And while the process was clarifying, it was also somewhat demoralizing because it was Q4, and we just got our goals in place. The first time we ran the process, it took us nearly a month to have goals in place. We had people with varying degrees of experience, including a tech leader who joined us from Google who was fairly proficient in OKRs - but most of the team had never fully experienced them. And those walls became visible as the core of all of the interpersonal conflicts that we had been dealing with over time - and that’s when I championed OKRs and Workboard.Ī few quarters prior, we tried to run OKRs on our own. That tension builds up, and, as it does, walls start to build between teams that should be collaborating together. And so, even before we had OKRs and WorkBoard, there was a shared realization that we needed something - because our misalignment was showing up day-to-day as unspoken tension.

It was! It was a deeply troubling yet cathartic moment that we all experienced together.

That sounds like a transformational experience. So that was the catalyst for us to start thinking about how to bring people together, how to think about our strategy, and how to get organized and work better together. We left that retreat wondering how even though we are a small company, we could be working against each other. And then we had our customer success talk about what they were doing - which was in the complete opposite direction of the engineering team! They conflicted with each other, and it was then that we had the epiphany that, as a team, we were not aligned at all - it was a wake-up call for us. And in this conversation, we had our engineering team talk about what that they were doing. Mike Giordani, Co-founder of Lingo Live: Well, first of all, I’m a huge OKR fanatic! At our retreat a few years ago, we had this open conversation about what’s working and what’s not working. WorkBoard: What drew you to OKRs and WorkBoard? Mike talks about how OKRs drive asynchronous communication and alignment for the global team at Lingo Live. We sat down with Mike Giordani, Co-founder of Lingo Live, to talk about how they’re using OKRs and some of their victories on the path to becoming a stronger, more resilient team.

Lingo live mission