OKR Plan

Our objective this quarter was to:

Make providing an effortless customer experience a habit for each application engineer by consistently honoring our guiding principles and definitions of success while maintaining healthy work habits.

We measured this via the following key results:

  • Anyone on the team will be able to review all open cases and say “yes” we are honoring our guiding principles and definitions of success at least 95% of the time when measured.
  • All application engineers will have a sentiment of at least a 2 in at least 60% of the technical competency areas outlined in our technical competency matrix.
  • All application engineers honor their weekly focus day at least 90% of the time and have taken about 20–30 days off by the end of the quarter (about 20 for those who started in June/July; about 30 for those who started in February/March).

We tracked our progress in our tracker and here is the end of quarter summary:

  • We honored our guiding principles and definitions of success 96% of the time, achieving our intention for this key result.
  • Application engineers have a sentiment of at least a 2 in 87% of the technical competency areas outlined in our technical competency matrix.
  • Application engineers honored their weekly focus day 80% of the time and 83% of application engineers took about 20–30 days off by the end of the quarter (about 20 for those who started in June/July; about 30 for those who started in February/March). CS leaders now understand how to better coach application engineers to take time off and we very much solved the barriers to honor the focus day … landing at 80% instead of 90% was due to factors out of the team’s control due to COVID impact in the last month of the quarter.

To accomplish our OKR, we…

#StatusResponsibleProject
1CompleteCS leadershipCase reviews
2CompleteCS leadershipHealthy habits
3In-progressApplication engineersEnablement

Task details

1 Case reviews

  • Workgroup: CS leadership
  • Facilitator: Nonso
  • Details: CS leadership will launch 3 types of case review practices in advance of in order to impact KR1:
    1. Peer reviews (similar to the idea of code reviews)
    2. Manager reviews (which include self-review)
    3. Retros on cases that take longer than 2 week to resolve (finishing what we started in Q3)

2 Healthy habits

  • Workgroup: CS leadership
  • Details: CS leadership will dig in with each member of the team to understand what needs to shift (mindset or practices) in order to make it easy to honor taking a focus day and taking time off as needed.

3 Enablement

  • Workgroup: All application engineers

  • Details: Each application engineer will work to complete as many enablement courses as possible and add them to our enablement page as they complete them. Our goal is to complete the following crash courses by end of December (and then more to come in January!):

    • Perforce (Alex)
    • RDS databases (Amber)
    • GraphQL (Ben)
    • Prometheus (Don)
    • Scaling (Gabe)
    • Code insights (Giselle)
    • Docker/docker-compose migrations (Jason)
    • CodeIntel (Kelvin)
    • Docker/docker-compose deploy (Mariam)
    • Kubernetes migrations (Michael)
    • Marketplace extensions (Stompy)
    • Kubernetes deploy (Warren)

    A crash course is something lasting and referenced from the handbook … either a video (harder to update over time but also super useful and/or written materials) … so more like Youtube – all at the application engineer’s preference. It’s okay for folks to experiment and see what works.