What I Learned From OKR Implementation In 2 startups
Story’s goal is to share learnings about OKR implementation. Non-goal is to explain what is OKR and why it’s a cool collaborative goal-setting and measurement methodology. I shared my 2 main resources at the end of the story if you want to know more about the methodology.
#1. Have a Company’s OKR Champion to Kick-off The Methodology
The role consists in helping all teams including the executive team to understand, execute the methodology and give globally the cadence.
After 1–2 first OKR iteration(s), teams should be autonomous.
If your company has multiple locations, train somebody to the methodology in each location to be the OKR champion and sync regularly.
#2. Have Agreement And Sponsorship Of The Executive Team
Start a flagship initiative like implementing OKR without the agreement of the executive team is suicide. On top of that, agreement is not sufficient… You need sponsorship.Why? Because implementing OKR is hard.
It requires you to be persuasive, persistent, confident and you will need support. You need to convince the executive team that a methodology like OKR is a must-have to scale in order they let you give it a try.
#3. Start By Creating And Sharing Company’s OKR
It requires that the executive team has defined a long term mission that the company wants to pursue. Often, it’s just not written and communicate company-wide whereas it’s crucial. Company’s OKR is the strategy to execute the mission. Company’s OKR give a clear & precise direction to everybody by telling where the company is going, and how.
After company’s OKR, team’s OKR creation can start.
Team’s OKR have to support company’s OKR. Alignment between company’s OKR and team’s OKR makes sure everyone is focus on what really matters (and say NO to what doesn’t) and knows how she/he is contributing to the company’s objectives.
Company’s OKR are usually set-up annually and team’s OKR quarterly. However, it’s OK to have the same Objective from a year/quarter to another if it remains the priority, consider it more as a cadence of introspection.
#4. Explain Why OKR? And Adapt It To Your Company Context
Introduce OKR methodology by presenting the company’s challenges and how OKR can be part of the solution. Everyone has to understand the company’s challenges and be convinced that OKR can help in order to go straightforward during the execution.
For example, in my previous company, we suffered of a too top-down approach concerning product roadmap so I insisted on the OKR’s mixed top-down and bottom-up approach to get buy-in from the teams.
#5. Know Perfectly What Is OKR? But Don’t Spend Too Much Time On It
Once you’ve done the job on the why? you might be tempted to explain the methodology in details. Wrong idea, you want to implement a 1st OKR iteration, not train everyone on OKR methodology. Remember that everyone is not interested by the methodology as you are. Summarize the what?, present OKR examples adapted to your company and do Q/A.
#6. Do Workshop With Each Team To Help Them Define Their OKR
Remember that adoption, autonomy and accountability begin with collaborative building. Invite team’s members only and let the team creates by themselves their team’s OKR to support company’s OKR. You will be surprised by the outcome! Much of OKR value comes from discussions.
Workshop agenda example:
- Reminder of the company’s challenges and OKR (5 min)
- Present the what is OKR? with examples adapted to the team (5 min)
- Brainstorming on the team’s Objectives (10 min)
- Debrief and vote to keep 1–3 Objectives at most (15 min)
- Brainstorming on Key Results (10 min)
- Debrief and vote to keep 2–3 Key Results by Objective at most (15 min)
Once 1st iteration done, share it as a minutes and allow the team 1 week to challenge it asynchronously then do a final review at the end including the team lead’s manager for information and adjustments if needed.
Don’t take too much team’s time on 1st OKR iteration, team will make errors and that’s good. They will learn from them for next iteration.
To give visibility on OKR set-up and gain momentum, you can share progress and team’s minutes on a Slack channel for example.
#7. Respect Basics Rules Of Key Results
Key Results have to be quantitative, measurable (ideally automatically) and achievable independently by the team in order that when measuring progress or at the end of the year / quarter, the answer to the questions: did we make progress? Have we achieved them? be YES or NO. Simple. No grey area. No room for doubt. No dependence with other teams.
Key Results also have to be impact oriented. Not task oriented. Teams must be able to change their plan if the task the team decided to do has no impact on the Key Result (yes, I mean being truly agile). It will boost team creativity and push them to test potential solution and learn. Example: “Increase leads by 10% on the website” instead of “Launch a campaign to increase leads on website”.
#8. OKR Needs Discipline, Cadence, Commitment & Celebration
Like always, everything is about execution. Once company’s and team’s OKR 1st iteration set in stone, you will need to implement a process composed of rituals in order to avoid the “set it and forget” syndrome.
Rituals example:
- Yearly ritual: at the end of the year, executive team does a retrospective of current year OKR, they share failures, learnings and brainstorms on next year OKR. They ideally also ask all employees what company should do next year (because great ideas are everywhere in the organisation). Then, CEO presents company’s OKR at year kick-off to all the employees.
- Quarterly ritual: at the end of the quarter (during all-hands meetings for example) each team does a retrospective of current quarter OKR, discuss about failures, learnings and brainstorms on next quarter team’s OKR. Then, they present what they achieved, failed and learned and next quarter’s OKR to everybody… and they celebrate! It requires in avg. 4 hours / team / quarter for last OKR retrospective and new OKR creation.
- Weekly ritual: each week, teams discuss and collaboratively set a confidence level to their OKR, follow their progress thanks to a dashboard and report to the company their OKR progress, team health, priorities, ask for support and celebration (using a common slack post, email or a weekly physical meeting for example). The idea is to connect, improve empathy, create a team spirit to boost support across teams. Also, don’t forget to informally discuss and celebrate as a team.
Last thing, company’s and team’s OKR have to be centralized in a tool accessible publicly throughout the company to share information and be totally transparent (it can be Google docs, Notion etc.).
End of the article, I hope this was useful. Don’t hesitate to share feedback at bottegal.brice@gmail.com and have fun!
Here are some resources to learn more:
- Book Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke
- Presentation How Google sets goals: OKRs by Rick Klau
