OKR planning template

Use this template to define your objectives and key results (OKRs) with your team.

Defining OKRs is a collaborative goal-setting methodology used by teams and individuals to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. OKRs help teams track progress, create alignment, and encourage engagement.

Developed and used by Mural's own executive leadership team, this template includes instructions for two planning sessions and a framework for writing and measuring your OKRs.

The OKR planning template helps you:

• Get connected and aligned as a leadership team

• Collaboratively build organizational goals

• Define metrics for success

• Increase transparency and understanding

How to use the OKR planning template

To use Mural’s OKR planning template, follow the steps outlined below with your stakeholders. This OKR planning framework is meant to be carried out over two working sessions and a post-workshop process. Use the first two sessions to outline the objectives and the projects you’ll work on, and the post-workshop to clearly define each of the key results for your objectives.

Session 1

Step 1: Kick off your session with an icebreaker and reflection

To begin your OKR planning workshop, kick off the first session with an icebreaker activity to help get everyone engaged. Then, have each team member contribute their feedback on recent wins and challenges using sticky notes inside the template.

Step 2: Overview of your company’s mission, values, strategy, and initiatives

Before you bring everyone together, locate or create an asset that goes over the core mission, values, strategy, and initiatives of your organization. This could take the form of a video recording with the CEO.

Once you’ve gone through your warm-up exercises, use this time to watch the video recording or go over your strategy, as this will help frame the rest of the discussion for the duration of your workshop.

Step 3: Agree on objectives

After going over the recent wins and challenges and framing your OKRs with your organizational mission at the center, it’s time to brainstorm. Have every stakeholder add their takes on what should be the main objectives for the coming quarter using sticky notes.

Once everyone has contributed, group the feedback by themes, and use Mural’s anonymous voting feature to determine the top two to three goals for the quarter.

This forms the end of the first working session.

Session 2

Step 4: Get everyone warmed up

Begin the next session with a warm-up exercise. The template suggests having stakeholders reflect on goals they have measured progress against in the past, but you can use a different exercise depending on your situation.

Step 5: Create measurable action plans

Have your team brainstorm projects to solve for the challenges outlined in your objectives that you defined in Step 3.

Break your team into groups, and have each of the groups give each challenge an associated project, criteria for success, owner, and deadline. Make sure that progress is quantifiable, and identify and agree on milestones.

Post-workshop

Step 6: Define your OKR framework

After your breakout sessions, it’s time to define your OKRs. This is where you bring everything together from your workshop to clearly outline the rationale, key results, projects, owners, dependencies, and status for each of your objectives.

Make sure your objectives are aspirational to keep everyone on your team inspired. Carry forward your projects from session two.

Tips for running an OKR template workshop

To get the most out of the Mural OKR template and workshop process, you should:

• Invite a diverse group of stakeholders to help make sure you avoid any blind spots regarding your objectives and strategy

• Use features like private mode for brainstorming to avoid groupthink during group sessions, and anonymous voting to help determine the best objectives democratically

• Keep your OKR plan up to date as you make progress using the Status section and the appropriate color-coded sticky notes