Product Review: WorkBoard

Public service announcement: we’re halfway through the year (!), which means you’ve got about six months to dust off your goals and rightsize and refresh your OKRs for Q3. If you’re thinking about using a software solution for OKR management, WorkBoard is a potential option.

Product Philosophy

WorkBoard describes itself as a “business results management solution.” Huh? What I gather is that it’s intended primarily for strategy and operations teams to drive growth.

From my experience, a surefire path to failure is to overcomplicate strategy creation and management. WorkBoard offers a straightforward tool that can complement a light touch strategy creation process.

Core Product Features

WorkBoard consists of four related “products”—strategy, objectives, monthly business reviews (MBRs) & workstreams, and analytics.

Strategy

Crafting business strategy is a cross-functional effort. WorkBoard includes an “OKR canvas” feature—basically a virtual white board—that facilitates interactive stakeholder brainstorming sessions. This feature is a must in a remote work setting.

To facilitate these sessions, WorkBoard comes with templates for initial OKR development and for resetting OKRs. The features roadmap includes the ability to create customized templates for your organization.

Once you publish a canvas, it’s locked for edit. But, that doesn’t mean you don’t get to make changes to your OKRs later on. You can do so using the objectives feature.

Objectives

Once you’ve created your OKRs via the strategy product, use the objectives product to iterate on the initial draft and publish your OKRs organization-wide. The objectives product also lets you align OKRs to the appropriate team and update associated details.

If you’re wondering where the list of teams comes from, you can either create teams manually within WorkBoard, or you can use an API to link WorkBoard to your human resources information system. That way, the list of teams in WorkBoard stays in sync with any org changes.

I like that WorkBoard prompts you when other teams may be tracking similar KRs so that you can sort out any potential dependencies or duplications of effort. If the KRs are related but different, WorkBoard also lets you link KRs to show their interrelationship.

Finally, as you record your KR progress throughout the quarter, WorkBoard is smart enough to predict whether you’re likely to meet that KR using a red, yellow, or green status indicator.

MBRs & Workstreams

MBRs. WorkBoard includes a plethora of templates for periodic business reviews that let you report progress against your OKRs. I love the idea of saving time on prepping routine meeting content. Of course, you’re always going to have that ad hoc use case to satisfy some executive’s pet peeve, but this is a great start.

Workstreams. The workstreams view lets you track work activities for each team you belong to. WorkBoard organizes workstreams by completion flow (to do, doing, done) by default but also allows for customizing column headers if you want to organize differently. The workstreams are separate from your KRs, but you can connect them, if desired.

A few notes to keep in mind:

• The person who creates an activity is the owner of that activity by default. Thank you for saving me that click.

• If you are using the completion workflow, new activities are assigned “doing” status automatically. Also great.

• The due date, however, defaults to the date that you created the activity. This is slightly annoying, but I don’t have an alternate suggestion.

The MBRs & workstreams product also includes meeting facilitation features. You can link your calendar to import events into WorkBoard. Then, you can create a meeting agenda, keep meeting notes, and log action items within WorkBoard.

I’m not sure this feature is terribly useful. I would worry about these notes and actions getting lost in the shuffle, unless the meetings you’re running out of WorkBoard tie specifically to big picture OKR discussions, and the edits feed directly to the OKRs in WorkBoard. Otherwise, you’d be better off using another tool to manage tactical execution.

Analytics

This section of WorkBoard visualizes OKR progress across the organization using a heatmap view. Are heatmaps truly analytics? Maybe not, but this view is probably more valuable than most alternatives for pinpointing areas of improvement within your business.

Additional Features

Some other cool WorkBoard perks include:

• A section on “My Work” where you can add your personal OKRs and keep track of anything assigned to you. There’s also a workstreams tab within “My Work” that includes a “personal stream” for your tasks. “My Work” is available in list, board, or calendar view. Plus, you can change the background (thank you!!)

• You can hand out digital badges to teammates as a thank you for a job well done. Love that.

• WorkBoard integrates with other communications tools, such as Slack and Google Calendar, but what impressed me most was that teams could develop OKRs in their preferred source systems and then feed them into WorkBoard. These integrations include Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Asana, Jira, GitHub, and Tableau, among others. This is super helpful for gaining buy-in for strategy and ops work cross-functionally.

• To get your team used to setting OKRs, WorkBoard employs OKR coaches that can help you navigate the process for the first time. While there’s definitely a wealth of information out there on OKRs, the accountability factor is key. Also, it prevents strategy and ops from always having to be the OKR bad cops. If you wish, you can become OKR coach certified through WorkBoard, which I’m totally eying for my resume.

Key Takeaways

I found WorkBoard to be a useful tool for executive reporting, and I liked that it also included some personal task tracking capabilities to help with execution.

But, where this tool falls flat for me is that it doesn’t offer a way to translate your OKRs to a tactical project plan. I would be concerned that developing and updating OKRs in a separate tool would add extra work for team members already stretched thin.

Using an integration might solve for this, but given the choice, I’d recommend investing in a project management tracking tool instead and creating a project for tracking and managing OKRs as part of that investment.