I’m excited to share with you that we’re offering long-term goal planning in Status Hero, starting today. It’s a better way to track OKRs, SMART Goals, MBOs, or just plain vanilla long-term goals than what you’re using now.
For years, I’ve managed individual, team, and company goals/OKRs in spreadsheets, wikis, and HR systems with mixed results. The process would go something like this: 1.) gather people once a quarter, 2.) dutifully discuss and create goals, and 3.) record them in one of the tools mentioned above.
Typically we’d forget about them until the end of the quarter, when we’d pop open the spreadsheet and scramble to hit the goals (or worse, change them to match our progress). Sound familiar?
That’s an obviously broken process that will only be coincidentally successful. Today at Status Hero we’re going to help you fix that.
Continuous Alignment, Vision, and Context
Long-term goals work to align people and teams under three conditions:
- They are represented as measurable desired outcomes.
- Goal owners continually communicate progress and confidence in said outcomes.
- They are woven into work routines and drive daily prioritization and decision-making.
The quality of your management will drive #1, but your choice of tooling will greatly impact #2 and #3. This is where otherwise wonderful tools like Notion or Google Drive fall apart: your OKRs sit in a folder (of a folder), largely ignored. No engagement or regular communication around these goals leads to misalignment and wasted efforts, especially for remote or hybrid teams.
In Status Hero, our goals offering solves for these conditions in a simple way that will not burden you or your team in meetings and bureaucracy: by sticking your goal progress front-and-center in your daily check-ins, dashboards, and reports.
Goal owners are gently nudged on a schedule to provide updates and context for goals, keeping the team informed and giving everyone a structured communication loop for comments and feedback around the goal. Max context, minimum fuss.
What’s more, Status Hero not only tracks the trailing indicator of goal progress, but goal owners assess their confidence in the outcome–a leading indicator–in their updates. For managers, this is a crucial distinction to help with course correction. That’s the hard truth about goals: you can be 90% done with the work but still very much at risk of missing your objectives.
As a manager and beta user of this feature, I can tell you that this is where the Status Hero implementation really shines: a live, 30,000 foot view of team priorities and confidence baked into daily work.
Finally, we designed our goals offering with flexibility in mind - it will work with whatever flavor of goals you and your organization already use: OKRs, SMART, MBO, and others, just better.
Want to learn more?
- We added a goals/OKRs outline to our website here.
- We’ve updated our support documentation here.
- Schedule a free demo to see goals in action.
As always, we’d love your feedback as we continue to develop Status Hero. You can contact us async anytime you like.
Cheers,
Henry
CEO+Founder
