Microsoft Viva vs. Stack Overflow for Teams

Well suited for

• Companies that have experience of using the OKR methodology and have a clear understanding of what it is
• Companies that are planning to expand/scale the OKR program
• Companies that are looking to reduce the effort involved in running the OKR program

Ill-suited for:

• Companies that are using OKRs for the first time and do not have a clear understanding of the methodology

Incentivized

In my opinion, Stack Overflow for Teams is well suited for an organization that is on a hiring spree for the engineering teams. The reason for it is because instead of catering to doubts of new joinees individually, they can be asked to refer to the Stack Overflow and hence will save a lot of time for both new joiners as well as the existing employees.

Incentivized

• The default state of transparency. This helps in reinforcing the superpower of OKRs. In Ally.io, the default mode of any objective created is public (unless stated otherwise). This helps people across the organization to understand where and how the organization is progressing.
• The above feature of transparency is also reinforced by the feature of creating dependencies. This allows for people to understand the parties involved in achieving a particular goal and creates accountability. It is clearly understood which party has not contributed enough and RCA can be done on the same.
• It allows for integrating with a host of other tools such that the check-in process can be automated. This allows for reducing the effort of managers in terms of updating multiple tools.
• The dashboarding feature has helped us in reducing effort spent in creating presentations for retros, planning, and demos
• Ally.io's customer success team is among the best that I have worked it. Always ready to help, proactive, and up for the next challenge. They take the success of their customers extremely seriously. Kudos to the team for this attitude.

Incentivized

• Sharing technical solutions to problems we encounter in our internal development environment.
• Sharing best practices we find in external resources.
• Discussions on design patterns and conventions we can use in our projects.

Incentivized

• Accelerate integrations and add more integrations.
• Ally.io has room for improvement in providing benchmark in-depth analysis across industries, same-size companies, etc.
• Ally.io can still improve upon some of its product features and communicating the releases. Videos have been extremely helpful.

Incentivized

• I would recommend an increased engineering focus on the Microsoft Teams integration.
• It would be nice to make more medals.
• Easier ways to earn points.

Incentivized

Again, Ally ranks very high and this is because they continuously work towards improving their software, platform and solutions. I believe that they have been very innovative and are adding important layers to help keep an OKR program culture relevant and beneficial to its customers. Ally is an opinion leader in this category and not a me-too tool.

Incentivized

It's easier to use Stack Overflow for Teams Q&A to maintain our knowledge base over time, over the Confluence wikis that we also maintain. You don't need to bother about folders, filenames, templates - just ask a question and answer it or get it answered. It feels less formal, so developers feel more free to add content.

Incentivized

• Ally.io has had a positive impact so far in reducing the effort involved in managing the entire OKR program.
• It also has brought with itself the opportunities to avail training and Q&A sessions with experts
• Increased the overall engagement of the company with its objectives

Incentivized

• It makes the search for answers more efficient, so devs can focus in more important things.
• Knowledge is not lost, even if people leave the company.

Incentivized