Oboard launches centralized check-in system for async teams

Photo courtesy of Christin Hume on Unsplash.

This article is Sponsored Content by Margo Sakova, head of marketing at Oboard.

One of the quieter issues created by the rise of asynchronous work is that progress no longer reveals itself in obvious ways. Teams may be moving quickly, but without a shared place to capture what changed and why, momentum becomes something people sense rather than see. That shift has prompted many organizations to seek simpler, more reliable ways to keep work visible without increasing meeting time.

Against that backdrop, OboardOKR software – an OKR and KPI tracking tool – has released a centralized check-in system designed to give teams a clearer read on how their goals are evolving week to week. The update brings progress data and narrative context into one workflow, making it easier to track movement even when teams operate on different schedules.

Explaining the value of regular check-ins

OKRs, short for Objectives and Key Results, give teams a clear way to define what they’re trying to achieve and how they’ll measure progress along the way. But the framework only works when those measurements stay alive in day-to-day execution, which is where check-ins come in. They’re the recurring touchpoints that show what moved, what didn’t, and which assumptions may need adjusting. In async environments, those signals tend to spread across tools and time zones, making it harder to maintain a shared view of progress. A structured check-in workflow helps keep the story coherent, even when teams aren’t moving in sync.

A clearer way to track movement across teams

Oboard’s new system concentrates the most essential parts of progress reporting into a single workflow. Instead of navigating multiple tools or waiting for meetings to fill in the gaps, teams can now see how work is shifting in real time through a set of tightly connected features:

• A centralized check-in feed that lists every update in chronological order, including the author, timestamp, progress change, and current status. It creates a clean narrative of how goals evolve over time, something async teams rarely get without manual effort.
• Instant visibility into when a goal was last updated, available across the Home page, Dashboards, Alignment view, and Roadmap. This helps teams distinguish genuine stagnation from simply missing updates, a nuance that matters when people aren’t working in the same hours or channels.
• A streamlined check-in window where users can update progress values and add context simultaneously. It cuts down the usual back-and-forth between tools and keeps narrative and numbers together.
• An automatic historical timeline appended to every objective or metric, showing the sequence of past updates without needing to dig through spreadsheets, chats, or email threads. The latest check-in is visible directly from the update window, with older entries available in the comments section.
• A lightweight layer of collaboration, allowing teammates to reply directly to a check-in. Conversations stay attached to the work they reference, rather than drifting across Slack or email.

Supporting async rhythm with scheduled reminders

To reinforce consistent reporting habits, Oboard’s update also introduces flexible check-in reminders that work across the tools teams already use. Users can set weekly, biweekly, monthly, or fully custom schedules, with notifications delivered through Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, email, or directly inside the app. 

For async teams, the value is straightforward:OKR check-ins no longer depend on someone remembering to surface them or on everyone being available at the same time. Reminders help create a predictable reporting cycle without adding meetings or extra coordination, ensuring check-ins happen even when schedules don’t overlap. It’s a small feature on paper, but in distributed environments, these gentle nudges often determine whether goals stay visible or slowly fall out of view.

Making check-in updates collaborative

The release arrives at a time when more companies are adopting async workflows and seeking ways to keep work visible without increasing their meeting load. As reporting becomes more distributed, organizations are increasingly relying on tools that can hold progress, context, and history in one place. Oboard’s updated check-in system fits into that shift by providing teams with a lightweight structure that doesn’t require everyone to be online at the same time.

By consolidating all updates into a single workflow, the system reduces the back-and-forth typically required to track progress, a change that can save teams hours in weekly correspondence. 

Teams interested in seeing the workflow in action can explore it through Oboard’s demo environment.