From Strategy to Action: Choosing the Right Tools

Organisations have no shortage of frameworks for setting direction and measuring progress: OKRs, KPIs, NPS, North Stars, OGSM, scorecards, and more.

The problem isn’t a lack of tools.
It’s knowing which one actually fits the situation you’re in.

In this interactive meetup, we’ll explore how different goal-setting and measurement approaches really behave in practice, not in theory, not on slides, and not according to dogma.

Pizza and mingling from 17:00-18:00, and we’ll kick of from 18:00 onwards!

Rather than asking “Which framework is best?”, we’ll ask a more useful question:

What can each tool actually do and where does it break?

What to expect:

This session is highly participative and deliberately practical. Together, we will:

• Identify the criteria that actually matter when choosing between goal-setting and measurement tools
• Compare familiar approaches such as OKRs, KPIs, NPS, North Star metrics, OGSM, Balanced Scorecards, Hoshin Kanri, and others
• Surface real trade-offs around learning, alignment, incentives, uncertainty, leadership effort, and gaming
• Explore why every tool wins somewhere and fails somewhere else

You won’t be taught “the right way” to do OKRs.

You won’t be given templates or rules to follow.
And you won’t be asked to defend a favourite framework.
Instead, you’ll work with others to make the often-implicit judgements explicit and see how different tools perform when put side by side.

About the speakers:
Jiten Vara is a senior product and agile coach with over 15 years of experience helping complex organisations improve delivery and strategic alignment — including large-scale portfolio work across 30+ value streams in UK banking. He is an ICF-accredited coach and an experienced trainer in product management, OKRs, and agile ways of working.

David Lowe is a product leader, coach and author with experience spanning start-ups to global enterprises across pharma, fintech, travel, finance and beyond. He holds a doctorate from Oxford Brookes, has authored six books and is known for making complex product challenges concrete, structured and actionable.

Who this is for
This meetup is ideal if you:

• Work with OKRs, KPIs, or other goal frameworks and feel the tension between them
• Are tired of one-size-fits-all answers about “best practice”
• Lead, coach, or support teams trying to turn strategy into action
• Want a more mature way to choose tools based on context, not fashion

No prior knowledge is required, just curiosity and a willingness to engage.

What you’ll leave with
By the end of the session, you should be clearer on:

• Which kinds of problems different tools are actually good at solving
• Which approaches are least suited to your current context
• What you would most want “in your hand” if you had to choose one tool to work with right now