Draft OKRs

Onboarding squad OKRs, next quarter

Objective 1: New teams get their teammates in during week 1, and stay (supports the company goal: make Fieldnote the place new teams get started)

• KR1: Raise the share of new teams with 3+ people in week 1 from 29% to 45%.
• KR2: Cut the median time from sign-up to the first note someone else opens from 3 days to 1 day.
• KR3: Raise the share of new teams active in week 4 from 34% to 40% (shared with the company KR).

Planned bets, not KRs: onboarding checklist, invite flow redesign, 5 templates, onboarding emails. We'll drop or swap any of them if they aren't moving KR1 and KR2.

Objective 2: Keep the product dependable while we change onboarding

• KR1: Zero open P1 bugs at quarter end, and no P1 open longer than 5 days at any point.

Backlog, not this quarter: dark mode, AI summaries, NPS target, help articles.

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Note to the squad

Thanks for the draft. Here's what I changed and why.

1. Outcomes, not deliverables. Most of the draft listed things we'd ship. We could ship all of it and leave week-4 activity flat. The checklist, invite redesign, templates and emails are now the bets we make to hit the KRs.

2. One clear line to the company goal. Teams where 3+ people join in week 1 are still active in week 4 58% of the time, versus 21% for everyone else, and only 29% of teams reach 3+ today. So KR1 is about getting more teams to that point. Reaching 40% overall probably needs about 45% of teams there, assuming the relationship holds. KR2 measures how quickly a new team sees value from a teammate.

3. Cut and moved. Dark mode, AI summaries and the NPS target have no clear link to the company goal, and NPS isn't something onboarding alone can move. They go to the backlog, not the bin. User interviews and help articles are useful, but as activities inside Objective 1, not KRs. "Fix 50 bugs" rewarded volume over impact, so it became a P1 guardrail.

4. Two caveats to settle before Friday. - The data implies a week-4 rate of about 32% (0.29×58% + 0.71×21%), not the 34% in the company KR. Likely a definition or timing difference, but I'll confirm which baseline we're using. - The 58% vs 21% gap is correlation. Teams that invite people quickly may already be more committed, so the real lift from nudging invites will probably be smaller. That's why KR3 sits next to KR1, so we'll see whether the outcome really moves.

5. The bonus link. Since scores now affect everyone's multiplier, the safe play is to pick easy, output-style KRs. I've deliberately not done that. KR1 and KR2 are stretch targets, and I'd rather be upfront about it than quietly sandbag. Before Friday I'll ask leadership and HR how scores convert to multipliers, and I'll push for 0.7 on stretch KRs to count as a good result. I'll share the answer as soon as I have it. If you think a target is unrealistic, tell me before Friday so we can adjust it openly.

Please reply with objections or number challenges by Thursday noon.

Proposed onboarding OKRs — next quarter

Objective: Help new teams start collaborating quickly and build a habit that lasts.

Measurement and scoring - Use consistent definitions of “new team,” membership and “active,” agreed with whoever owns company reporting. Exclude test accounts consistently. - For KR2, use a fixed observation window and report the share of teams that never reach the milestone alongside the median. A faster median must not hide more teams failing to collaborate. - Score week-4 retention only on cohorts old enough to observe it; agree the final reporting date before the quarter starts. - Treat these as proposed targets, not finalized bonus commitments, until we validate measurement, scope and feasibility.

Candidate work—not additional KRs

Prioritize the invite-flow redesign and a minimal onboarding checklist as the first experiments. Use interviews to understand why teammates do or don’t join. Test templates, onboarding emails and help content where evidence suggests they address a specific obstacle; do not commit to shipping every item.

Keep capacity for onboarding reliability. Before approval, agree measurable quality guardrails for sign-up, invitations and note access using current performance and existing incident standards. Do not trade reliability for activation gains.

Defer dark mode and AI summaries unless research establishes a stronger onboarding opportunity than the current priorities.

Note to the squad

I replaced three broad objectives and a delivery checklist with one focused objective and measurable user outcomes. Launches, bug counts and interviews describe work; they don’t establish whether onboarding helped teams succeed. NPS is useful context, but too broad to be our primary onboarding score.

Early team participation is our strongest current signal: teams with three or more people joining in week 1 retain at 58%, versus 21% for others. That is correlation, not proof that getting more people to join will cause higher retention. We should test changes and measure downstream retention—not optimize invitations alone.

We also need to reconcile the data before locking targets: the supplied segment rates and 29% participation share imply about 32% overall retention, rather than 34%. They may describe different cohorts or definitions.

Finally, because OKR scores now determine bonuses, scoring rules are part of the commitment. Before Friday’s sign-off, we should agree target realism, weights, cohort timing and treatment of material external dependencies with leadership and HR. The company retention target remains shared accountability, not an outcome onboarding controls alone. With five engineers and one designer, focused experiments and reliable core flows are a more credible plan than nine separate launches.

Here is the revised OKR draft along with the team note.

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Proposed Q3 OKRs: Onboarding Squad

Objective 1: Accelerate new teams to their first collaborative moment * KR 1: Increase the share of new teams with 3+ members in Week 1 from 29% to 45%. * KR 2: Reduce median time from team creation to first collaborative note opened from 3 days to <24 hours. * KR 3: Contribute directly to the company goal by lifting new team Week 4 retention from 34% to 40%.

Objective 2: Deliver a seamless, zero-friction first-run experience * KR 1: Maintain zero open P1 bugs across the sign-up, invite, and first-note flows throughout the quarter. * KR 2: Increase invite-flow conversion (invites sent per new team) by 25%.

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Note to the Squad

Team,

Thanks for pulling the initial draft together! Ahead of our review with leadership this Friday, I’ve refocused our OKRs. Here is what changed and why:

#### 1. We shifted from outputs to outcomes Shipping checklists, templates, and emails are solutions, not goals. If we ship all four and retention doesn’t budge, we haven’t succeeded. By framing our KRs around moving specific user behaviors (e.g., getting teams to collaborate faster), we give ourselves the flexibility to iterate, drop what isn’t working, and double down on what does.

#### 2. We’re anchoring on our biggest retention lever Our company goal is lifting Week 4 retention from 34% to 40%. Our data shows an undeniable path to get there: * Teams with 3+ members in Week 1 retain at 58% (vs. 21% for everyone else). * Currently, only 29% of teams hit that milestone. * It takes 3 full days for a teammate to open their first shared note.

Our primary job this quarter is simple: get teammates into the workspace and collaborating on day one. Every template, invite prompt, or checklist we build should serve that specific loop.

#### 3. We cut scope to protect our focus (and our bonuses) Now that HR ties our bonus multipliers directly to squad OKR completion, our OKRs must be focused, measurable, and within our sphere of influence: * Dropped AI summaries and Dark Mode: Both are cool features, but neither solves the core first-week team activation problem. They dilute our engineering capacity. * Dropped NPS (31 to 40): NPS is a lagging, noisy metric influenced by the entire product (pricing, bugs elsewhere, feature gaps), not just onboarding. * Refined bug targets: Fixing an arbitrary "50 bugs" incentivizes fixing trivial issues. Instead, we’re committing to zero critical bugs in our core onboarding and invitation paths.

Let’s chat through any questions at standup tomorrow so we’re fully aligned before Friday!