Insights on strategy, leadership, and management inspired by our work at Koan
Love them or hate them, status reports are an important part of good team communication. Here's how to write clear, concise updates that everyone will thank you for.
Handling file uploads can be a tricky process. Here's how Koan's React SPA delivers files to AWS S3 without an extra trip through our servers.
The perfect OKR tool will build and reinforce great practices while fitting in seamlessly with the way your team already works.
From customer to evangelist: meet Koan's new Director of Customer Success
Effective status reporting encourages team members to share their achievements and detail plans for the week ahead. Here's how to build an effective, high-value status reporting process.
At Koan, we use DynamoDB for all of our application’s database needs. It’s fully managed, helping us maintain reliable query latency regardless of traffic volume and reduce our operational workload. But one of the challenges we’ve had to deal with has been around capacity planning. Our traffic pattern is generally very spiky: we see our highest usage on Mondays and Fridays, with the middle of the week and weekends being low points.
It’s no secret that autonomy is a key factor in employee satisfaction, and since you’ve recruited great people and set clear objectives, the responsibility for making tactical decisions is likely already in their hands. Congratulations! You’re already much of the way towards more autonomous, purposeful work.But what about longer-term, strategic decisions? When the time comes for your team to reassess its position and set new objectives, is there a North Star available to keep them on course?
At first glance, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) seem a natural fit for a performance management process. OKRs communicate strategy through clear, measurable goals; performance management makes sure it’s delivered efficiently.
Much has been written lately about Millennials’ and (especially) Generation Z’s desire to work for purpose-driven companies. It may very well become one of the defining narratives around how the workplace will evolve, especially as the war for talent continues.
When we launched Koan, we promised managers a new way to foster transparent, constructive conversations with their teams. Fast-forward to 2019: our simple, focused reflections now offer more than 1,000 teams a weekly opportunity to build visibility and open dialog. We’ve heard awesome stories about Koan’s transformative impact on companies both large and small — but we’re only getting started.Our mission — to help every team realize their purpose — is much more than weekly dialog. Transparency matters, of course, but so too do the vision and focus needed to drive great results.Today, we’re excited to announce the next major step for Koan: Collaborative OKRs.
Last week, well-known venture capitalist Fred Wilson wrote a great post “The Heartbeat” about the rhythm and cadence that great CEOs set inside their companies with goals/OKRs, regular product…
