Draft OKRs

Q3 Onboarding Squad OKRs (Revised)

Objective: Get new teams collaborating in Fieldnote during their first week.

• KR1: Increase the share of new teams with 3+ members in their first week from 29% to 45%.
• KR2: Reduce the median time from sign-up to a teammate opening a shared note from 3 days to under 24 hours.
• KR3: Increase Week 4 retention for new sign-up cohorts from 34% to 40%.

(Note: Previously listed features like the invite flow redesign, templates, and onboarding emails will now live on our roadmap as the bets we’ll place to hit these numbers).

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Note to the Squad: What I changed and why

Hey team, thanks for pulling the draft together. Before we send this to leadership on Friday, I’ve made some big cuts and reframed our goals. Because HR is tying our bonus multipliers directly to our OKR score this year, it’s critical that we set ourselves up to win with goals we actually control and can realistically hit.

Here is the thinking behind the changes:

1. One focused Objective tied to company math Leadership’s only goal this quarter is moving Week 4 retention from 34% to 40%. Look at our data: teams with 3+ members in week one retain at 58%, vs. 21% for everyone else. Right now, only 29% of teams hit that 3-member mark. By mathematical average, if we just move the needle on that 3-member metric from 29% to ~45%, we will single-handedly hit the company’s 40% retention target. Furthermore, since Fieldnote charges at 6+ members, getting teams to 3+ in week one is the best thing we can do for the business.

2. Moving from outputs to outcomes Our draft KRs (checklists, templates, invite flow, emails) were a task list. If we ship all four and retention stays at 34%, leadership won’t view the quarter as a success. By making the KRs about behavior (inviting teammates and sharing a first note quickly), we give ourselves the freedom to experiment. We’ll still build the invite redesign and templates, but if they work early, we don't have to build the rest. If they don’t work, we can pivot without failing our OKRs.

3. Protecting our bandwidth (and our bonuses) We are five engineers and one designer. The draft had us building dark mode, AI summaries, and four onboarding features, plus fixing 50 bugs. That’s way too much for one quarter. * Cut "Delight Users" (Obj 3): Dark mode and AI summaries are huge scope creeps for an onboarding team. Also, NPS is a lagging, company-wide metric—we shouldn’t tie our bonuses to a number that core product bugs or pricing changes can tank. User interviews and help articles are great, just as part of our weekly process. * Cut "Improve Quality" (Obj 2): Fixing 50 bugs incentivizes us to hunt for 50 tiny typos, while "zero P1s" is a baseline engineering standard, not a quarterly goal. We will keep squashing bugs in our normal sprint triage, especially anything breaking the sign-up or invite flows, without making it an OKR.

Let’s chat in standup tomorrow to make sure everyone feels good about these numbers before I send them up on Friday!

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.

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.