Step 2.1: Start planning product objectives

Define how objectives should be tracked

To capture your team’s objectives, you can create an “OKRs” table, which teams will use to track their progress against key results specific to their product area. Here’s how this might look in Airtable:

Typically, a product manager or product operations manager will use the OKRs table to keep track of progress, as well as report and flag any blockers to leadership on a quarterly basis.

Using the formula field can provide a real-time dynamic snapshot of objective progress. In this example we’ve created a formula field that displays a percentage (% complete = progress / goal), so users know how close they are to completing their objective.

Product managers may also be updating the OKRs table, but they may also be doing much of their ongoing updates in context of projects (aka features) or sprints, which we’ll cover in the later stages. 

Connect and begin organizing projects

By this stage of the product operations process, your team has ideally triaged customer feedback and gathered other necessary inputs from the business to form objectives and related key results. In the step above, you’ve also begun determining what fields and criteria they will use to track those objectives. 

At this point, PMs can then begin brainstorming, identifying, and tracking projects (aka features) that will help reach those objectives. These projects become the basis for product roadmaps (more on that in Stage 3). 

You can use linked records to associate Projects with OKRs, creating the foundation for additional insights.

For example, you might roll up all Projects related to a certain Objective, and vice versa (which Projects are supporting which Objectives). In the view below, you can see that we’ve linked our Projects to our OKRs table. Additionally, all key results are grouped by quarter.

After you’ve linked specific projects to your objectives, you can organize the data in a way that makes sense to your leadership, who care about the progress your team is making toward each key result.

Some handy tips you can use to organize your data include:

• Cut data with different views: Visualize your data in different ways by creating new views in your table. For example, you can apply a filter that only shows the objectives with a “not started” status, or create a view with hidden or grouped fields to focus on key details (i.e. Project Details by Objective). 

• Color records with conditional coloring: Apply colors to records to create differentiation. Color records by quarter, completion status, objective, etc. 

And with that, you’ve got your team’s objectives on lock. In the next step, we’ll walk through how to make sure your entire organization is aligned.