Quarterly OKR planning at Spotify
This season on MURAL Imagine, we're bringing you live sessions and workshops to shine a spotlight on companies that have embraced change in 2020. One of these changemakers is Emem Adjah, the global head of monetization at Spotify, the world’s most popular audio streaming subscription service.
Emem leads the team responsible for optimizing revenue within Spotify’s ad-supported service. Emem joined MURAL’s Emilia Åström for a live session about how she adapted her team’s quarterly OKR planning sessions when the pandemic made in-person planning impossible — now, Emem can’t imagine conducting OKR planning without MURAL, regardless of whether it’s in person or remote.
Watch the recording below, or read on to learn how Emem and her team use MURAL to facilitate remote OKR planning sessions. Then, borrow their template to replicate their success with your team.
The old way: in-person planning
Toward the end of every quarter, Emem and a cross-functional team come together for an OKR planning session.
A quick refresher here: OKR, which stands for objectives and key results, is a framework for setting goals and measuring progress. Objectives are your target destination, while key results are your measurable milestones for getting there.
“What I like to illustrate to my team is: here's the destination. I don't care if you walk, swim, fly, roll to the destination … You’re going to pick the best, most efficient way to get there.”
💡 Emem Adjah, Global Head of Monetization | Spotify
Emem facilitates her team’s OKR planning sessions at Spotify, guiding them through a series of collaborative activities over the course of three to four hours. In the past, this meant booking a conference room six weeks in advance, arriving at the office at 7 am to set up, and spending time documenting the output after the session.
“It was a whole ordeal. So although I still love brainstorming ... it was just a lot of work manually, logistically getting all that stuff together — which now, we don't have to worry about with MURAL."
💡 Emem Adjah, Global Head of Monetization | Spotify
When COVID-19 made the usual method of OKR planning impossible — just days before the team’s quarterly session — Emem turned to MURAL to digitize the planning process.
The new way: online OKR planning with MURAL
Using MURAL, Emem built out the OKR planning process in a digital environment. “Because [MURAL] is so intuitive,” she said, “within 24 hours, we were able to translate our entire quarterly planning session [online].”
Let’s walk through the key components of her new and improved, online OKR planning process.
Agenda
For Emem’s team, a timeboxed agenda is essential for staying on track. At the very beginning of the session, she outlines the topics and activities they’ll cover, how long each will take, and the desired outcomes.
Ground rules
Because of the number of distributed and remote participants, Emem outlines simple rules and expectations to help the sessions flow smoothly. For example, she points participants to a Slack channel where they can ask questions, and she asks that everyone turn their cameras on when they’re in breakout groups.
Reviewing objectives
Before planning starts, Emem reviews the OKR structure with the team. At Spotify, OKRs start at the very top with the company vision. With the vision in mind, Spotify defines key focus areas that guide the leadership team in setting the company’s yearly objectives. These annual objectives give team leads a North Star for defining their own team’s quarterly objectives.
Warmup
To get everyone warmed up, spur creativity and imagination, and introduce them to using MURAL, Emem facilitates an interactive icebreaker. For example, she might ask everyone to place a photo of the first album they owned in a designated area of the mural. (Fun fact: Hers was Brandy’s Full Moon in 2002.)
Tip: Get ready-made icebreaker templates for MURAL here.
Breakout groups
After the warmup, it’s time to brainstorm and prioritize key results. First, everyone brainstorms individually, adding their ideas as stickies in the mural. Then, they break out into small groups to share their ideas and narrow their collective KRs down to just three to five. The groups reconvene and present their outputs to the larger team. Finally, as a big group, they prioritize and finalize their KRs for the quarter.
And that’s how a world-class team does OKR planning when they can’t be in the same room.
Benefits of remote OKR planning
No more sticky notes falling off the whiteboard. No more waking up at the crack of dawn to prepare for planning. During the MURAL Imagine session, Emem shared how facilitating OKR planning remotely has made the process more efficient and effective.
Time-saving: Emem explained that compared to in-person workshops, “I save a good three hours, both pre and post.”
Cross-functional communication: “There is a lot less friction,” Emem said. “There’s a lot more osmosis between teams, a lot more communication.”
Accountability and transparency: Emem frequently refers to her team’s OKR planning mural throughout the quarter, and she shares it with the broader leadership team for visibility.
Tips for remote facilitation
In a lot of ways, online planning can make your job much easier — but still, facilitating an online workshop can feel daunting at first. Let’s take a look at some MURAL tips and tricks that will make you look like a pro.
📩 Invite contributors to the canvas and test access in advance of your online workshop.
⏲ Timebox activities and use the built-in timer to keep each activity on track.
🟨 Have each participant use different colored sticky notes so you can ensure everyone is participating and has an equal voice. Or, you can define colors for specific themes or objectives.
⭐️ Add icons to visually illustrate attitudes and emotions.
🙋♀️ Leverage the voting feature to prioritize “how might we…” questions by voting anonymously.
🗓 Spread the workshop out over time. Try scheduling multiple “power hours” with time in between to tie up loose ends and prepare for the next wave.
👋 To bring the group back together, summon everyone to where you are on the canvas. Rest assured knowing everyone's seeing what you're seeing.
Get the OKR Planning Template
Want to replicate Emem’s OKR planning process with your own team? Use this MURAL template, created with our friends at Spotify, to guide your next quarterly team planning session. In it, you’ll find the activities Emem outlined in her MURAL Imagine session, so you can put them into action immediately.
Session transcript
Emilia Åström: [00:00:00] Good morning, good afternoon, and welcome everyone. And welcome to MURAL Imagine. I'm Emilia Åström and I will be your guide today through this session. We kicked off MURAL Imagine earlier this year as a way to bring people together from around the world to share ideas and foster discussion on how the city works differently. And, whether you're an expert in facilitation or simply committed to solving hard problems through visual collaboration and problem solving, MURAL Imagine is your space to learn, engage, understand, share and grow.
[00:00:38] And our guest today, in our second session, is Emem Adjah. Emem is the global head of monetization at Spotify, and we're really excited about having her here today. So historically, Emem and her team have used in-person white boarding to plan together, for setting monitoring OKRs, career development, and more. This year, that process has taken digital turn, as the team has shifted to remote collaboration. Now, the team turns to MURAL, to plan together, making sure they set the right goals, both for themselves and for their team.
So today we're here to learn how the team turns springs imagination into the planning process, using MURAL to make it happen. And throughout the session, lots of highlight tips and ideas to bring this concepts into your work along the way. And I'm sure all of you will have lots of questions for Emem throughout this session as well. So feel free to add your questions in the Q&A pane of the Zoom software, and we'll get back to those questions at the end of the webinar. And we'll have Emem share some more insights and ideas. So, without further ado, I want to say welcome to Emem, thank you so much for having us here today. We're really excited to hear more about how you're bringing imagination into the planning work at Spotify. How are you?
Emem Adjah: [00:02:05] I am wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here today. I absolutely love Mural, so this is going to be a fun conversation. As Emilia mentioned, I'm the global head of monetization at Spotify. Essentially, what that means, is I work within the free user business and we look at ways of how we can optimize revenue for Spotify, for our advertisers. So, I would do ad product development all through, insights. So, I've been here four years and before Spotify, I was at, Twitter and Snapchat, and Bloomberg. And so I have a quite variety of tech, tech experience. so very excited to be here today.
Emilia Åström: [00:02:35] We're really excited to have you as well. So, we, we all know and love Spotify, but could you tell us a bit more about how Spotify uses MURAL?
Emem Adjah: [00:02:48] So, Spotify uses MURAL in a variety of ways. First off, we have almost, you know, 2,000 templates on MURAL, that we have access to us. But essentially we use it for only quarterly planning. We also use it for general strategy sessions, product roadmaps, whether it's company roadmaps, brainstorming, fun activities, research mood boards, team building, career planning. We use it for a wide variety of use cases. So it's been fantastic in terms of like what your teams and what my team has been able to lean on MURAL, especially during COVID where everything is digital.
Emilia Åström: [00:03:31] Yeah, I, I've been, I've been with MURAL for like six years and I've been working with Spotify for about probably more than four years now. And it's been really exciting to see how it's, how it has grown from like the first 100 users to over 2,500 today. And to be honest, most of the, a lot of the growth happened during the, at the beginning of the [inaudible 00:04:30] this year, as well. So it's released exciting to see more teams coming on board and starting to use MURAL. And that's also how I met you, which I'm really excited about as well.
Emem Adjah: [00:04:03] Yeah, it's been, it's been great, Emilia. I've worked on both, my personal, which is vision boards, but then also just professionally. And I would say that she was a saving grace when we were able to, when we had to switch over and figure out how to do our quarterly planning session. So I would say Emilia was just fantastic in being able to show us how to use MURAL, and really get us acquainted with the platform. And now we use it absolutely all the time.
[00:04:32]Emilia Åström: [00:04:32] Thank you. I'm blushing over here. But yeah, Spotify is a, is a, has been a great, exciting partner to work with. People are very innovative, very happy to experiment with different things. So we even have a little Slack channel where we share ideas and questions and that's how I met Emem as well. So b- before we getting to how Spotify does OKR planning remote, but also in person, for those of you in the audience, not familiar, would you be able to share a little bit about the purpose of OKRs and how those work?
Emem Adjah: [00:05:13] Yeah, so, OKRs, just for people who may not know, stands for objective and key results. And so, essentially, we do it on a quarterly basis and it's our way of really determining our goals for, for the quarter. So again, I mentioned it's quarterly, that we do this planning. And essentially, I mean, my team has our mission, so again, our mission is, driving revenue through product insights and, ad hoc development. So, what does that look like in terms of outputs for for our team? So each quarter, in terms of accountability, you can go back to this and say, "Okay, these are the projects that we've worked on to not only drive our mission, but our mission that ties into the overall mission for, for the company."
Emilia Åström: [00:06:00] So historically your team has planned your OKRs in person. And we talked about this a little bit before how we included like post-it notes, white boards. How, could it tell us a bit more about how, what the process was like when you did your OKR, OKR planning sessions in person?
Emem Adjah: [00:06:17] Oh, wow. So the OKR planning session before MURAL, I would say was a lot of time. So essentially it's four hours, three to four hours, two weeks before the quarter ends. We'd have to book a conference room. I'm sure many of you know, you might have issues with like booking conferences have to be big enough. You have to have a big enough white board. So that even booking even six weeks in advance in our building.
[00:06:41] The second part of that is, I would then have to, we'd have a session maybe between 9:00 AM to let's say 1:00 PM. I'd get to the office around 7:00 AM. and I would then grab sticky notes with all different colors if you have it, pens paper, and then I'd go to the conference room and start setting up. From there, I have to then draw, different parts of the brainstorming to sort of organize, "Okay, well, this is where we're gonna have an introduction. This is where we're going to have our, our group breakout. And these are some like neat tricks to use." I have to draw all of that. So that's two hours of prep time.
[00:07:18]And then we get into the session. It's a lot of verbal discussions and then we put up our sticky notes and do all that stuff. And then post session, we'd have to take pictures of the sticky notes and then you have to codify everything, by then invite him down what we wrote. That will be put on the board. We'd have to clean the board, we'd have to grab a sticky notes and picture to clean the room. And it was a whole ordeal. So, although I still love like brainstorming all of that stuff, it was just a lot of work. Then we would just [inaudible 00:08:42] getting all that stuff together which now we don't have to worry about with MURAL.
Emilia Åström: [00:07:59] Yeah. That sounds like a lot of work. And like now, after working from home, like without seeing other people for like more six than months, it's almost hard to remember what it used to be like before. But yeah, so, so six months ago we all suddenly had to go remote and we had to start working remote. We also know that as Spotify planning to work, continue to work remote until next year as well. But so when, when the countdown started and everyone has to start working from home immediately, c- could you tell us a bit more about that? When, when did you decide to start doing the OKR, all OKR plannings online, and what the, the process of kind of translating the in-person experience to the online experience look like?
Emem Adjah: [00:08:48] Yeah. So it started, I would say when, you know, the lockdown started happening. So in March, we, I think it was our OKR planning session was on a Friday. And, we had gotten notice that we're not allowed to come to the office, I think, mid, midway around March. So it was around that time when we do our OKR planning, it's just so critical to our team and to determine what do we focus on and how do we execute in for Q, for Q2? That, I was scrambling trying to figure out, like, how are we going to do this digitally? Like what, what, you know, what do we have?
[00:09:28] So history for my team in monetization, we used to sit within R&D. And I physically used to sit next to an Agile coach. So luckily I believe I had reached out to an Agile coach to get help on what platforms we should use. Normally, most people don't have access to an Agile, Agile coach. I sit, I sat within R&D at some products, our team is in products before we moved to sales strategy. So I had that resource and then they told us about MURAL, and MURAL was on the Slack channel. So that's when I reached out to Emilia and said, "Hey, we are trying to do our career planning session. I don't know how to use this tool. But apparently, Agile quick to start using it."
[00:10:08] And then within 24 hours, me, my, my, my team member, Julia [Mata 00:11:07], we got on a call with Emelia. And because it's so intuitive, within 24 hours, we were able to translate our entire quarterly planning session, which is about four hours of work, very easily. So one of the things is like, is this something that's intuitive? Because we also have to not only, you know, get people using this tool, we have to be comfortable using this tool.
[00:10:36] So we had to demo it to everybody who had the, the [inaudible 00:11:33], but it's very, very easy to use. So, luckily we were able to transfer our whole entire session on, and it went pretty smoothly after that. I think Spotify, one of the good things, that we have access to a lot of tools. But because of that, sometimes we get inundated. It's very hard sometimes to have things that are sticky. But this, because it was so easy and plus the account support that we had, it just made sense. And now, it's, it's just a part of our, like everyday, our everyday team workflow.
Emilia Åström: [00:11:10] Yeah. That's great. And, and I've been collaborating with a lot of different Agile coaches at Spotify as well. And it's just great to see how it's really interesting to see as well like the role of this kind of facilitators in onboarding the rest of the team. Because after using the tool in this session, so you can also start using it for your own work on the side. And then suddenly, you can collaborate better with everyone and the senior team as well.
[00:11:32] When I used to visit the, I remember like back in the days when I used to visit the Spotify office in Stockholm, and there were like lots of sticky notes all over the walls and people would take photos of the sticky notes and send to each other. Like moving, moving all the stickies online into MURAL is definitely the same way to create more transparency and just make it easier to work on an everyday basis as well.
Emem Adjah: [00:11:55] Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think everyone's, everyone's company is trying to be green on top of that. And I, I think this also helps us to be green. Just the lack of sticky notes and paper that we're using and discarding, discarded [inaudible 00:13:07], this was just so easy. And I mean, I love to use different color sticky notes. Now I don't have to worry about how the diversity of them. So it's really helped us be a lot more efficient and even, eco-friendly.
Emilia Åström: [00:12:22] Exactly. And sustainability is a big thing too, not just limiting the use of sticky notes, but also not having to fly it all around the world for sessions to be in the same location.
Emem Adjah: [00:12:34] Yes, yes. We have, our team is global. We have people in Singapore, we have people in London and in Stockholm down to, you know, Brazil, to Mexico and all of that stuff. So now, it's an easier way for us to collaborate during the brainstorming session.
Emilia Åström: [00:12:47] Definitely. Another thing another other Agile coach mentioned that I hadn't thought about before, was also how, by not having to fly people around the world all the time, it's also more sustainable when you think of it from the political perspective. Not having to spend so many hours on the plane, being away from your family and have to adjust to time zone changes too. Even though we all love flying, it's also nice to be able to choose when you want to.
Emem Adjah: [00:13:09] Yeah. And I think just the mention of the Agile coach, I mentioned this before, how there's like a knowledge like an information osmosis that happens when using MURAL. A lot of the templates, you know, we get inspiration from other teams. So, you know, you can go in and, and, and see how let's say an Agile coach is structuring their OKR, or brainstorming, and copy that template to help in yours. So that's been even great for our team because we don't have that resource. We don't have that resource at our disposal. But now you can kind of go in and without having to nudge an Agile coach, we can go in and actually, you know, search through the templates and, and, and use it for our own. and it's been extremely helpful and being creative of how we approach the OKR planning session.
Emilia Åström: [00:13:53] And we actually have one of those OKR planning templates here with us today. Could you orient us to the templates? So, what, what are we seeing here? What, could you give us a quick overview of what an OKR planning session in MURAL at Spotify looks like?
Emem Adjah: [00:14:08] Yeah, so this is an example of an OKR template that I absolutely love. And you'll see it's two parts. There's like an introduction and a working in groups section. So, we'll move from left to right. the introduction is sort of setting the ground rules and the principle by which you govern our OKR planning session. so we'll see, like there was an agenda [inaudible 00:15:47] section, there's OKR logistics and even there was a pyramid that shows the mission of the company and then how that flows into the mission of the team. and so there's just some best practices to help, guide the overall session. And even we will do a, an icebreaker. it sounds so formal and especially being in a room for three to four hours, we want to get people worked up and excited, so we'd like to have them warm up, before we begin.
[00:14:15] And then the second part of that is, depending on your group size, I sit within a larger real team. Well, we tend to break out in groups. So, we'll see here, and we're, we're gonna zoom in on, the different sections. But in the working in groups section, you'll see that there might be a theme, certain things that you should both work on, and then, we'll have towards the end, an area where we'll sort of consolidate each of the different, group discussions and their OKRs, and then come up with a few things for us to sort of move forward for a quarter.
Emilia Åström: [00:14:42] Let's dig into it. So, what are some things you would like to highlight from the agenda? What, what does a typical OKR planning session look like?
Emem Adjah: [00:14:50] Yeah, so this is just an example agenda. We have so much that we want to go through. And so we like to have time dedicated to each line. I love to talk. [laughs] A lot of people in my team love to talk. So having just, "Okay, we have five minutes for this area and 10 minutes for this area," you know, that is very, very important to us, to really be structured in how we figure out what, how much time are allocated to each area and what's the desired outcome.
[00:15:23] And then like who's, and who's leading that. just so in the beginning or even before the session starts, if there is different facilitators, you guys can sort of meet beforehand. but this is just an, a general agenda that we can use. Of course, very flexible, you can accommodate any, adjust it as you need to. But we'd like to have a time schedule.
Emilia Åström: [00:15:42] Yeah. That's a-, that's also something that helps like facilitating the session. If you end up being an never ending conversation, you go down the rabbit hole, you can always kind of point to the agenda to kind of move things forward as well.
Emem Adjah: [00:15:55] Yeah. We're also the same at Spotify with meetings too. We are very big on having a schedule and a key outcome, on everything. Because time is very valuable. So, so, you know, it pours into everything that we do. the second part of that is ground rules. So, you know, generally, it's, it's good to also visually see this and pre MURAL, I would say that, you know, you're seeing everything visually, you might forget, you might even forget for yourself, so you're holding yourself accountable. But it's nice just to have like a post that says, "Okay, this is what, this is, here are some of the ground rules for it. camera's on, you have your Slack channel on, section of [inaudible 00:19:00] issues. really just providing guidance and how things should be running, moving forward, so we're all on the same page. So, again, if it's another nice way of, visually putting out what, the structure of the OKR planning should be.
Emilia Åström: [00:16:52] Yeah. And it's also really nice to see how you're thinking ahead. Like if technical challenges would appear, where can people turn to? If they, if their Zoom [inaudible 00:19:27] for example, if the wifi goes out, so they don't feel like they're left in this kind of vacuum and lose connections to the rest of the team.
Emem Adjah: [00:17:08] Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah. Because we all know tech issues happen. So, it's good to, anticipate those things just in case. We can move to the OKR, the OKR logistics. So this is the next step after the session. it's about building like a schedule and almost like a mini road map of how we're going to tackle this specific OKRs afterwards. So, one of the goals here is generally deciding what the outcomes are going to be. You may or may not have time that you wanted then determine action plan afterwards.
[00:17:45] But generally, there's other stakeholders outside of just this group that we work with that are cross functional, that we would need to, talk to and coordinate with. So this is providing this overall structure, like how should you be creating that [inaudible 00:20:32] for the OKRs. So it's followed with a when. In the quarter that we expect to deliver on certain OKRs, the who. So I mentioned before, we're very cross-functional. Although we sit in sales strategy and operations, we work with external partners. I work with engineering. I work with product, I work with government partnerships, we work with supply, we work with sales. We work with a lot of people.
[00:18:24] So, you know, getting them all together and we having a plan, I think that's the biggest part of determining who's going to be very, very important. And then the, how is it determining what, what are the methods you use in order to execute on each of these OKRs? So, you know, also finding a cadence in how you're touching base. So you might have a bi-weekly sync, you might have messages or dedicated Slack channels and how you discuss these things. A separate planning session to discuss through this. So, really understanding what are the tools, maybe on a communication portion, that you're going to ensure that throughout the quarter, you're keeping a pulse on, in terms of when this OKR is going to be done.
Emilia Åström: [00:19:05] So you mentioned the collaboration with different teams, how you're very like cross-functional.
Emem Adjah: [00:19:11] Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Emilia Åström: [00:19:11] Is this OKR planning session meant for one team or for one department? Who usually participates in this?
Emem Adjah: [00:19:19] It is as flexible as your need for it. Depends on your team and where you are in terms of your team. The, so I've had different flavors of OKRs. Pre MURAL, was actually pre, adjustments of my team. So before, my team was just yield. And we sat within research and development. So our OKR sessions was just us. So we didn't have different group breakouts. We would just have one group and we focused on certain themes and create OKRs for each of us to have. Now pre MURAl, ac- post MURAL actually coincided with our restructure.
[00:19:54] So we now are within, sales and strategy. So we now have different stakeholders, so, it's a larger OKR session. So, because there's so many people, we have different groups. But even before we were restructured, we, we also had people come in to our OKR planning sessions. So, a cross functional partners that we worked with a lot, I think [inaudible 00:23:01] was pricing. And we'd have them come and join and they would some- sometimes say, "Oh, we'd love to work with you on that." Or they'd give us guidance on, in certain areas that perhaps you'd want to partner with them on.
[00:20:29] So it's really up to you. And Spotify, really does it in different ways. What I love about that also is that we aren't stringent. Although it could be a stringent process, it's not. It's very, very flexible. This is like we have a North Star and you can take whatever path you want to get to the same destination. We don't care. So they're very, very open on how each one runs it. And so yeah, every session works differently.
[00:20:55]Emilia Åström: [00:20:55] Very interesting. So w- where do your OKRs come from?
Emem Adjah: [00:21:00] Yeah, so our OKRs are a byproduct naturally of our company vision. So, what I like about this is that, we are holding ourselves accountable and sort of tying back on how, what our company vision is and then how that flows into our current focus areas, our yearly objectives and then our quarterly objectives for the team. So, we always want to be tying that back into like, what is our overall roadmap and what, how does our team and our OKRs fit into the larger piece of the puzzle there.
[00:21:30] So I think what's extremely helpful is, you know, also showing what is your, do you know your company vision? Or do you know your product roadmap for the quarter? Do you know your organization's roadmap? If you don't know it, maybe that's a preliminary meeting. If I didn't know what it was, I would have a preliminary meeting with our leadership just to ensure that we were aligned on, "Okay, what do we want Q2 to look like?" So that's something that, you know, you might do before the session and then have that here. just to make sure that we're all up to date on like, what is our path. Because sometimes we pivot from time to time. So it's, it's good to, to make sure that's fresh.
Emilia Åström: [00:22:12] Yeah. B- before the session when preparing, we also spoke about how the OKR planning at Spotify, it's not just top to the bottom, it's, it's also bottom up as well.
Emem Adjah: [00:22:21] Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Emilia Åström: [00:22:21] Can you talk a little ab- a little bit about that?
Emem Adjah: [00:22:26] Right. So, I think the goal at Spotify and as an employee of Spotify, you always want to feel like you're empowered and really have a say in how the company is moving forward and executing their vision. You want to be a part of it. You know, no one wants to be in a top-down, just a purely top down organization where you're told what to do. Because that hinders creativity. And then, and then you'd say, "Oh, well, you should just tell me what to do, you know, since I have to say."
[00:22:53]However, we also don't want to be, you know, as a company roaming aimlessly at all different directions with different visions. And so, it's a, it's a big merger between, okay, top down, what is the company, what is the company's destination? And bottom-up is more so, you know, how are we going to get there?
[00:23:12] So I mentioned before, and what I like to illustrate to my team is that, "Here's the destination. I'm just giving you the destination. I don't care if you walk, you swim, you fly, you crawl to the destination, whatever method you need to get your points, take the best way, most efficient way to get there." So it's about really just setting forth like the end game and then allowing the employees in your teams, the flexibility and creativity to figure out, "Okay, what paths do we, could we take, which can be infinite on how to get to that same destination?"
Emilia Åström: [00:23:50] So, so how do you prepare these templates before the session then? Do you just type in the, the company vision and the different focus areas into the sections? Or do you add links to documents, that have the morning information in them?
Emem Adjah: [00:24:07] Yeah, we're fairly organized. So there will be documents where, you know, we have an all hands meetings. And so, you know, we're great about transparency here. So there's generally a supporting document or presentation that will show what's the company vision or the focus area? Your objective, like this is codified somewhere within a Google drive or a presentation that was reported. So that's fairly easy for us. And then another thing, if in the event, it wasn't codified in some documents, it's really easy to have access to leadership. Or I would then go to my director and say, "Hey, can we just confirm some what, like, what are the focus areas so we're all aligned here?" And they have a direct line to leadership and can determine like what that looks like too.
Emilia Åström: [00:24:47] Awesome. Thanks for sharing. So OKR planning can feel pretty rigid and there's also a lot of process. So what are some tips or some kind of tricks that you have to make... How do you basically bring imagination into the planning?
Emem Adjah: [00:25:08] I would say the way that we bring imagination into planning is I think, number one is just ensuring that people are somewhat present and excited. So there's like a psychological element to this as well. So, you'll see here that we even have a separate section for warming up and really doing like an ice breaker. I love doing ice breakers. And one of the things we generally like to know who you're working with, know people at a, a, a deeper level. So everyone does like a two truths and a lie or something like that. I think the first MURAL session we had, like, "What was your first album?" mine was Brandy, Full Moon, back circa I think 2000 or I don't know, 1998.
[00:25:54]But, in any case, we went to this work room and get people excited, so it's not just business and sort of the creative juices are going. And then as I mentioned before, there is a general sense even before MURAL, we have an ecosystem that just allows for people to think, to think broadly. And we try and encourage that all the time. But I think as I mentioned before, you know, we will just tell you what the destination is. And I will say, "I don't care how to get there." whether we ask the question, like, "What's the sky dream, what's the big bet? Like where do you see the company in five years? Like, what are some sky dreams?" So really aspirational questions to sort of get people thinking and to not limit themselves, as well.
[00:26:31] And I think the diversity of thought also will help people in ensuring that people are also contributing, will also help people think outside of themselves and think creatively too, if they hear the different team members or different teams. that was really helpful.
Emilia Åström: [00:26:41] [crosstalk 00:30:05] we're good.
Emem Adjah: [00:26:44] Yeah.
Emilia Åström: [00:26:45] We're gonna interact a little bit more afterwards too, but you're, you're running kind of this person on the planning sessions with team members, so that you're not just looking at the, the team goals or the company goals. You're also looking at the, those personal goals and how to get there.
Emem Adjah: [00:27:06] Yes, yes. I'm very passionate about career planning. And so we use MURAL for that too. And each emplo-, each member on my team will have their own career planning MURAL. So even a part of this OKR session in our last MURAL session, I remember from our career planning, that there was like statistics that I wanted my team to learn. And so that's a personal OKR that, we make sure to insert in our larger OKRs too. So, all of that interplays with one another [inaudible 00:31:04].
Emilia Åström: [00:27:40] Exactly. So it kind of like bringing in the personal goals kind of also helps spark creativity and imagination that people will bring with them into the team OKR planning as well.
Emem Adjah: [00:27:51] Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Yeah, definitely. And I love that.
Emilia Åström: [00:27:53] Yeah, me too. Yeah, so as you can see, Justin has been having us adding some hats to the team here. So, this is just one example, a warm up activity can do. Warm ups are great because on one hand they, help the team get relaxed together, give them a chance to interact with each other and get to know each other better. But it's also a great opportunity to introduce people to new tools and make sure that everyone knows how to use the tool before you get into the session. So that when you start discussing OKRs, you don't have to answer too many tool questions at the same time. So that's, that's one of the reasons we like to recommend warmups here at MURAL.
Emem Adjah: [00:28:30] Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Emilia Åström: [00:28:33] So, how do you get people set up for success? What else do you do before actually getting into the, the planning?
Emem Adjah: [00:28:41] So, the actual, the second part of that, which is breaking out into groups, we'll, we'll have general instructions beforehand, as you see here, just kind of go over into like how the group sessions or separate sessions to be structured. And again, the end goal is to walk away with OKRs, for the team. So logistically, so for example, our last MURAL, we had separate MURALs or, you know, separate areas that each team would have. We were on Zoom and like Zoom there's also a feature where you can go just, break out with their own separate rooms too.
[00:29:19]And then we would sort of center around like a theme. And this theme could come from. I think we saw, I showed you before, this, this pyramid, of the company's mission and the focus areas, you could also have you little, have like a main focus area, or sub themes within that focus area. Each, either way, each area can have their own separate, somewhat topics to discuss.
[00:29:44]And then from there, we'll then, bring back top, OKRs from there into a final group that everyone is going to discuss together. And there is a smart, a smart framework that we will use, that somewhat explains, "Okay, this is how you need to think about each of your OKRs." So for smart, it's either your, it needs to be specific, it needs to be measurable. Especially being in a revenue impacting organization and team, we want to be able to tie this back to numbers. Is it achievable? Is it realistic? We love sky dreams, but we want to be able to be practical. And then time bound. So time bound is key, and that's why before we showed you like post OKR session, coming with an action plan that's tied to some type of time schedule. so we need to understand, like when are we going to be able to execute really see these OKRs, [inaudible 00:34:20].
Emilia Åström: [00:30:44] Yeah. And I really love how you structure the session, how you go from like collaborating with the whole group together then you break out into smaller groups and then you come back as a whole team at the end to kind of wrap up and, and summarize the findings in each group together. What, what other tools do you use besides MURAL in a session like this? Zoom or Hangouts?
Emem Adjah: [00:31:05] So we use, we use Zoom, we use Zoom for a larger group because they have this break out feature that you can have sub videos or sub conference calls and have that time. And then once that's done, it'll then bring everybody off back into the same, Zoom call. Which I think is great, and unfortunately, Google Hangouts does not have that. But it's really good for, for multiple groups.
Emilia Åström: [00:31:33] Exactly. And also just want to point out here, you can see that Justin Owens is following in, in this MURAL. So right now, we're obviously using your screen-sharing for these webinar to be able to share the visuals that we, we are talking about. But one thing that I find really practical in, in sessions as well, we use MURAL, is that by f-, you've seen this following function, where you can summon and you can follow people. You can actually, avoid using the screen-sharing and, and just use the MURAL to share instead. Yeah. And th- there's Justin. He can't hear us right now, but he's here. He's, he's just over here.
Emem Adjah: [00:32:06] Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Emilia Åström: [00:32:08] And then you do a quick introduction about the OKRs here as well before getting into the groups.
Emem Adjah: [00:32:13] Yes. So, so yeah, so they'll have different just a list of like what the key results are going to be. And then again, it's just a general instructions. But we can move to the next example. So here is where I used several different features of MURAL. So one, there's a timing feature. So, you know, you can put a timer at the top just to ensure that again, everyone's taking the time. And then again, here's this instructors, which you can nicely put next to your MURAL. But in this area, you'll see like, you know, here at the top, I have the objective language. So you can have the objective that they're supposed to be focusing on and then sub themes.
[00:32:58]And so what's great about the sub theme, especially visually, is that, for example, my team, we might focus on analytics, product development, stakeholder management, external stakeholders, ad surveying, enhancements as themes, right? And so, each of those, each of those themes might have its own color coordinated sticky note. And then you'll put every person's willing to think through and they'll spend some time reading to themselves thinking through, "Okay, what, what are some, objectives that I can think of to tackle these areas?" You create a new dashboard, maybe part of your product or a new feature.
[00:33:43] And then towards the end, you then will consolidate, and pull, bring all of those down into the sharing cluster session. And what's good visually is, I like to, as a manager, see where I'm over-indexing or under indexing in terms of themes. So if I'm seeing that we're too blue, I'm seeing we're focusing way too much on analytics, we're forgetting about our stakeholders. And remember last quarter, we need to do better on stakeholder management, so we need to go back to the drawing board and ensure that we have a bit more, you know, stakeholder focused OKRs.
[00:34:16]And so there's also flexibility here because the themes can also be people too. And sometimes depending on personality types that I have on my team, some people are more outspoken than others, you don't want it to be driven by just maybe some people who are just maybe a bit more outspoken. And I want to ensure that everyone is collaborating, everyone is contributing to the discussion. So, also when you have the color coded stickies and it might be by person, you can see who's contributing, who's not, or really trying to encourage people everyone to equally contribute.
[00:34:48] So, that's what's been great. Pre-MURAL, if your company did not have a diversity of sticky notes, it would get sometimes just really annoying and having to name everything it's just can be quite messy. But here it's really easy to kind of visually see where you're putting, focusing your efforts, either by person or by theme, by area, which has been extremely helpful, for our teams', OKR planning.
Emilia Åström: [00:35:14] And this then came from, from the company strategy or from your team?
Emem Adjah: [00:35:22] Yeah. So, I mean, it's a hybrid of, of each of those things. It's, it's, it's our team's mission, but our team's mission is tied intrinsically, to the company's mission. So, eventually, we are saying, "Hey, these are the steps our team is gonna make, is gonna take, to execute on our mission and the company's mission.
[00:35:41] And then, [crosstalk 00:39:37]. Yeah?
Emilia Åström: [00:35:45] No, I think you, you were going to say exactly the same thing. So, but, but then, once you've been summarizing kind of all the different themes and all different OKRs that you've been brainstorming, how do you go about... You, you need to bring, each group needs to bring in about three to four OKRs out to the big group, to summarize together with the other groups. How do you go about defining which ones you should focus on?
Emem Adjah: [00:36:08] Right. So there's also another voting feature. So we would have, you know, your each of your groups would then maybe vote on the top three, three to five, that you focus on. And so, everyone can have, you know, there are three to five votes and then they could put it on each of the stickies, which is great. Before, we would, our team would put dots, would color dots on the sticky note, to see, okay, this is, this is where we want to, this is like a top OKR of ours and we shuffle around on that.
[00:36:45] But now here, they would have an embedded voting feature. And then you can see, you know, how many people are clicking on them. And then it's easily to kind of drag those over to, to the main or the larger group area. And yes, you can also see the voting results too.
Emilia Åström: [00:37:03] And the voting is also anonymous, you also avoid bias when you try to prioritize the ideas you're going to move forward with. And then once each group have the, has to find their three to five OKRs, what happens next? How do you kind of su- summarize and wrap up the session?
Emem Adjah: [00:37:27] So, normally even within the group, each group will have maybe a leader or a facilitator. So that facilitator would then probably just copy and paste it, copy and paste the top three to five into their group block here. And then we just discuss and would probably do another voting in the sharing cluster section. and then come up with final, OKRs that, essentially everyone would be focusing on. So, again, depending on your group, my team, will have individually, we'll have a separate section monetization for individual OKRs based on the feeds here and the different objectives you want to create. Some people might have, and the session with individual OKRs they've decided, or they might have if you're working with other teams. So there's a monetization team in my new division, there's a pricing and inventory team, there's a core strategy team.
[00:38:26] And so each of the OKRs, will somewhat dibble dabble and speak to each of those. But then, so you might have team based or division based OKRs and then separate individual OKRs. But my end goal and our end goals' always at the end figure out individual OKRs, which might happen in a separate session. So this is just a pretty good way of sort of kicking off and understanding like, what are the final feeds that we want to discuss? And then determining like how each person on your team is going to dedicate their time, to invest in that.
[00:38:59]So, this is overall our, our planning session and, and templates. Again, this is one of them, but we use several different kinds [inaudible 00:43:20].
Emilia Åström: [00:39:10] Awesome. So from, from taking OKR planning remote, what are some of the benefits that you've seen?
Emem Adjah: [00:39:20] Definitely, saving time. I'd saved a good three hours, at least, before prep time. Both pre and post. there is a lot less friction. There's a lot more osmosis between teams, a lot more collaboration and even more, I would say, tons of accountability. I always go back to our MURAL whenever we're trying to see how we're pacing towards our OKRs. So, it's been, it's been extremely great in building and visually seeing, "Okay, what are we doing?" And even sharing it broadly with leadership so they can see. And having a record for each of our planning sessions, moving forward.
Emilia Åström: [00:40:00] Yeah. Like sharing becomes so much easier. You basically just need to generate a shared link. You can, into that link in an email and people can go directly into the MURAL and actually see what the whole thought process looks like. So even if they couldn't attend this session, they can see exactly how the whole session played out and how the team came to the conclusions that they ended up with.
Emem Adjah: [00:40:22] Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Emilia Åström: [00:40:24] And, we already touched a bit on this because it's, it's a topic I'm really fascinated in as well, and I'm really excited about it too. So, you shared with me that, you also have been using MURAL to drive carer development with your team, which is also very important on having your team being engaged and also feel like they, they are related to the OKRs and, and the goals that they're working on. So, so how does this career development work?
Emem Adjah: [00:40:50] Right. So, I mean, nothing's in a vacuum. I, we talk about creativity and brainstorming and thinking, but p- want my team to feel motivated, and for them to feel as though it speaks to their skills and their strengths and what they ultimately want to do. So it's good for myself and for them to understand like, "Okay, what are you trying to do?" And I definitely ask them, "What do you want to do with your life?"
[00:41:14] And some people are saying, "Hey, I want to become a filmmaker in five, five years." Or it could be simply type, "I want to become a data scientist manager in two years." But we've definitely talked about career development. and like, what do they ultimately want to do with their life? What are their strengths and skills to get there? And how does Spotify and this team play into that? So what do you want to, what do you want to do, essentially?
[00:41:39] So for example, I have MURALs for each of my team members and I will go through and have a plan for 2020 or 2021. And if they say, "Hey, I want to become a data scientist." I will, as manager now, think does this actually fit within our team? Does it not? It actually does. And then I'm going to ensure that they have projects that will hone in those skills in order for them to really build and get to that point. So there's no where I do, as a manager to really say like, "I'm helping you achieve your dreams." So we have a full map of that.
[00:42:14] And so when I go into OKR planning session, one of the byproducts example was, there is a project that we're working on with the product team and they, this is actually going to lean into heavily into data science skills. So, I know that as an objective, I want them to work on this specific analysis and like focus on that with the product team, because I know that based on the career development, this is something that they wanted to do in this speaks to their dreams of wanting to become a data scientist. so all of this is like very intertwined, even down to our team OKR planning session. So it's truly helpful.
Emilia Åström: [00:42:56] Thank you. Yeah. I can imagine that you're going to get a lot of applications, people wanting to come and work for you. This seems like the best [laughs] team to work with in the world basically. And, and also this is, the, the way we met actually earlier this year, we connected through Spotify. And, we did, we ran a vision boarding session together in MURAL. And we're hopefully gonna do another one before the end of the year. So could you, before we go into the Q&A, could you tell us a little bit about how this works?
Emem Adjah: [00:43:23] Yeah, so we, so on the side, I love career development, I love career guidance. And so, I did a vision board session about like, "What do you want to achieve in your absolute life?" And so this is across health, so financial to, um, love and relationships to everything. Anything you want to achieve. Um, and so we actually Emilia and I made a session and we used MURAL on it. And so this is, it's about that time, like the New Year's, so everyone's figuring out, "Okay, what am I gonna do with my life? And what is it, you know, what is it supposed to look like?"
[00:43:41] So every morning, I actually look at my vision board across those four pillars and see like, what am I doing to take steps forward to get there? so it's, you know, when we talk about the company vision down to team vision, I also, as a manager, as a human being, will think about, "What is your overall vision for your life? How does that tie into your career vision, career portion?" And then that career portion then also influences, you know, your teams and the ecosystem and even the energy they bring forth to your team. So it's all one big exercise. Everything's in MURAL [laughs] for me.
Emilia Åström: [00:44:20] Yeah. I, I still look back at my vision board from that session too. And it's talking about adoption, looking back at that MURAL board each day and, and keep improving both on your own work, but also using the tool.
Emem Adjah: [00:44:32] Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Emilia Åström: [00:44:33] Thank you. so it sounds like you're all putting to MURAL, MURAL to work at Spotify in all, in all sorts of ways. Could you tell us a bit more about some of the trends you're seeing, what else people are doing with it?
Emem Adjah: [00:44:46] The other trends, I guess, that I'm seeing just in general with, MURAL is that, everyone's iterating over time. everyone is, you know... My first MURAL was, I guess it was very bare bones, but now one I'm using other MURALs and I iterate upon it. It's never the same. And, and so we're really building out a fast, rapid pace in terms of the adoption. And then I think the second trend is that before, it was very product engineering. And I think because of my [inaudible 00:50:02] in sales and sort of like a sales strategy org, but then other organizations, other divisions outside of just R&D are also being exposed to this for their own planning sessions. So, it's really being evangelized across the org.
Emilia Åström: [00:45:28] And it's also really good to see like inside the Spotify workspace, how people keep sharing their templates with everyone. And as you had mentioned at the beginning of the session, when you're planning for new workshop, you could just go into the templates library, you see what all the other teams are doing. You can adapt it and improve it. And I also really appreciate that hearing that you're not only changing your OKR planning boards for each session, because you learn new things and you want to improve them. You also do it to motivate and engage your participants to give them something new and exciting to look at and work with each time. So it's not just the same thing over and over again.
[00:46:07] That's something I'm going to bring, it's something I already do, but I really appreciate that, in cycle six and how just like trying something new, challenging yourself can also inspire and engage it in as well.
Emem Adjah: [00:46:23] Mm-hmm [affirmative]. Got it.
Emilia Åström: [00:46:26] Cool. So thank you so much. This was super interesting and insightful. it's time to go into the Q&A session. And I'm going to set the timer for 10 minutes, to time box the results. and, first question, I'm sure everyone are really excited about, once the counting is over, do you think you're going to go back to doing OKR planning, using whiteboards and sticky notes, or will you continue using MURAL?
Emem Adjah: [00:46:52] I would definitely continue using MURAL. I do not want to go back to the damn physical sticky notes. S so we're still thinking through like, what that, what is that gonna look like? I still want to have like a big room that we run to, might even, I think now it's easier to go off campus or go off out of office someplace like the park. I don't know. But I still want a big space where we can brainstorm et cetera, but it's just the fact that we can save everything in the different tools that, I will definitely use MURAL moving forward.
[00:47:25]I think the only thing that we can think of, it's just, making sure to keep people moving it's dynamic, get the creative juices going. So I think there's a physicality that I'm think through. but I think we can get that through like warming up and walking around the room and et cetera to fully think through things. But yeah, MURAL is not going anywhere.
Emilia Åström: [00:47:44] Yeah. Like I, I work at MURAL and like we have an office in Buenos Aires that I've been going into before the quarantine started. And we, we do all our meetings in MURAL as well. But yeah, just as you say, you can also just get up and do like warmups, like standing up, you can use, like, you can have big touch screens in your room that also allows you to stand up and they're a bit more dynamic if you want to collaborate. So like continue to working on screen doesn't necessarily mean that you have to sit down all the time. So we have a question here from Ray, "Do the team members and team leads negotiate they're OKRs. And if so, could you give an example?"
Emem Adjah: [00:48:23] Yes, they do. So, if there's going to be a final finalization exercise that I will have, with my direct report to finalize that. And it's a bit going back and forth on, on what it's going to look like. So I guess an example is, let's say like, there's this supply and demand health dashboard that I, you know, I want to build. But, is this something... Like, what are the metrics that we want on this? Should we be using Tableau versus maybe Einstein?
[00:48:58]But the negotiation is, as I mentioned before, what is, what is the goal here? Like what is the output that we're trying to get out of this? And what's the question we're answering. What's the health of our inventory and our demand business. And so I think that a dashboard and visibility for that as the best way. But they come to me and they say, "Well, actually, you know, I don't think a dashboard is the best for that. Maybe you should have [inaudible 00:54:28] meetings, it's an email forum." You know, we'll go back and forth. Eventually, you know, I might be up to my discretion, but, I want them to feel empowered, sometimes I'm like, "Okay, I, I, I trust you, you know? And, and so we'll see how this goes. And you know, if we need to pivot, we need to pivot." So it's definitely a negotiation.
Emilia Åström: [00:49:43] We have lots of questions about OKRs here. So maybe we can take one more OKR question before we go into post session on the adoption engagement.
Emem Adjah: [00:49:52] Mm-hmm [affirmative].
Emilia Åström: [00:49:53] We have another question here from Paulina. is the contribution in OKR something additional to regular project work, or not, I mean, not dedic-, not the dedicated people. And if so, how do you encourage people to work on OKRs?"
Emem Adjah: [00:50:13] Yeah, you know, I, this is a great question. Because we currently we restructured the team that was reactive, meaning their team was heavily sort of in response to maybe like sales inquiries. So, they're, they're more reactive and responsive. While my team has a bit more strategy, we had a bit more free reign. So it's been interesting on how to incorporate OKRs into that. The answer to that is, OKRs will still exist regardless, regardless. Whether or not, if you're a responsive or you're reactive type of org, you'll still have SLAs that you probably want to improve on, or the case loads you want to improve on. There are gonna be tooling that you can improve on too. So, you know, we can still talk about general inefficiencies there. I think the team, regardless of whatever you're doing should be forever evolving and there should be measurable results.
[00:51:08] And that's just for any team. I, I want to be able to have receipts that my, my team is an, an asset [laughs] to the business. And so, if you don't have a reporting saying, this is what we're doing. You know, I, I think that leads it to some stuff will be like, people are questioning, "Hey, well, what value are you bringing to the org?" That's what OKR is defines for, for your team? so there should always be one.
[00:51:31]But naturally I guess my team, because we're less reactive and do a bit more like strategy or a bit proactive. And, and so a lot of our, OKRs are, it takes up 80, 80% of our time but 20% is like reactive sales might come to us about something for an ad hoc, request. So that's how I've been looking at OKRs, as it, as it relates to maybe your team structure.
Emilia Åström: [00:52:00] Thank, thank you. We're at the top of the hour almost. so I'm going to do a quick outro, before people leave. If, if you're fine with it and then we can stay online for like-
Emem Adjah: [00:52:09] I'm fine.
Emilia Åström: [00:52:10] ... five minutes after, and just continue with a couple of more questions. so... But also quick last question, before we, we, end, the webinar. How, how did you drive MURAL adoption across Spotify from 100 to 2,000 active users? That's a pretty ama- amazing growth. How, what do you think contributed to that?
Emem Adjah: [00:52:31] Word of mouth and Slack? [laughs] I honestly think, I really think the Slack channel number one, I think the environment of Spotify we're very transparent and share a lot all the time. It's over-communicate. so I think that's one. So, you know, it's word of mouth, you start seeing people there. We do an OKR planning session. I've taken snapshots and my own OKR planning session and shared with other teams. And so they ask, "Oh, what are you doing?" I think the third of that is really just, unfortunately, fortunately, COVID and moving to digital. People have been finding ways to how to bring closeness in a very disparate time. So, this has been top of, top of mind. I think that's why it's skyrocketed the use of it at Spotify.
Emilia Åström: [00:53:12] Thanks for sharing. So, Emem, thank you so much for joining us here today. We truly appreciate this and I found it super inspiring myself, for my own OKR planning sessions too. So Emem, thank you so much. And let's celebrate you for sharing your story and joining us today in MURAL Imagine.
Emem Adjah: [00:53:31] [inaudible 00:59:13].
Emilia Åström: [00:53:32] And while we do that, we're also gonna take the opportunity to demonstrate the confetti and [inaudible 00:59:19] celebration function in MURAL. I, I try to use this as often as I can, to be honest. We, we appreciate MURAL members like yourself who share their experiences and stories and tips with the world. you're also part of helping to pull, especially throughout this [inaudible 00:59:35] to be able to continue the work, even though we have to do it in a new and different way. And, before we end, I wanted to share quickly also, what we have coming up for next session.
[00:54:06] So next week, next Tuesday, we have Helping Suddenly Remote Teams, with Atlassian. So Atlassian are are gonna talk about how they went from prototype to play in four weeks. When work suddenly shifted to fully remote earlier this year, [inaudible 01:00:05] Chung, research and design team culture at Atlassian, sought a new way to help teams that were struggling to adapt. How might teams practically work to better understand the work life impact of being remote?
[00:54:35] So over the course of four weeks, [inaudible 01:00:21] went from idea to shift play, in the Atlassian Playbook. So next week, you can come and hear how they used MURAL to help co-design, prototype, test and launch the play. And did with the Atlassian templates that you can use to understand work-life impact for your team. So it's basically, it's really nice workshop to empathize with your team, different, working situations. People working from home, working from, their sofas, their kitchen tables. So I really recommend joining us next week for more information on this.
[00:55:12] So make sure to register for the entire session. you can do this by going to mural.co/imagine. And in the next couple of days, we're also going to send the attendants a recap of this session, including a link to the Spotify OKR planning template as well. So, yeah, thank you so much, much, Emem, for joining. This was super interesting. We still have a lot of people on line. So if anyone is interested in joining, we could do one last question before we had lots of them. All about that one last question.
[00:55:48]Do you want the pick one, Emem? [crosstalk 01:01:38] Which question would you like to pick? Yes, you get to pick question. Which one do you want to do before we end?
Emem Adjah: [00:55:57] Let's see. Hmm, how are you going to use [inaudible 01:01:51] when you were turning back to this block, defining the objectives for your team? [inaudible 01:01:56] OKR. hmm, I guess Martin [inaudible 01:02:05], you ask, "Can Emem gives a real example of an issues resolved, thanks to using MURAL instead of an in-person OKR?"
[00:56:10]I would call it a two for one special. I no longer... Well, Agile coaches are always helpful, but I didn't need to ping an Agile coach, for help on how to approach problems or challenges within the business that my team are facing, because now I can go through MURAL templates and see what Agile coaches are doing and the questions that they ask. so that's one.
[00:56:35] And then the second part of that is truly just the efficiency and having access to a library now, of all of our sessions that we can share. So now if I'm meeting with a new director or someone new on the team or, leadership, I can just share with them our MURAL, and kind of go through, "Okay, this is, this is essentially what we've done, and these are some of the key results that my team has done." I always, I love professional receipts. I like having a record for everything that we've done, and this is the value that my team brings. So, I think the codified part and the note, the no longer needing to bother my Agile coach, an Agile coach for assistance. So that's been great.
Emilia Åström: [00:57:24] Yeah. And that's a way to kind of scale the Agile coach's work as well. I know that Agile coaches can be very busy planning all the sessions. And we also want to give, give a shout out to just MURAL templates in general. Like, don't be shy, go ahead and share your methods and your MURALs because there's a lot of members on your team that might benefit from it. So, thank you so much Emem for joining us. It was super interesting, learned so much. Always a pleasure, being able to work with you and do things together. So, thank you for letting me be your host here today as well [laughs].
Emem Adjah: [00:57:59] Of course. You're the reason why we're using, we're using MURAL Emilia. So, thank you for having me. And thank you to everyone for your great questions. Feel free to ping me on LinkedIn, if you have any other questions, I'm definitely here to, to answer them.
Emilia Åström: [00:58:13] Awesome. Yeah. Thanks everyone for joining and looking forward to seeing you next week in the next week session.
About the authors
About the authors
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