Building a fitness tracker for your org

It used to be really expensive and time consuming to get some understanding of your health. You had to book an appointment, get your blood tested, hook yourself to machines. And then wait days or weeks to get the results. Boring and costly.

Today, there are plenty of smart devices and fitness trackers that can tell you how your body is going just by staying on your wrist or finger. These devices won’t replace a full check up, but they can give you enough information to make daily adjustments that can significantly improve your well-being as well as your ability to perform.

Not having to wait 6 months to get a sense of your health is a blessing. And it can give a significant advantage to those who compete – the more you understand what affects your performance, the easier it is to design a plan to improve.

The same thing applies to business.

Your org is a living system

Each team in an org can be seen as a different part of a living system. And a business will need all these parts to be healthy to perform well.

• Marketing needs to be generating leads
• Product needs to have retention
• Sales need to produce revenue
• Support should help keep users happy
• Etc…

Now, the interesting part in this analogy is that, just like with athletes, you might need to strengthen different parts of your system depending on your market and business model. Running a sprint and running a marathon both involve your legs, but the training and muscles required to be great are completely different.

Looking at the world of work, a B2B sales-driven org and a B2B product-led company are both selling to businesses. But a sales-driven org can often tolerate having some friction in their product onboarding if they have a strong sales team. On the other hand, a product-led company will need to invest significant resources in building a great trial and pilot experience in order to grow.

So, the first lesson here is that, as a business, you must know which sport you’re trying to play and what’s required to succeed. Only then can you start picking the right metric to monitor.

Maintenance metrics vs. improvement metrics

A simple way to approach your fitnerss/health metrics is to divide them into 2 buckets:

• Maintenance metrics (ex: KPIs): These metrics are here to help you understand the general health of your business or team. They don’t govern the strategy, but they’re here to make sure that nothing broke. Think of it as monitoring your glucose, oxygen level, or anything critical that can shut down your body entirely.
• Improvement metrics (ex: OKRs): The OKR framework is about defining the things that you want to improve in the next quarter. The key results will focus on specific measurable goals that need to be better. Think of it as working on your endurance, lifting power, or breath hold.

You will probably see some overlap between the maintenance metrics and improvement metrics. To be more specific, your OKRs will often include a subset of your KPIs. The reason is simple: your KPIs represent the key metrics of your business, and in any given quarter you might want to take some of these metrics to a higher level.

Let’s take an example.

At a company level, your maintenance metrics, or KPIs, will often include:

• Revenue
• Number of leads
• Pipeline size
• Number of customers
• CAC
• Churn
• Active users
• NPS or CSAT score
• Burn
• Runway

Those are metrics that you should be monitoring every month. You will probably have some targets for many of them, but you won’t be able to improve everything at once. You just want to make sure that nothing gets completely out of control.

Then, in any given quarter, you can pick a set of improvement metrics, or OKRs, that can include:

• Improving number of leads/week
• Reducing CAC
• Growing the number of daily active users (DAUs)

These become the priority for the next 3 months, and all teams should align their effort to make these goals become a reality.

At the end of the 3 months, new baselines will be established for the associated KPIs, and you may decide to change your focus (or keep pushing for more improvements).

Differences between monitoring maintenance and improvement health metrics

Cadence

Your KPIs (aka maintenance metrics) can usually be tracked on a monthly basis. They’re not driving the roadmap, so having a more frequent review cycle won’t really impact your processes. It can be useful however to have alert systems in place that will notify you when metrics are falling far behind their baseline.

Your quarterly OKRs (aka improvement metrics) should be tracked and discussed weekly. These goals capture what needs to happen by the end of the quarter. As a result, progress on your key results should inform your roadmap, and it is essential that you keep a close eye on it.

Dashboards

A KPI dashboard will be fairly simple. Name of the metrics on the left, then target and current value for each of your metrics. The purpose of the dashboard is to help you quickly assess the status of your key metrics and make sure that they’re all moving in the right direction.

Evaluating KPI dashboards consists mostly in looking at numbers to understand if you’re above or below target.

An OKR dashboard is much more qualitative. First, your objectives and key results should be clear statements that help your team understand what the focus is. Instead of listing “Retention” as a metric, you should write “Improve retention from X% to Y%” for your key result. And your parent objective could say something like “Turn leads into fans with an amazing product experience”.

Reporting

In most cases, updating your KPIs will simply be about recording the most recent value of your metric, and possibly plotting it on a graph.

For OKRs, it is really important to give a personal assessment of progress on top of the recorded value for your key result. This can be done quickly by answering 5 simple questions:

• How much progress have we done?
• How did this progress happen?
• How confident are you that we’ll reach our goal?
• Any blockers?
• Should we do things differently?

You can reduce the number of questions to answer by 30% by showing a chart next to your comment.

A key result progress chart will help people quickly understand progress and confidence without having to read anything.

Putting reports on (semi)autopilot

Let's do a quick summary. To build your org's fitness tracker you need to:

1. Know which sport you're playing, and what specific muscles you'll need
2. Define the top 10-15 KPIs that you'll track every month → these are your maintenance metrics
3. Figure out your quarterly OKRs that you'll track weekly → these are your improvement metrics
4. Build dashboards to make it easy to see your performance
5. Track progress!

Step #4 and step #5 are where things can get costly.

In an ideal world, we’d have AI agents that would be monitoring everything, crafting beautiful updates, and telling us exactly what we need to know, when we need to know it. We might see this happen soon, but for the time being humans are still much better at parsing a set of metrics to understand if a team or business is healthy.

It’s boring. I know.

But, there are ways to remove a lot of the tedious parts of monitoring and reporting on KPIs and OKRs. A platform like Tability will take care of generating dashboards and graphs for you, nudging people when progress updates are due, and broadcasting updates once they’re published. On top of that, it can connect to your tools to pull the data required to do your check-ins.

If you’re finding yourself overwhelmed by spreadsheets, you might want to give Tability a try.

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