What are Dashboards and OKRs? 

Traditional business reports cover what happened in the past. Dashboards cover what’s happening in real-time. Advanced Dashboards can predict what should happen and benchmark current events against those predictions.

Dashboards are the internal and external presentation of the real-time information that ExOs need to operate. They reflect essential company and employee metrics and allow for the implementation of short feedback loops. The phrase “what gets measured gets managed” is made manifest with Dashboards. In the case of ExOs, where growth is rapid, Dashboards are essential as they enable management decision-making to keep pace with the extreme rate of change. 

There are two types of Dashboards: external and internal. Think of an automobile dashboard, which offers important operating data, from speed to oil pressure to available gasoline. An ExO dashboard, however, offers many, many more metrics.

External Dashboards typically present Engagement metrics for early-stage companies and dollar metrics for mature companies. External Dashboards are made up of company, team, and personal Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). This type of Dashboard uses “leaderboards” to drive Community behavior and Engagement. For example, Peloton created Community competitions using Dashboards that compared users’ stats against their friends’. All digital gaming platforms are external Dashboards.

Internal Dashboards, exemplified by OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), are a collaborative goal-setting methodology for teams and individuals to set ambitious goals and track measurable progress in real time. Unlike key performance indicators (KPIs), which are measured at the end of a business cycle, OKRs provide continuous insights into performance. This methodology can be applied to various types of company operations and organizational levels, effectively aligning the entire enterprise on the path to achieving its goals.