Now that your calendar is in place, it's off to the races. OKRs extend well beyond that three-week period of crafting, sharing, and locking. Now it's time to track. Tracking is the ongoing process of checking in on the goals you've set -- your OKRs -- and this happens over the course of a cycle. Tracking isn't a simple thumbs up, thumbs down exercise on the Key Results. You really need the information, the conversation, and the debate you get from tracking. Because those will help you adjust and improve your strategies and tactics during that cycle. Tracking is how OKRs work for you all cycle long. So what are you looking for when you're tracking OKR? Simply, you're looking for progress on your measures and milestones, your Key Results. I like to think about tracking along two vectors, altitude and attitude, just like an airplane. Altitude asks, "Where are we?" It's the Objective measure of the KR. This is why it's really important the Key Results have clear measurements attached to them. You should be able to easily answer whether or not the metric is being met. Attitude asks, "How do we feel about our Key Results?" It's a more subjective look at the overall progress in process. Is what we're doing working? Do we feel like we're at risk of falling behind? Tracking both vectors should be a natural part of every week and it can fit into a meeting you already have on your calendar. If it doesn't, consider creating a dedicated tracking meeting and give the team a chance to acknowledge the metrics, to weigh in on the status changes, and craft plans to keep the Key Results on track. We've had a lot of success using a system where we mark our OKRs as red, yellow, green. Green says, "We're on track and the things we're doing are working." Yellow says, "We're at risk and we might need to adjust our approach." Red, that sounds the alarm and it says, "We likely won't meet our KRs, and it's time to take a hard look at what we're doing, and get collective buy-in on how to move forward." Evaluate both altitude and attitude to determine if each KR is red, yellow, or green, Key Results must be verifiable. If your Key Result is something like the uptime of your website or email open rate, you likely can get that data in real-time. Other measures, like the number of visitors to a store or revenue, that might only refresh daily or by the week. And now if the measure you've chosen only updates monthly, see if you can find one that updates more frequently. Checking in on a KR once a month doesn't let OKRs serve as early warning signals. The best metrics might be harder to track. You might need to measure something that's never been measured before, and that's okay. Make sure you have the tools in place early enough in the cycle to be able to measure it accurately and regularly. Alan Eustis, the former senior vice president of engineering at Google, he suggests that a move from green to yellow or yellow to red, any change in color, immediately instigates a plan to get back on track. A plan with a clear owner. If we've gone yellow or red, what needs to change in order to get back into the green zone? How tough should you be on your cell phone tracking, and how tough should be on your team? Tracking is a blameless activity. I remember back when we were working on healthcare.gov, and unfortunately there was an issue where the website kept going down at a similar moment during the day. And honestly, we couldn't figure out why. We raised the issue during one of our daily standup meetings, and this was a meeting which brought 40-50 people from every department together. We describe the issue and asked if folks had any theories on why. All the way in the back of the room, a hand went up and one of the engineers said, "I think I'm the one causing the website to crash," and sure enough, he was running a script every day that was causing the site to fail. But instead of getting angry with him or reprimanding him in front of the group, we gave him a round of applause. It was just a relief to know that someone had a hunch about the problem, which allowed us to fix it. That's the culture we're looking to foster as we track our OKRs. If people are comfortable pointing out weaknesses or mistakes without fear of retribution, the faster we all get to a solution that works. Approach tracking with curiosity. Present the truth as it is almost clinically, without vague descriptions. Your updates should be concrete and include the direction. We grew this much. We're off track by this much. Bad updates leave out or sugarcoat information. When you say things like "We're doing great," or "We really messed up this quarter, but I don't know why," those aren't helpful. We need to be more specific, and by all means, please don't fudge a metric to make a KR green when it shouldn't be. That's unfair to your team and everyone's relying an accurate measures to guide the work.