Draft OKRs

Onboarding squad OKRs, next quarter (draft for Friday)

Objective: Make Fieldnote the place new teams get started.

• KR1: Raise the share of new teams still active in week 4 from 34% to 40%. (Company KR, shared with leadership.)
• KR2: Raise the share of new teams with three or more members joining in week one from 29% to 50%.
• KR3: Cut the median time from sign-up to the first note opened by a second member from 3 days to 1 day.
• Guardrail: Zero open P1 bugs at quarter end, with no new P1s in onboarding flows.

Delivery plan (tracked, not scored): - Invite flow redesign and onboarding emails first, since they target KR2 and KR3. - Onboarding checklist next, then the five templates. - Ten user interviews with teams that stalled after sign-up, to learn why people didn't invite others. - Dark mode, AI summaries, and the four help articles are paused. If leadership has committed to any of them, let's discuss before Friday.

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Note to the squad

Hi all. I reworked the draft before it goes to leadership. Here's what changed and why.

1. One objective, tied to the company goal. The draft had three objectives, and several items (dark mode, AI summaries) didn't connect to the week-4 number. Everything now points at one goal: new teams getting started.

2. We're targeting the lever the data points to. Teams with three or more people joining in week one stay active at 58% in week 4. Everyone else stays at 21%. Only 29% of new teams get there today. Getting more teams to that threshold is the biggest lever we can see. It's correlation, though, not proof. Teams that invite friends early may already be more committed. The invite flow work is our test of whether the link is causal, so we'll watch it closely.

3. Outcomes over outputs. Since bonus multipliers now depend on the OKR score, I want the score to measure whether we moved the number, not whether we shipped things. A "ship 5 templates" KR scores 100% even if nobody uses the templates. The delivery plan still shows what we're building, and it has no bearing on the score.

4. Fewer KRs. Ten KRs across three objectives meant spreading five engineers and a designer very thin. Three KRs plus a guardrail give us a clear focus.

5. Bugs stay in as a guardrail. I cut "fix 50 bugs" because a count rewards small fixes over important ones. Zero P1s is the real bar: we shouldn't trade quality for onboarding speed.

6. Targets I'd like your pushback on. The 50% figure for KR2 is my estimate of what would move week-4 activity toward 40%, based on the 58% and 21% split. If the link is weaker than it looks, that target may be wrong, and I'd rather find out in week three than week twelve. Likewise, the one-day target in KR3 is a judgment call. Tell me if the invite flow can't realistically get there.

Thanks for the work so far. The draft's raw material was solid. It just needed one thread running through it. Let's review progress at week six, and I'll bring any changes to the team first.

To the Onboarding Squad:

Thanks for putting these together. I’ve rewritten our OKRs for leadership. Before I explain why, please note HR’s rule: our bonuses are now tied directly to our OKR scores. That means our OKRs must be about outcomes, not output, and they must tightly align with the company goal.

Here is what I changed:

1. Dropped the "feature laundry list." Draft 1 listed outputs (checklists, dark mode, 50 bugs). If we ship all those and week 4 retention doesn't budge, leadership fails us—and our bonuses drop. We need to focus on what happens to the user, not what we build.
2. Anchored on the Company Goal: Leadership wants week 4 team retention up from 34% to 40%. Our entire quarter must serve this.
3. Used our Data: Our data shows a massive retention cliff: teams where 3+ people join in week one retain at 58%, versus 21% for everyone else. Right now, only 29% hit that 3+ threshold. Furthermore, the median time to a shared note is 3 days—too slow.

Here is the finalized version going to leadership on Friday:

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Q3 Onboarding Squad OKRs

Objective: Get new teams collaborating faster so they stick around.

• KR 1: Raise the share of new teams with 3+ active members in week 1 from 29% to 40%. (Directly attacks our biggest retention lever).
• KR 2: Reduce the median time from sign-up to the first note opened by a second team member from 3 days to under 24 hours. (Accelerates "time-to-value" and teamwork).
• KR 3: Raise the share of new teams still active in week 4 from 34% to 40%. (Our direct contribution to the company goal).

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What this means for us: Features like the checklist, templates, AI summaries, and invite flow redesign are still our tools to hit these goals, but we’ll prioritize them based on whether they actually drive team invites and fast collaboration. Let’s crush this.

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.