Objectives and key results with weekly check-ins and health states, so progress is visible long before the quarter ends.
Leaders running an OKR cadence across teams.
Quick answer
The Quarterly OKRs template is a ready-made workspace for Leaders running an OKR cadence across teams.
Quarterly OKRs template in short
Included when you apply it
Applying this template creates the 1 board below — with every list — and pre-loads 3 sample issues, all yours to edit. The automation rules further down are suggestions you can wire up next; they aren't created for you yet.
A preview of how this template lays out — the boards, their custom workflow states, and where the sample issues land. WIP caps show a badge.
Q3 OKRs
O1 — Reach activation parity across plans
Key results live as sub-issues under each objective.
KR1.1 — Land three reference customers
KR1.2 — Cut time-to-first-board by 30%
These rules aren't created when you apply the template — they're recipes you can wire up in Settings → Automations once your board exists.
When
Monday 9am
Then
Generate a weekly check-in issue per objective owner
When
An objective is flagged 'At risk'
Then
Notify the owner and the leadership channel
This board is not organised by team or by stage. Its columns are health states — On track, At risk, Off track, Achieved — which means the board's job is to answer one question: what is in trouble, right now. That is deliberate. The characteristic failure of OKRs is not bad objectives, it is that everyone discovers the quarter went badly in week eleven. Sorting by health rather than by owner puts the bad news in the first column you read.
An objective you are confident of hitting is a plan, not an objective. Aim for something where a reasonable person would say the odds are around seventy percent. If every objective on the board ends the quarter Achieved, the board is measuring sandbagging rather than ambition — and everyone involved knows it.
Each objective is a parent issue and each key result hangs off it, so progress rolls up rather than being asserted. Cap it at three key results per objective. The fourth is almost always either a task masquerading as a result or a second objective that has not admitted it yet.
One name, not a team, not two co-owners. Shared ownership of an objective reliably produces an unowned objective, and the failure shows up as a check-in that nobody writes. The owner is not necessarily the person doing the work — they are the person who owes an answer about it.
The weekly check-in is the entire mechanism; without it this is a wall poster. Each owner updates progress and, crucially, is expected to move their own card to At risk when it belongs there. A board where nothing is ever At risk until the final week is a board where honesty is being punished somewhere upstream.
Score each key result, write two sentences on what you learned, and close it. What matters is the second part — the pattern across quarters of what you consistently over-commit to. Carrying grades forward as a performance record is the fastest way to teach everyone to set objectives they cannot miss.
This board encodes one opinion about how the work should run. Here is where that opinion is wrong and something else fits better.
Honest comparisons, including where the other tool wins. Planoda is pre-launch, so nothing below is a benchmark — it is a description of how each product approaches this job.
The Notion OKR template is the most-used version of this in the world, typically a database of objectives with a rollup of key-result progress. It is excellent for the writing around goals — context, rationale, links to strategy documents — and weaker at making the state of the quarter legible at a glance.
Where Notion is better: For narrative context around each objective, and for OKRs that live inside a larger strategy document, Notion is the better home. Rollup formulas also give you a numeric progress percentage that a health column does not.
Purpose-built goal tools — Ally, Perdoo, WorkBoard and similar — model alignment as a graph: company objectives cascade to teams to individuals, with automatic rollup and a cadence engine that chases check-ins. That is genuinely more machinery than four columns.
Where Dedicated OKR tools is better: At several hundred people with multi-level cascading alignment, a dedicated tool is the right answer. Its check-in reminders, alignment visualisation and confidence trend-lines do things this board simply does not attempt.
Most OKR programmes actually run in a spreadsheet, and it is worth saying plainly that this works fine for a small company. The reason to move is not the sheet's capability — it is that the sheet has no link to the work, so progress is a number someone typed rather than something derived from issues closing.
Where Spreadsheets is better: A spreadsheet is faster to set up, requires no adoption, and is trivially exportable for a board deck. For a company of fifteen people running its first OKR cycle, that is a real advantage over any tool.
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