Crafting specific, impactful Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) can feel like a high-stakes puzzle. For years, the team at Helm struggled to really nail down this process, sifting through meeting notes, personal observations, and historical data about our working process. Achieving what we desired became exhausting and we found that the team would slowly drift into murky waters as each quarter progressed. Not what you want out of the OKR framework.
As Q4 reared it’s head, we held our quarterly strategic sessions and documented plenty of discussion around our Objectives. The sessions were structured. Leadership had deep insights. Everyone felt free to be honest and true in the discussion. Now, we needed to turn all of this into something actionable and clear so that everyone gets rowing in the same direction.
I was quickly impressed by ChatGPT's understanding of a screenshot of our Miro board. Yes, only a screenshot of our ideas on virtual post-its. It was like interacting with a highly-perceptive colleague with an innate ability to “read between the lines”. Nobody needed to repeat themselves or find the specific item we were talking about. It was ready and capable of understanding what our simple human minds could not do easily.
The first real breakthrough came when I began feeding it more specific information. I started inputting meeting notes, discussions about our team's past performance, goals for the future, challenges we had encountered, and our successes. I also fed in personal notes, my observations about us, our working vibe, and my vision for the company.
I shared details about each member's abilities, their past contributions, and areas where they had room for growth. This wealth of data might have seemed is overwhelming, but to ChatGPT, it was all clay for the potter’s hands.
It took these all into considerations and presented me assignments for which objectives would be best fit for which team members. About 60% of them were good and worthy of carrying forward.
In the past, the team and I are often debating about what to measure and how progress should be tracked through the quarter. So, I prompted it to write key results that were actionable, measurable, and tied tightly to our objectives. The resulting Key Results were ambitious, achievable, and offered quantifiable measures to use throughout the coming months.
At this point, I’ve spent less than an hour nudging ChatGPT and am at a place where it would've taken 2-3 meetings with our most senior people.
The experience also drove home the importance of personalizing the OKR process. Understanding that a one-size-fits-all approach doesn't work, and leveraging LLMs to tailor OKRs based on individual strengths and team dynamics — this was a game-changer.
By synthesizing our human notes, ChatGPT didn’t just streamline the process; it added an extra layer of strategic thinking that helped build clarity in our direction. The OKR creation process is not only faster but also more engaging and and fruitful. I’m left with OKRs that truly capture our team's potential, turning what used to be a mentally exhausting task into a productive and rewarding strategic exercise.
With the latest OpenAI announcement, I leveraged the custom GPT builder to turn this concept into an OKR Master bot. It leverages some of the worlds best writings on OKRs as well as custom configurations to make sense of your notes and deliver clear, actionable Objectives and Key Results faster than ever.
Try it here and let me know what you think. [LINK: OKR Master GPT]
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