Product Review: Ricotta
Eisenhower famously used a 4x4 matrix evaluating urgency and importance to determine which tasks to tackle. The logic makes sense—prioritize the important over the urgent. In practice, product managers may find this prioritization difficult—particularly when it comes to convincing others to make similar choices. Compared with the feeling of satisfaction that comes from dousing the daily fires, diligently making incremental progress on big picture goals often feels less rewarding in the moment. It is certainly more difficult. This is why working with your team to measure progress against your OKRs can sometimes feel like pushing a boulder up a mountain. There’s got to be an easier way. Enter Ricotta, a Slack add-on for OKRs tracking.
The Ricotta Product Journey
The Ricotta team’s product journey will likely resonate with many PMs—I know it did with me! When the Ricotta team initially established their OKRs, they tracked their progress using Microsoft Excel, but quickly realized this tool was not robust enough. They switched to an external tracking tool instead. Even though this tool had the bells and whistles they needed, by the time it came time to report quarterly progress, the team had kind of forgotten what their OKRs were. In the commotion of the daily tasks that the Eisenhower matrix would have deemed urgent but not important, the OKRs were overlooked. They had gotten buried in an external application that no one had remembered to check.
How could the team keep their OKRs front and center and eliminate the need to check yet another portal? The team decided that, if they were already distracted by Slack, they should at least be distracted by their OKRs in the process. The idea for Ricotta was born.
Automated OKRs Tracking
The Ricotta app offers the option to create OKRs at the company, team, and individual levels. Individual OKRs roll up to team OKRs, which in turn roll up to company OKRs. Built-in access management settings let the user determine which individuals are part of which group and therefore who has visibility to see which OKRs. To update your progress, select the “Update Progress” button that appears below the relevant OKR.
A simple pop-up box appears. The first field lets you select a percentage completed from the dropdown menu. Thank you for making this a dropdown in increments of 10! Goodness knows that engineers would try to, I don’t know, overengineer this by selecting something random like 31% ;) As a team gets more sophisticated in its measurements, they’d probably want a built-in methodology for calculating underlying progress, but increments of 10 are probably good enough for those that are less mature in their OKRs usage.
The pop-up screen also includes a dropdown field for status and the option to enter a comment. Click Submit, and your OKR progress is updated just like that!
By default, team members receive daily notifications reminding them to update progress against their OKRs (although these notifications can be disabled in settings.) Automating the boring parts of a PM’s job FTW!
When reporting progress, you also have the option to tag your managers or your subordinates, depending on the level of reporting and your position within the company. Best of all for this product manager, Ricotta is working to build a simple dashboard summarizing quarterly results that you can share with your executive team. Easy to track and easy to report…it’s a win-win.
Other Ricotta Features
Along with OKRs tracking, the Ricotta app also offers taskboards, to-do lists, and a kudos function.
Taskboards. After rolling out their OKRs tracking, the Ricotta team received feedback from users requesting functionality in Slack akin to the Kanban board task tracking offered by products like Trello or Jira. The taskboard feature is meant to support asynchronous task tracking within Slack so that geographically distributed teams can spend less time on video calls at potentially awkward times. Users can choose from five different taskboard templates, select a name for the taskboard, and identify a list of board owners and members. Depending on the template selected, you can populate tasks with a description, start and end date, priority, and custom labels.
To-do lists. This feature offesr a quick and dirty note taking ability, again to eliminate the need to leave Slack for tracking random tasks that may arise in the course of conversation. I appreciate the desire for this function, having found myself searching for a notebook to jot down actions stemming from Slack threads or, worse still, asking my team to email me a reminder of what was discussed. Theoretically, though, you wouldn’t need the to-do list if you have the taskboard.
Kudos. The intent of this function is to send public praise to a team member in a pre-existing Slack channel. I’m familiar with the concept of Slackbots for employee recognition, but this one felt a bit forced to me. Why use this feature to type up a message when you could simply post directly in the Slack channel? Maybe there’s value in being reminded, but I’m not convinced about this one.
How to Start Using Ricotta
You can sign up for Ricotta for a 14-day free trial that doesn’t require a credit card. I like that Ricotta’s pricing tiers vary based on company growth stage (this is probably the most equitable way to do it.)
In case you’re fretting that you’d love to use Ricotta if only your organization used Slack, the team is working to build out similar functionality for Microsoft Teams. Smoother OKRs tracking is on its way.
