My first team retro ended with eight Post-its that all read “no one knows what matters.”
I’d spent weeks polishing OKRs nobody opened.
So I borrowed a trick from indie Twitter: the single scoreboard.
Friday noon, we pick one metric that actually moves revenue.
We slap it in a Notion page, full-screen on the TV.
No dashboards, no traffic lights—just that number, the owner, and the next tiny bet.
Monday morning: did it go up or down?
If it went up, we high-five.
Down, we cut scope or kill the task. Zero debate.
Four weeks later the same eight engineers shipped our highest-grossing feature in half the usual time.
One dev admitted, “I finally know why I showed up today.”
Kill the OKR spreadsheet.
Pick the one number, make it visible, and everything else starts to breathe.