Draft OKRs

Objective: Help new teams reach shared value quickly and make Fieldnote their place to get started.

Key results 1. Increase the share of new teams still active in week 4 from 34% to 40% (shared with the company goal). 2. Increase the share of new teams with three or more people joining in their first week from 29% to 40%. 3. Reduce the median time from sign-up to the first note opened by someone else from 3 days to 1 day.

Candidate initiatives: Test an onboarding checklist, templates, invite-flow changes and onboarding emails. Use interviews and support feedback to guide the work; treat bug fixes as necessary reliability work, not OKRs.

Note to the squad

I replaced launch counts and broad activity goals with measurable outcomes tied to the company’s week-four retention goal. The data suggests teams that bring in three or more people early are more likely to stick around, and getting a note opened by someone else is a concrete sign of shared value. The feature ideas may help achieve these results, but shipping them isn’t success by itself.

I left out NPS, dark mode, AI summaries, bug counts, interviews and help articles as KRs because they don’t directly show whether onboarding is working. They can still be useful work or learning activities. Since OKR scores affect bonuses, let’s agree on cohort definitions, measurement and ownership before the quarter starts—and review progress against the same definitions throughout.

Onboarding squad OKRs: next quarter

Company goal we serve: Raise the share of new teams still active in week 4 from 34% to 40%.

Objective 1: Get new teams working together in their first week - KR1: Raise the share of new teams with 3+ people joining in week one from 29% to 45%. - KR2: Cut the median time from sign-up to the first note a teammate opens from 3 days to 1. - KR3 (shared with the company): Raise week-4 active new teams from 34% to 40%.

Objective 2: Learn what makes a new team stick - KR1: By week 4, interview 10 teams that stalled and 10 that stuck, and share the findings. - KR2: By mid-quarter, run a test showing whether adding invites causes better week-4 retention, or whether teams that invite were just more committed to begin with.

Guardrails (watched, not scored) - Zero open P1 bugs in sign-up, invite and first-note flows. - Free-to-paid conversion at the five-member mark doesn't drop.

Bets we'll try to move the KRs: the invite-flow redesign, the onboarding checklist, onboarding emails, and starter templates built for sharing. We'll drop any bet that doesn't move KR1 or KR2.

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Note to the squad

Thanks for the draft. The work in it is good. Here's what I changed before Friday.

1. I swapped launches for results. "Ship the checklist" scores 100% even if nobody uses it. Leadership asked for more teams active in week 4, so we now measure the changes in behaviour that lead there. Your launches are still in the plan, as bets.

2. I built the plan around the strongest signal we have. Teams where 3+ people join in week one are 58% active at week 4. Everyone else is at 21%. Only 29% of teams reach 3+ today. Getting teammates in, and getting them to open each other's notes, is the main lever. That's why the invite redesign comes first.

3. I cut dark mode, AI summaries, help articles, the NPS target and "fix 50 bugs." Some of these are worth doing, but none clearly moves week-4 retention for new teams. Five engineers and one designer can't do them all and still do onboarding well. Quality is now a guardrail on the flows new teams actually touch.

4. I added a learning objective because our data may mislead us. Teams that invite people may stick because they were already serious, not because they invited. If so, pushing invites won't move retention much. A test early in the quarter tells us before we spend all of it.

5. Two things I'll raise with leadership: - The numbers don't add up. 29% × 58% + 71% × 21% gives about 32% week-4 retention, not 34%. The metrics may be defined differently. I'll check before Friday. - The gap is big. Even if invites cause retention, hitting 40% would mean about half of new teams reaching 3+ people, up from 29%. My 45% target for KR1 is already a stretch. I'll be upfront that the company KR probably needs other teams' help too.

6. The bonus link: I want to be straight with you. HR now sets each of our bonus multipliers from our OKR score. That rewards safe targets. The old draft was mostly launches we control, so it would likely have scored well. The new one has ambitious targets we may only partly hit. Good OKRs often land around 70%.

I don't think the answer is to lower the bar. Easy targets would make our OKRs useless to leadership and to us. I'll ask leadership and HR how a 70% score on a stretch target will be read for bonuses. I'll come back to you before we lock anything. If the answer is bad, we'll decide together how to handle it.

Happy to talk any of this through before Friday.