If you work in a digital product team in 2022 you may have heard of the OKR framework. With OKRs often comes "Monday Commitments" and "Friday Wins". Meetings that are meant to set goals for the week on Monday, and celebrate your achievements on Friday.

As teams and organizations can be organized in different ways, I’ve been curious about all the different ways these meetings are facilitated. So I talked to a couple of colleagues to find out how they have made them work out for their team. Why do they have them? What works and what doesn't? Maybe these experiences can spark some ideas as to how you can adapt these methods to your own unique team.

Lars Andreas and Markus from Spink

Our Product Owner works remotely, so we do our Monday and Friday meetings digitally. It is a truly important gathering point for our team. Our Monday Commitment meeting agenda is written as a Trello task, readily available and right next to our backlog. Though sometimes, we’ll admit, we forget to look at it. Every week we rotate on having the responsibility to make sure we are working towards those commitments.

The way we write our commitments is more “big picture”, not concrete tasks. For example: Our goal is to get this in production – not all the steps it takes to get there.

Making commitments for the week does, to a certain extent, help us keep focused and prioritize what we should do throughout the week. Although by the end of the week we often haven’t done all the tasks we committed to, mostly due to unexpected new tasks that are more urgent.

Though we usually don’t get to everything we would like to, we like doing the Monday Commitments because of two things:

1. It really sets a focus for the week. “This is what we are focusing on – and this other thing we will put aside this week.”
2. We check our commitments each week to see what we should work on next. It is a good to-do-list (better than our backlog), because it is always up to date.

Markus from Möller Digital

Our team rituals consist of Monday Commitments, daily standups, and Friday Wins.

For our Monday Commitment meetings we close our Jira board completely, and enter a little corner in our Miro board instead. Here we set common goals for the team to accomplish this week, without tagging specific people to a task. Some of the goals are "low hanging fruits" – others more of a stretch goal. These meetings work well to frame our Jira-tasks. The Jira-tasks are often so specific that it’s hard to see the bigger picture. As a designer, I get more invested in what we are making than I would have been if I was just focused on the concrete Jira-tasks. In the long run, we should get better at linking our commitments to our OKRs. We do have a way to go there. The OKRs at Möller have up until recently only been on a higher level in the organization. A few weeks back we sat down with the team and made OKRs on a team-level. So in the weeks to come we will hopefully get better at linking our commitments with our teams OKRs.

For Friday Wins, we put up our Miro board and look at what we have accomplished, color code it, and celebrate that. If there is something we haven't done, we bring it with us for the next week.

Citona from SpareBank 1

Right now we are in a phase where we are trying to figure out what works for us and what doesn’t. We are a big team and have recently divided ourselves into three sub-teams with three different focus areas. We are responsible for a lot of different functionality, so it is quite hard to set goals that everyone can gather around. The three sub-teams make it possible for everyone to have ownership and focus on a specific goal. Our hope is that the sub-teams manage to make goals that contribute towards the “main goal”, so that they become visible to everyone.

We previously used the OKR system with Monday Commitments and Friday Wins. Most teams in our organizations were doing it, and we initially wanted to take part in this thing that seemed to be working so well for everyone. For our team, though, using the methodology felt a bit forced. However, I do not believe there's anything wrong with the framework itself. We are just not quite rigged for OKRs as we have a wide variety of functionality, a lot of maintenance, and legislations that have to be taken into account. So we stopped, took a step back and asked ourselves: What does our team need to find focus and make progress? What we need is a simple meeting on Mondays where we gather and talk about what we are going to do this week.

Although we dropped the classical Friday Wins format as well, we do believe it is important to celebrate our achievements. Every Friday became a bit too often though, as we didn't necessarily achieve that much within a week. Also, after Covid a lot of people continued to work remotely on Fridays, and frankly celebrating in a hybrid meeting or on zoom just isn’t the same.

So this is what we are doing right now: Every ⁠M⁠onday ⁠the whole team get together in the office. One representative from each sub-team shares something that they are proud of from the previous week, and then what the sub-team plan on doing this week. So in a way we have combined some celebration and some planning in the same meeting. We also try to celebrate along the way. We do that by continuously following numbers and measurements, and when we have bigger launches we of course have cake!

So.. Was the fuss worth fussing about?

To have a clear focus and be able to acknowledge and celebrate your achievements, big or small, is undeniably important for personal motivation and for your team to succeed. Monday Commitments and Friday Wins are nice ways to really put it on the agenda. Though, it is important to remember why you do it, and keep reflecting with your team on what works. Do the tweaks needed for your unique team to feel ownership and motivation! I hope reading about my colleagues experiences could inspire you to do just that.