Run the week

A quarter is only as healthy as its Monday updates. Use a short but disciplined cadence to turn static objectives into live feedback and fast decisions.

Your weekly rhythm

Treat every seven‑day cycle as a micro‑sprint. Data lands, owners react, and initiatives reshuffle before momentum stalls.

Monday morning

9am: async KR check-ins

Your team completes their key results check-ins asynchronously. They enter in changes in metrics, how confident they are about their ability to hit their goals, and leave a comment with context for their rating:

• What’s going well
• What hurdles or blockers are they facing
• What resources do they need in order to succeed

All updates must be completed before the review meetings. KR owners who know ahead of time that they won’t be available on Monday should fill their check-ins out on Friday. For unexpected absences, whenever possible, another team member or a manager with context on the goal should do the check-in.

9.30am-11.30am: read updates & comment

Your team spends time reading each other's updates at their own pace and leaving comments on them. This will make the actual review meeting for efficient and facilitate discussions. This also gives time to offer help, ask questions about specific KRs or initiatives, and celebrate wins.

11.30am: review meeting

This meeting should include all KR owners that share a common set of OKRs. The review meeting should be sharp and quick moving.

Go through the KRs one by one to discuss the updates. Each KR owner presents their update to the team. Generally you should be moving quickly for key results that are on track so you can reserve more time to discuss items that are red or yellow.

⚠️ This is not a project planning or spec meeting. The discussion should focus on outcomes and the goal is to re-align team on the best strategy possible to achieve the objectives by end of the quarter.

Monday through Friday

Now that the OKR progress has been reviewed, teams can execute with the right context in mind. You should have a separate planning meeting during the week where you can review the list of candidate initiatives and adjust them as needed.

A Now, Next, Later roadmap approach will be more suited to OKRs as they focus on value rather than deadline. They allow for more flexibility by asking the question "what's the most valuable thing to do next, given the current state of the OKRs?"

Friday

Fridays are for showing the outputs. Get the team together and go through all the things that have been shipped, built, or drafted.

Demos aren't just for devs showing features. It's also a place to show upcoming designs, new content copy, marketing campaign briefs, etc. It's a way for people to connect the dots between their work and get early feedback on the things that they are doing.

A lot of magic can happen when people open up about their work.

How to write a good check-in

Your OKR check-ins should answer 5 simple questions:

• What happened last week?
• How did it happen?
• How confident are you about the future?
• Any blockers?
• Should we do anything differently?

Put efforts into it but don't make it a novel. Assume that the readers are just as busy as you are and they need to quickly understand the current state of things and how they can help.

Having a progress chart attached to your weekly update will make context much easier to understand. It's also a great way to notice when things are going flat.

Not more than 2 yellows in a row

You need clear signals to drive your strategy forward. Here's a simple rule to adopt:

• There cannot be more than 2 yellow (at risk) consecutive check-ins
• The 3rd one needs to be either green (on track) or red (off track)

Don't be scared of bringing tough conversations forward. This is much better than waiting for the end of the quarter to say that you were, in fact, not doing great.

What to do when key results slip

It is guaranteed that some of your OKRs will fall behind. This is because you're doing hard stuff and you're trying to see what works.

Here's what to do when you see a key result slipping:

1. Don't panic
2. Don't blame the owner

There can be many reasons why a KR is not on track, and you need to have a conversation to figure out what is happening. A KR might be slipping because:

• The team hasn't had a chance to work on initiatives tied to the KR
• The bets are wrong
• The target is wrong
• The market has changed
• ...
• Last: the team is not good at their work

The point of this list is that there are many many questions that should come before you point fingers at the quality of the work. The more you take time to explore these reason, the easier it is to build a culture where people feel safe taking risks and reporting issues early.

Checklist for a solid week

✅ All owners posted updates by 09:00.

✅ Review wrapped ≤ 30 minutes.

✅ Not more than 2 yellows in a row

✅ All check-ins are done

✅ No owner holds > 7 active check‑ins.

Hit these six and your OKRs will steer the team instead of haunting it.

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