Step 2.2: Manage product objectives across multiple teams
Airtable
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Airtable
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Guide for product operations
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Manage product objectives across multiple teams
As a Product Operations leader, you likely manage OKRs across multiple teams in your organization, so shared visibility is crucial.
In this step we’ll dive into best practices to centralize your objectives planning for maximum visibility across multiple bases, while still allowing for teams to work in the ways that make the most sense for them.
Follow along in Airtable.
In this step, we'll explore this org-wide template. Dive deeper into the product operations workflow here.
Recommended Approach: Centrally managed OKRs pulled into team bases
When it comes to organizing your objectives across bases, we recommend teams adopt a top-down model, where objectives/OKRs are managed centrally (i.e. by Product Operations) and then used to shape plans for individual product teams.
This enables shared visibility and standardization of key information, while providing distributed product teams the flexibility to work based on their specific needs.
This entails creating a master OKR table in a central location (i.e. the org-wide base), and then syncing the data into individual team bases (i.e. the team-level base). All of this helps teams with shared visibility and standardization to speed up downstream, team-level planning and work.
With this model, each team could have a view in the org-wide base that they populate and then sync into their team base. Within their team base, they can then add extra fields (like product theme, link relevant JIRA user stories, etc.) that are relevant for their specific needs. Within their team base, they also have the flexibility to group their own OKRs by those new dimensions and create more customized views of information to manage progress tracking.
⚡ Pro tip
After you’ve mapped out your objectives in a new view, you can share the view with other stakeholders via view share links.
Bottoms-Up Approach: Pulling OKRs from different teams into a central location
Some teams may use a bottoms-up model for managing OKRs. This involves product teams making their own OKRs/plans, and then syncing those plans into a central location for others throughout the organization to view.
In this example, you can see that we’ve aggregated OKRs from different pods (Mobile, Core Engineering) into a single table in our Product Operations base, in real time, using multi-source syncing. A multi-source sync allows you to centralize all of your OKRs in one place.
No matter which method you choose, syncing can take the guesswork out of aligning your objectives organization-wide. In the next step, we’ll layer on a few ways to report on progress that are just as simple.
