Plan ahead with Gtmhub OKR Sessions

We have just released a major new update to Gtmhub product: planning sessions. In short, planning sessions allow you to organize your objectives in time periods, such as quarters or months. After talking and observing how our customers use Gtmhub to manage their OKRs, we have observed several things that keep coming up. 

• Using OKRs is as much about learning as it is about everything else; hence OKRs are valuable source of information even after they are completed.

• OKRs are a process, and as such need management – the more people involved, the more challenging this gets.

• Setting OKRs rarely happens within a day, it takes time

• Agile companies are distinguished by both discipline and flexibility; sometimes plan needs to be executed ruthlessly, sometimes, however, it needs to be adjusted to the new circumstances

OKRs planning session

To answer these problems, we’ve released planning sessions feature.

Learn from the journey

Introducing OKRs is simple; getting most of them takes some time and learning. To facilitate this process, planning sessions in Gtmhub can now be archived, once completed. In that way, we can go back in time and see how our planning process and execution has improved over time, which problems seem to happen time and time again and thus adjust properly our process.

Planning session states

High level overview of the OKRs process

OKR aggregators have an unenviable task of making sure everyone has set their objectives, that there are not to many KRs and in general that things are going smoothly. Management, on the other hand often wants to get instant insights in how entire company is executing against it’s objectives. Finally, problems should be spotted instantly so that they can be dealt with. To help with this, OKR planning sessions come with overview dashboard which provides this information.

OKRs planning session overview

Plan ahead

In an ideal, theoretical, world – all objectives would be set in a day and then execution would start. What we have observed in practice, with our clients, is that this is almost never the case. People visit clients, call in sick, have to be on a call… The larger the company, the harder it gets to have everyone available to set objectives. To deal with this reality, we have made it possible to have multiple planning sessions open in Gtmhub. So, for example, one can open the session for the next quarter 30 days in advance, while the current planning session is still underway.

Lock session or adjust plans

Planning sessions can be locked, meaning that once all the negotiations are done – no more changes to objectives or KRs can be done. On the other hand, as always, reality does kick in sometimes and plans need to be adjusted. To facilitate this need, OKR aggregators can move objectives between sessions, adjust objectives and so on even in locked sessions.