1. When Strategy Is Missing, Start With Shared Understanding
At times, company-level OKRs either come late, change rapidly, or simply don’t exist. This can paralyze a team at the start of a new quarter. In those moments, rather than wait for strategic direction to arrive from above, we built Session #0 to help teams self-orient around customer needs, platform constraints, and business opportunities.
Session #0 isn’t a replacement for company strategy—it’s a mechanism for alignment when that strategy is unclear. Its power lies in focusing the team on what is already known: customer pains, platform strengths and limitations, stakeholder expectations, and growth opportunities. Instead of filling a vacuum with assumptions, we fill it with collaboration.
The outcome is not a backlog. It’s not a roadmap. It’s clarity—a single vision statement that captures what matters most for the next 90 days.
| Context | Typical Risk Without Session #0 |
|---|---|
| Strategy is delayed | Team starts with unaligned or made-up goals |
| Strategy is vague | Ideas compete instead of coalescing |
| Strategy is unknown | Execution starts with friction and confusion |
This session helped us stop spinning in circles and instead start from shared insight.
2. The Vision Template: Five Angles of Exploration
We created a structured canvas to help teams map and prioritize what they already knew. The canvas isn’t static—it’s collaborative. It includes five key areas:
- Customer Known Pains
- Customer Known Gains
- Business Opportunities
- Stakeholder Expectations
- Platform Known Constraints and Strengths
Each area contains sticky notes where team members add facts, feedback, signals, or known blockers. The idea is not to brainstorm blindly—but to gather what we already understand from user research, analytics, interviews, retrospectives, and incidents.
# Recommended folder structure
okra/
├── session-0/
│ ├── customer-pains.md
│ ├── customer-gains.md
│ ├── business-opportunities.md
│ ├── stakeholder-expectations.md
│ └── platform-notes.md
This process helps reduce opinion-based debates and raise the visibility of common themes across functions.
3. Facilitation Techniques to Shape Contributions
Different moments of the workshop require different styles of participation. We often fall into the trap of thinking alignment means everyone talking at once, but the most productive sessions use varied techniques to draw out input.
Here are a few facilitation modes we’ve used during Session #0:
| Technique | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Divide and Conquer | Speed up parallel input capture |
| Fishbowl Conversation | Focused discussion, limited number of active speakers |
| Person in the Spotlight | Let one person explain, others ask clarifying questions |
| Tell and Cluster | Group similar ideas to expose patterns |
| Individual Brainstorm | Minimize anchoring bias |
| Voting | Prioritize without over-discussing each item |
You don’t need to use all techniques. But picking the right one for each activity reduces groupthink and increases signal.
4. Step-by-Step Instructions for the Session
The way we facilitate Session #0 often looks like this:
- Split into two subgroups. Each group is responsible for half the canvas (e.g., pains/gains vs. stakeholders/platform).
- Tell and Cluster. Participants read out their notes, and others group them into visible clusters.
- Voting round. Each person gets a limited number of votes to prioritize the most important pains/gains/opportunities.
- Vision Statement Writing. As a group, we write one clear sentence: “This quarter, we will [do what] in order to [drive which outcome] for [which users or teams].”
Vision: Empower players to reliably organize and join football matches with confidence, by launching core features that reduce friction, increase trust, and build community-driven growth.
It’s not about writing a perfect sentence—it’s about summarizing what matters most, together.
5. Why Session #0 Pays Off
Session #0 doesn’t produce a roadmap. It creates context. It’s the difference between being handed OKRs vs. shaping what the OKRs should be about. And even when company OKRs do exist, Session #0 helps validate whether team execution will actually contribute meaningfully to them.
We’ve seen teams:
- Align faster on what not to do
- Build better OKRs in Session #1
- Spot blockers (like platform gaps) early
- Give stakeholders more confidence in their focus
OKRA doesn’t skip the messy part. It uses it. And Session #0 is where that mess starts to make sense.