525. It's OKR time again💈
Five free OKR templates to help you stay on track with your new goals
Hellooo 👋 So happy to have you here. I’m Kevan. I have spent 15+ years as a head of marketing for some cool tech startups. Now I’ve co-founded a brand storytelling business called Bonfire. We do coaching, advisory, and content. If you identify with creativity and marketing, we’d love for you to join us.
Free OKR templates for marketing leaders
It is the end of June, quarters are ending, first halves are coming to a close, and everyone is turning their attention to planning and—if my in-house experience is any indication—wondering whether there’s a better way to do OKRs than we’re currently doing them.
The answer for most teams: Yes, there is almost a certainly a better way to do OKRs.
(I’ve been part of some build-the-plan-as-you-fly OKR processes, and I’ve also been part of some pretty fantastic ones at Buffer and at Oyster.)
I’ve written before about my process for coming up with great OKRs and tracking them throughout a quarter.
It’s served me well as a way to:
Prove the value of all the marketing work my team is doing
Keep everyone on the same page and aware of what we’re working toward
Cut down on ambiguity around reporting and progress
And my process stays mostly the same regardless of which tool or template I’m using. There are lots of templates I love. So I thought I’d share a bunch with you in case you’re wanting a fresh way to coordinate OKRs for your team or for your company.
1. My go-to OKR template in Notion
Most every startup I’ve worked at is using a tool like Notion (or Slite or Coda, etc) for its internal documentation and team wiki. What a perfect place then to show off the numbers and goals that are most important to a company!
With this template, you can see visual progress bars for each Key Result, you can nest Key Results underneath specific Objectives, and you can even assign ownership and add contextual updates to progress throughout the period.
Get a free copy below (just click the “duplicate” icon in the upper right-hand corner to add this to your team’s Notion workspace).
2. My new favorite OKR template in Daydream
You can think of Daydream as like the Figma for data. If you’ve ever used a tool like Looker or Heap or really any analytics or business intelligence platform, you have likely wanted just a bit more context and explanation for all those numbers you’re seeing. Daydream does this by joining data with documentation, as if Looker and Notion were melded together.
So obviously Daydream makes a super candidate as a hub for OKR reporting.
I spent a minute with the Daydream team to put together a template for how OKRs can work in their platform and how marketing leaders like you can use them to gain that well-deserved appreciation and influence!
3. An OKR template I love from Buffer
The Buffer team makes everything transparent—even salaries—so of course their OKR process is available for anyone to see and use, too. Here’s a link to the template in Notion.
I had left Buffer before we started using Notion for OKRs, but I can imagine some of the brilliant teammates who invented this process. The template is great, clean, easy to understand, and straightforward enough to scale to pretty much any size of company or team.
4. How we did OKRs in Asana when I was at Oyster
When I was at Oyster, we ran all of our projects through Asana. We also ran all of our OKRs through the platform.
The beauty with this is that each project could be tied back to a company goal, which made all the work feel extra important and valuable. It’s quite encouraging to know that the thing you’re working on has an impact on a thing everyone cares about!
If you’re an Asana user, the actual feature is called Goals (not OKRs), but all the OKR methodology is covered in the featureset: you can nest goals under other goals (i.e. objectives), you can assign owners, and you can update progress toward a goal amount with a deadline.
5. An OKR template in a Google Sheet
I’ve been at many places, especially early stage, that live and breathe spreadsheets. So sometimes it makes sense to put your OKRs in there, too.
One of my favorite templates is this one from Perdoo.
It includes all the things you’d need to have in an OKR template, plus it has the spreadsheet math to show you how you’re faring with progress and completion throughout the quarter.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Now I am cofounder at Bonfire, a brand storytelling company.
Each week on this substack, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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