Participants:
Time to run:

OKR planning template

Align, progress, and engage around measurable goals

OKR planning

Use this template to define your objectives and key results (OKRs) with your team.

Defining OKRs is a collaborative goal-setting methodology used by teams and individuals to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. OKRs help teams track progress, create alignment, and encourage engagement.

Developed and used by Mural's own executive leadership team, this template includes instructions for two planning sessions and a framework for writing and measuring your OKRs.

The OKR planning template helps you:

  • Get connected and aligned as a leadership team

  • Collaboratively build organizational goals

  • Define metrics for success

  • Increase transparency and understanding

How to use the OKR planning template

To use Mural’s OKR planning template, follow the steps outlined below with your stakeholders. This OKR planning framework is meant to be carried out over two working sessions and a post-workshop process. Use the first two sessions to outline the objectives and the projects you’ll work on, and the post-workshop to clearly define each of the key results for your objectives.

Session 1

Step 1: Kick off your session with an icebreaker and reflection

To begin your OKR planning workshop, kick off the first session with an icebreaker activity to help get everyone engaged. Then, have each team member contribute their feedback on recent wins and challenges using sticky notes inside the template.

Step 2: Overview of your company’s mission, values, strategy, and initiatives

Before you bring everyone together, locate or create an asset that goes over the core mission, values, strategy, and initiatives of your organization. This could take the form of a video recording with the CEO.

Once you’ve gone through your warm-up exercises, use this time to watch the video recording or go over your strategy, as this will help frame the rest of the discussion for the duration of your workshop.

Step 3: Agree on objectives

After going over the recent wins and challenges and framing your OKRs with your organizational mission at the center, it’s time to brainstorm. Have every stakeholder add their takes on what should be the main objectives for the coming quarter using sticky notes.

Once everyone has contributed, group the feedback by themes, and use Mural’s anonymous voting feature to determine the top two to three goals for the quarter.

This forms the end of the first working session.

Session 2

Step 4: Get everyone warmed up

Begin the next session with a warm-up exercise. The template suggests having stakeholders reflect on goals they have measured progress against in the past, but you can use a different exercise depending on your situation.

Step 5: Create measurable action plans

Have your team brainstorm projects to solve for the challenges outlined in your objectives that you defined in Step 3.

Break your team into groups, and have each of the groups give each challenge an associated project, criteria for success, owner, and deadline. Make sure that progress is quantifiable, and identify and agree on milestones.

Post-workshop

Step 6: Define your OKR framework

After your breakout sessions, it’s time to define your OKRs. This is where you bring everything together from your workshop to clearly outline the rationale, key results, projects, owners, dependencies, and status for each of your objectives.

Make sure your objectives are aspirational to keep everyone on your team inspired. Carry forward your projects from session two.

Tips for running an OKR template workshop

To get the most out of the Mural OKR template and workshop process, you should:

  • Invite a diverse group of stakeholders to help make sure you avoid any blind spots regarding your objectives and strategy

  • Use features like private mode for brainstorming to avoid groupthink during group sessions, and anonymous voting to help determine the best objectives democratically

  • Keep your OKR plan up to date as you make progress using the Status section and the appropriate color-coded sticky notes

Mural makes it easy to collaboratively brainstorm, define goals, and create a plan of action

With Mural, you can get everyone involved and engaged in the OKR planning process, helping create better solutions, define clear action items, and make responsibilities transparent.
Sticky notes & text

Sticky notes & text

Add ideas, action items, and more as a sticky note or text box — then change the colors and cluster to identify patterns and new solutions.

Mapping and diagramming

Mapping and diagramming

Build quick and easy visualizations of flows, maps, processes, hierarchies, journeys, and more.

Private mode

Private mode

Avoid groupthink and get authentic feedback by allowing collaborators to add content privately.

Anonymous voting

Anonymous voting

Gain consensus and reach alignment quickly, either in real time or asynchronously.

Real-time collaboration

Real-time collaboration

Add more productivity and engagement to meetings and calls with features to guide collaboration.

Asynchronous collaboration

Asynchronous collaboration

Innovate and collaborate effectively together without booking time on calendars.

OKR planning template frequently asked questions

What is an OKR planning session?

What is an OKR template?

How do you write an OKR plan?

How do you run an OKR planning session?

Mural and LUMA System Logo Lockup

Mural is the only platform that offers both a shared workspace and training on the LUMA System™, a practical way to collaborate that anyone can learn and apply.