October Product Updates: Improved OKR and Goal Management

Collaboration is at the foundation of Koan. We believe that by taking a collaborative approach to goals fosters transparency and visibility, helps organizations stay aligned, and improves efficiency. Particularly now, with most teams still working in a remote setting, it can be difficult to understand what others are working on and how that work can impact you. Koan helps to bring the team, and information around team goals, together in one place. Making this information visible, so any individual in your organization can see all the different teams.

The latest refresh in Koan helps to simplify this challenge by providing additional visibility and transparency around OKRs and team dependencies. These recent product improvements are primarily focused around managing goals, and creating a way to easily see core dependencies across teams. Take a look at some of the recent improvements.

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(1) Objective and Key Result Creation: In June, we announced the ability to add new goals directly within the goal list. Now you have the ability to add KRs to existing Objectives, offering a faster, more refined OKR creation experience. We also made goal creation smarter: Koan will automatically set the metric based on the key result text and will intelligently abbreviate metric display. Learn more.

(2) Improved Goal Creation Workflows: We’ve made several improvements to help users manage goals across their teams. Some of these features include better archive, delete, and restoration of goals behavior, improved linking and hierarchical visualization between goals, and more intuitive handling of empty states for goals. Also, we’ve more closely linked the objectives with key results, so when you archive or close an Objective, it will also close the associated key results. Learn more.

(3) Organizational upgrade: We’ve made several improvements to the way you organize your goals within Koan. The All Goals page is now grouped by team, with company goals at the top. Additionally, the filter visuals have been improved to help provide more clarity around goals. You’ll now clearly see which goals are active, closed, and archived, and which teams and individuals are associated with each goal. These tags act as a clear way to see how goals are connected across teams. Learn more.

(4) Drag and drop functionality: Within the goals list, users now have the ability to drag and drop nested goals, to customize the view to your preference. And the order you create on your team page will also reflect in the All Goals page view. Learn more.

(5) Hierarchical Context: We’ve improved the functionality of associated goals, so that it's easier to see what goals belong to which team, and which goals then roll up to company goals. Now when you click on a goal, it is clearly linked and tagged to the appropriate teams and goals. Learn more.

(6) Visualization: You’ll also notice several other minor improvements to the goal list view, with better visualization of goal hierarchy. All views are now consistent between company goals, all goals, and team goals. In addition, All Goals has improved visualization, offering one place to see what every team in your org is focused on.  Earlier this year, we updated the platform to have a different overall look, and have since continued to improve the visual consistency throughout the app. 

(7) Company Widgets: On the Koan Company Headquarters page, it’s an opportunity to keep your organization’s mission, vision, and strategic objectives front and center for everyone to see. We’ve recently added a user-friendly widget to this page, to help make updates and customize specifically for your organization. Learn more.

We hope these adjustments make it easier to use the product and collaborate with your teams. If you’re interested in a virtual tour, check out this video from our Senior Director, Product & Design, Buck Wilson. 

We're continuing to improve our design and overall experience, so keep an eye out for more updates over the next several weeks! As always, if you want to talk about anything we’ve covered in this post or learn more about our platform, feel free to reach out on Intercom, schedule a meeting, or give us a follow on Twitter or LinkedIn.