Slack's OKR review process evolved from live, synchronous per-team review meetings to an async format: teams recorded their own review as a Slack Clips video, leadership triaged each team's status with a red/yellow/green flag, and only flagged (non-green) teams got pulled into a live Slack Huddle for real-time discussion.
The change was forced by scale — total review hours had ballooned to "300 and something" hours under the live-meeting model — and it preserves the review's information value (every team still reports, every status still gets seen) while making the default channel async and reserving synchronous time for the exceptions. This is a specific instance of the broader Checkpoints vs. Performative Rituals (QBR Theater) problem (reviews becoming theater as they scale) and complements Communication Bandwidth Hierarchy for Distributed Stakeholders (matching channel richness to need). It is also a concrete mechanism supporting the general Peer-Executive Partnership Operating Model (PM–CTO).
Reported by Tamar Yehoshua (Glean), describing Slack's internal OKR process.
As the number of teams grew (at one point 'like 300 and something'), the async format was tightened with triage rules to keep review time bounded. Teams still submitted a written doc plus a time-limited Slack Clips video walking through their OKRs, but only the 5–10 teams with the highest priority or the most flagged questions received an actual live follow-up meeting — everyone else's async submission was the full review. Within status reporting itself, a red/yellow/green convention meant only 'red' (at-risk) OKRs were discussed live; green and yellow items were skipped to protect meeting time for real problems. When an async update raised a quick clarifying question, the team used a Slack Huddle to resolve it synchronously in minutes rather than scheduling a separate meeting — a lightweight middle ground between fully async and a full calendar invite. See Peer-Executive Partnership Operating Model (PM–CTO) for the joint-leadership cadence this review process supported, and Treating Your Own Alignment Process as a Product for the quarterly practice of revisiting the review format itself.
Slack's original synchronous OKR review process became so expensive at scale that its cumulative cost was measured at roughly 300+ hours across the org, forcing leadership to redesign it into asynchronous video-clip reviews. The 300-hours figure is cited as the concrete trigger, not just a general sense that the process felt heavy — a case of quantifying process debt during hypergrowth before deciding to redesign.