Koan helps you set goals and measure progress. Once you have written incredible
OKRs, it's time to add them to Koan and (where it makes sense) link them to parent goals.

You will want to begin by adding the titles of your objectives and key results in Koan, as well as giving them due dates. Follow the steps below to learn how to do this!

1. Navigate to your team's Goals page and select the '+ Objective' icon.

2. Add the title and due date of your first objective in-line. Then select the 'Save' icon or click 'Enter/Return' on your keyboard to begin entering in your key results.

3. Next, enter the title and due date for each of the objective's associated key results. We'll automatically assign the same due-date as your objective to all of it's key results to cut down on the initial setup work you'll need to do.

According to OKR best practices, every key result in Koan should be measurable. This means that you should have a starting and target metric for every KR in Koan. After entering the titles and due dates of your Key Results, you will need to add a metric that will allow you to measure it overtime.

After having created your OKR, you will want to go back and edit each objective and key result to add more details that will give your team more context into the goal. You can do this by editing the objective or key result.

When creating your OKRs in Koan, you also have the option to link your objective to a parent goal. Linking goals is a great way to visualize how different projects or teams are supporting one another to accomplish high-level priorities.

You may want your goal to be cross-functional. If so, you will want to assign additional teams to the goal.

Even if you have teams assigned to a goal, you will still need to assign specific contributors to the goal. Contributors are individuals who are actively working on the goal who should provide a confidence rating weekly. Every lead and contributor will be asked about their goals in their weekly reflection.

When linking your goals, there will be a dropdown menu of goals to choose from in addition to having the search bar option. Note that the dropdown menu does not contain all of the goals in the organization. If the goal you are looking for is not in the dropdown menu, you must search the name of the entire parent objective. By searching the whole name of the parent objective, the parent objective should become visible in the dropdown menu, and can be selected as a parent goal.

Generally speaking, no! A strict hierarchical (tree structure) of goals/OKRs across your whole organization is simply too rigid in most cases. Even worse, it can force a "cascading" goal-setting process that is time-consuming and frustrating for everyone involved. Instead, try setting a few key top-level goals and then let each team use those as inspiration when setting their own. In the cases where goals are directly aligned, link them! There will be many other cases where teams are working on important goals that aren't directly related to the company's top-level goals -- find and encourage the right balance of behaviors and don't worry about making a perfect tree of goals!  

You can view the goal links in a few different places. If you are interested in seeing the big picture of linked goals throughout the organization, check out Tree View on the Organization Homepage. If you are looking at a specific goal, you can view child goals by selecting the goal itself. This will open up the goal's fly-out will additional information about its parent and child goals. For more information on viewing goal links, go here.

Yes! Parent objectives in a single team can be linked.

Goals usually inside individual teams. In many cases, your company-wide goals might live in an Executive team. In other cases, each department might own and be accountable for one of your top-level goals. We suggest that you take team-owned goals and mark them as organization goals that will be showcased on the Organization Homepage. You can learn how to do this here.

This is a common question, as many people think that assigning a team to an objective or key result is the same as assigning all the members of that team as responsible for the execution of the goal. This is not the case. Assigning a team and assigning a lead and contributors to a KR are two separate steps. If you assign a team to a goal, it makes that goal visible under the team's goals page and signals to the rest of the organization that the goal is primarily being executed by that team. That being said, assigning a team to a goal does not mean that the whole team is working on that goal. Of the members on the team(s) associated with the goal, you must assign a lead and contributors to the KR, they will be the ones responsible for executing the KR and for providing confidence and metric updates.

Do you have a question that isn't answered in this article? If so, send us a message directly by opening the chatbot in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. We will get back to you as soon as we can.