How G-Loot improves OKR execution with ClickUp

G-Loot has a team of roughly 80 employees across a range of departments from people to growth to product. Objectives and key results (OKRs) are essential to how they get work done. Without OKRs, teams lack alignment on initiatives that impact the business the most. But to actually drive success, the ability to measure progress against OKRs was essential.

However, without a centralized productivity platform, it was difficult for various teams to connect their day-to-day work to OKRs and for leadership to understand how work rolled up to company goals. With critical business growth initiatives in play and on the horizon, it was imperative for the business to figure out how to not only align teams on the long-term goals, but also how to track real-time progress toward those goals.

While G-Loot’s previous productivity tool was robust, Chief Growth Officer Jamie Dunbar Smyth’s team had trouble creating and using the workflows required to efficiently manage and track OKRs.

G-Loot needed the right platform to implement the OKR concept across the entire organization. After hearing about ClickUp from a colleague, Jamie tested the solution, then turned his attention to a company-wide rollout to focus all of G-Loot’s employees on the same goals and monitor performance.

An all-in-one work hub for OKR management and more

Once Jamie got approval to use ClickUp, he onboarded G-Loot’s marketing team first. They had the most task management experience and were ready to improve their workflows.

“I stayed close to that process and coached those using ClickUp by running training sessions. That’s really important because, ultimately, the tool is there to streamline the way you do the work, so you need people to know how to use it,” Jamie says. “The user interface is extremely easy to use.”

Now, G-Loot leverages ClickUp to manage progress toward OKRs and to track performance. The company has even consolidated several disparate tools into ClickUp’s powerful platform for visual collaboration with the Whiteboards feature, for general task management, and for knowledge management with the Docs feature.

In addition, G-Loot’s entire staff now use ClickUp as the company intranet.

“Prior to ClickUp, we handled our intranet through a tool called Frontify. Unfortunately, nobody used it because it was another place they had to go to get work done outside of their regular systems,” Jamie says. “We want people to live in ClickUp every single day, so we decided to create the intranet right in the platform.”

1. More efficient management brainstorming sessions

G-Loot uses ClickUp’s Whiteboards to turn ideas into action faster and establish OKRs by translating brainstorming sessions into projects.

“Previously, we used MURAL to move from brainstorming sessions to project progress. We thought, why do this in a different place when we can do it in ClickUp?” Jamie says. “Now, it’s seamless. Teams can put virtual sticky notes on a matrix between value and effort—high or low value and high or low effort—then try to gauge what each project would entail.”

ClickUp enables G-Loot to set up custom fields on each Whiteboard card and hard code the impact and effort of each project with a numerical value. This allows the company to determine which projects have the highest impact, for example. From there, G-Loot tags each project with the various competencies required, scopes out the project, and maps out the tasks required to get it done in a month’s time.

“Where possible, we try to keep projects to a month timeframe rather than three months. Otherwise, projects would be too difficult to get out the door,” Jamie says.

2. Streamlined communication

G-Loot’s marketing team runs biweekly sprints every month to get projects completed and work toward OKRs. ClickUp’s Sprints is integral to this process. At the beginning of every sprint, the team creates subtasks within each project.

“What’s great about this is that you can add subtasks to Sprint boards in ClickUp. When you update any of these tasks, it updates the core project, which means you can get a really good sense of how you’re progressing at any moment in time. I had been wanting this type of feature for over 5 years when using other platforms and was really impressed when ClickUp released it this year,” Jamie says.

In addition, G-Loot uses ClickUp’s Gantt Chart view for each project timeline, which is Jamie’s favorite feature for viewing the entire company’s project roadmap.

“This was a frustration of mine, using other tools where you create a roadmap in one area, then you create the projects in another area, and they’re completely disconnected from each other,” he says.

With ClickUp, users can take a set of projects or tasks and output these items in the view that makes the most sense to them personally.

“Sometimes we want to look at what’s coming up on the company roadmap, so we use the Gantt view,” Jamie says. “However, the Whiteboard view is an up-and-coming favorite. I use Whiteboards on a daily basis to visually brainstorm and collaborate.”

3. Real-time OKR performance reporting

G-Loot also prefers to use ClickUp’s Docs to provide quick insights into OKR progress by embedding and aggregating ClickUp lists and reports.

“Someone in the creative team may not have any idea what someone in the CRM team is doing, and that makes it a challenge to support their efforts,” Jamie says. “We want to create visibility for everyone. ClickUp offers a great way to do this with Docs, because you can curate pages by aggregating and embedding views from various lists and Whiteboard cards, which makes for easy viewing.”

In addition, G-Loot uses ClickUp’s Dashboards feature to track the company’s sales pipeline.

“We used to have a very complicated Google Sheet tracking our sales pipeline,” Jamie says. This was not so great, so we decided to move that into ClickUp. Now we have quite a streamlined setup–and it’s actually fun to use.”

Now, G-Loot’s sales team can manage the pipeline in ClickUp. That information is synced to other platforms like data warehouses and business intelligence software on a weekly basis. This means all of G-Loot’s pipelines are always up-to-date across the company’s business dashboards.