You probably know how to create a goal, why they're important and what the three key types of goals are.  But how do you craft a really good goal in Rypple?  

In this article we'll use our social scalpel to dissect Objectives and Key Results and how we've designed them to help you achieve more, together.

Objective Name

This should be something short and aspirational, like "Have the highest quality software in the business", which is easy to communicate and easy to remember.  In fact, it has to be short in Rypple because we've limited it to 50 characters.  And while you might find it painful to distill your big dreams to under 50 characters, you'll thank us when you're exploring your organization's goals and you're able to quickly see which ones are relevant to you.

Objective Description

This is where you have a little more real estate to expand on your objective.  Focus on conveying why this objective is important and what would inspire others to want to help.

Key Results

These are the measurable outcomes of your objective (typically 3).  They are WHAT you will accomplish and the main way that you show progress on your objective.  

Due Dates

In Rypple, you can set due dates for your Objectives and Key Results.  This is good practice because it provides content for how ambitious your objective really is as well as a sense of urgency to get it done.  We find that creating objectives with a 3 month time horizon strikes a balance between objectives that are so large that it's hard to show progress and momentum and objectives that are so small that keeping them up to date creates too much overhead.

Actions

If you have another place to track tasks and manage your actions - great! - consider it optional in Rypple.  But we provide the capability to create, assign and track actions in Rypple for those who want to keep things in one place.