Achieving Success at FlowForge

There's multiple ways to align a company around business goals, and at FlowForge we've identified two ways to help us shape this. The core metric are captured in the KPI. A KPI is a tool to identify problems and areas for improvement.

The second tool employed at FlowForge to improve on the identfied problems are OKRs.

KPI

A KPI, or Key Point Indicator, is used as a heuristic metric for company wide success. At FlowForge we're engaged in many initiatives to grow our offering and assess product market fit. At this time there's one KPI to track progress.

Managed Node-RED instances

Dashboard

FlowForge is the key product we're verifying in the market currently. Each customer electing to use FlowForge to help them in their Node-RED journey is a signal we're providing value.

An instance is either a remote Node-RED running the FlowForge Device Agent, a hosted Node-RED in the FlowForge Cluster, or an otherwise FlowForge licensed and supported Node-RED instance.

Telemetry collection is opt-in, and dependant on an internet connection. As such it's anticipated to under report the true number of FlowForge managed instances.

Target growth for this metric is 10% week over week.

OKRs

OKRs, Objectives and Key Results, are action oriented goals that have a measureable impact on the company. OKRs are intended to be bold goals, where the bar is set high enough that one still takes a leap.

Given goals are intended to be bold and aggressive, performance on the OKRs has no influence on compensation or any other performance indicator of a department or individual.

Anatomy of an OKR

Per timeboxed period a couple of OKRs are created. Each of them should describe clearly what the objective is, the key results that will be used to measure the success. measured. Further, the goal and plan to achieve it should align with the values.

The process

Before the OKR period, the CEO sets company wide OKRs. Each of the CEO, CTO, Head of Marketing, Head of UX, and product manager are expected to read the OKRs and work with their teams to develop at least 2 OKRs their team will implement to help achieve the company goal.

At the start of the OKR period, each team will present their OKRs during a company meeting. Bi-weekly meetings will be held where each team will present a quick update on the status of their OKR and current work being done to achieve the key result. At the end of the OKR period, a company wide retrospective will he held to share lessons learned from the OKR.

Current OKRs

OKRs are tracked here. Every two weeks updates are shared in the Bi-weekly KPI meeting.