objective, a couple of lower-level key results will be set. While objectives are qualitative, key results should be quantitative, concrete, and trackable. They are the metrics the team uses to assess how well they've achieved their objective. For example under the objective of "Lead the industry in customer satisfaction", key results could be "Reduce average time to resolution to 6 hours for customer support requests.", "Maintain a 90 percent customer satisfaction rate", and "Develop 5 new features based on customer research data".

• Initiatives: Under each key result, we will create some initiatives. You can see initiatives as action items or projects that will help the team achieve the key result. Taking the key result "Develop 5 new features based on customer research data" as an example, we might set initiatives such as "Interview 6 active customers", "Prioritize feature list", and "Create product requirement documents", etc. 
• For each objective, key result, and initiative, it's always good to set an owner that will be leading it. Many will be a team effort, but there's probably somebody who is closest to the work and best able to track results.

• To make sure everyone is aligned on the progress, companies or teams will do "Check-ins", usually weekly or monthly. These company or team-wide check-in meetings are held to update the progress and plans of each OKR with each other and see if everything is on track or if there's anything that needs to be modified. 

In short, OKR is a goal-setting framework that guides you to break down a bigger vision into lower-level goals and tasks, and finally helps people easily team up, support each other, and celebrate success together.