Four Check-In Questions Worth Asking (and One to Drop)
A weekly or biweekly OKR check-in is only as useful as the questions it asks. Ask shallow questions and you get shallow answers, a quick number update and nothing else. Gallup's research on team check-ins makes a similar point: the right handful of questions, asked consistently, surfaces far more than a long survey ever does. Ask the right questions and a five-minute check-in can surface exactly what a manager needs to know to help unblock a team. Here are four questions worth building into every check-in, and one common question that's worth dropping entirely.
1. What's the Current Status?
This one seems obvious, but it's worth being precise about what "status" means, in line with how Google's own OKR guide frames it. It shouldn't just be a color or a percentage pulled out of thin air. It should reflect the actual current value of the metric against its target. If the Key Result is written well, with a real baseline and target, this question has a concrete answer rather than a gut-feel guess.
2. What Changed Since Last Time?
This question does more work than people expect. It forces a comparison to the previous check-in instead of a fresh, disconnected snapshot. It's also the question most likely to catch a watermelon OKR early, a Key Result that's been reported as "on track" for three check-ins in a row with literally nothing changing underneath it is a clear signal that something's off, either the tracking or the honesty of the update.
3. What's Blocking Progress?
This is the single most actionable question in any check-in. A status number tells a manager where things stand. A blocker tells them what to actually go do about it. Maybe it's waiting on another team, a budget approval, or a technical dependency. The value of a check-in isn't the status report itself, it's surfacing blockers early enough that someone with more leverage can step in and clear them before they cost a whole quarter.
4. What Do You Need From Others?
This question turns a check-in from a one-way status report into something genuinely useful for the person doing the work. It's easy for someone to note a blocker without connecting it to a concrete ask. Explicitly asking "what do you need" pushes that connection, does this need a decision from leadership, help from another team, or just more time. Skipping this question is how blockers get logged every week without anyone actually acting on them.
The One to Drop: A Precise Weekly Confidence Score
Many OKR tools and templates ask people to rate their confidence in hitting a Key Result on a numeric scale, say 1 to 10, every single week. This sounds rigorous but rarely earns its keep. Confidence rarely moves meaningfully week to week, so the number mostly just repeats itself or drifts slightly for no real reason. Worse, it invites the same sandbagging problem as strict OKR scoring: people learn to keep their confidence number safely middling so it never looks alarmingly low or suspiciously high. A written note about blockers and what changed gives far more useful signal than a number that mostly just sits there. If a rough sense of confidence is genuinely useful, capture it as a simple status (on track, at risk, off track) rather than a precise weekly digit that invites false precision.
Keeping Check-ins Short but Not Shallow
The goal isn't to turn a five-minute check-in into a lengthy interview. These four questions can be answered in a few sentences each. What matters is that they're the right sentences, ones that surface real information instead of a hollow status update. This is the thinking behind how Easy OKR structures updates: a status plus a short comment field that naturally invites answering what changed and what's needed, without demanding a form full of numeric ratings nobody has time to think carefully about every week.