I love seeing Koan starting to get more engaged in the Portland startup community. First, they’ve been out and about running workshops designed to help companies better understand management through Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) — in a really grassroots and Portlandy way. And now? They’ve signed on Portland startup juggernaut Vacasa as a client.
But what are OKRs and how does Koan figure in…?
Instead of pushing goals from the top down, OKRs encourage individual teams to self-organize around an organization’s objectives — a flexible, lightweight alternative to traditional goal-setting processes that still allows leaders to communicate strategy and marshal the resources needed to deliver.
That’s where Koan comes in. Collaborative OKRs integrate seamlessly into your existing weekly reflection, making them easy to update and track. Then, we’ve worked hard to balance qualitative confidence and quantitative metrics, to connect objectives to the company’s mission, vision and strategy, and to keep your goals central to your work.
And it’s that efficient workflow that attracted one big ol’ local client, Vacasa.
The benefits are clear to Vacasa, the nation’s leading vacation rental manager with more than 2,500 employees around the world. “Vacasa has undergone tremendous growth over the last several years and we needed a framework and a tool to support OKR alignment and accountability across the organization,” said Vacasa founder and CEO, Eric Breon. “With Koan, we now have a single place to communicate and execute on our strategy. I can see the status of our top priorities —and more importantly, everyone else can, too.”
Portland startups using products built by other Portland startups. Buy local, indeed.
For more on the work with Vacasa, see the Koan press release. For more on the management framework, see the Koan OKR blog post.
