Google’s ORK (Objectives and Key Results) Framework - Notes ✏️

How to get things done in a measurable way

4 min readJun 18, 2018

Summary

OKR stands for objective and key results. It’s a framework adopted by Google (and many others) to help employees, teams, and organizations set and achieve goals in a measurable way. OKR’s have 2 keys elements. First, the objective. Which should be ambitious, and feel slightly out of reach. Second, 3–5 key results. These clearly make the objective achievable, are measurable, and lead to accurate grading.

About OKR’s

OKR’s impose discipline on the organization by helping individuals understand what they ARE working on and why, while also helping them understand what they are NOT working on and why.
It also helps people work together, as others in the company know what someone else’s OKR’s are and how they can align with one another.
It helps people understand how they are doing, and measure how close they are to their goals.
It is great for 1:1’s, team meetings, and helps employees know what their objectives should be in accordance with their manager’s and the company’s OKR’s.
The concept can be applied to many other things as well. For example, Google employees use OKR’s as the basis for what will happen in meetings. The objective is the take away, and key results are what needs to be done to reach the takeaway.
Everyone’s OKR’s should be public and viewable at anytime to create accountability, this is beneficial as their work becomes visible to their co-workers. In the Google company directory, search results return employees and their OKR’s in tandem.
OKR’s should ideally be set quarterly. They can be set at the personal, team, and company levels.

Objectives

It is important to be challenged, but it is also important for goals to be achievable. When setting your objective you should feel slightly uncomfortable because what you’re doing is challenging and you’ve set your sites high but only slightly out of reach.
Objectives should be high level enough in order to break them down into key results, which are the steps to achieve the objective.

Key Results

Ideally you should have 3 to 5 key results, of course this is a guideline. Anything less may be too little, and anything more may spread you too thin resulting in bad performance.
It is important to remember that these must be specific and measurable. An example of a good key result is “perform 30 product demos to potential customers”. An example of a bad key result is “demo to customers”.

Examples

Example OKR: Objective — Accelerate Blogger revenue growth. Key results — 1) Implement Adsense targeting to increase revenue per thousand impressions by xx%. 2) Launch 3-revenue specific experiments to learn what drives revenue growth. 3) Finalize PRD (product requirements document) for ad network.
Example OKR: Objective — Grow Blogger traffic by xx% above organic growth. Key results — 1) Launch 3 features that will have a measurable impact on blogger traffic. 2) Improve bloggers 404 handling, thus extending session length for users that start the user journey on a 404 page.
Find more examples of OKR’s for a variety of different fields here.

Grading

It is really important to grade yourself in terms of how you succeeded against the key results and overall objective. A scale of .1–1.0 is commonly used. Unintuitively, and ideally, you want a grade in the .6 — .8 range. Anything higher, and it is likely your OKR’s were too easy. Anything lower, and you have likely improperly scoped your OKR’s. However, sometimes the only correct grade is a .1 or a 1.0 because the outcome is binary. You should always have goals that are slightly out of reach so that you are always striving to be better beyond what you think is reasonable.
The objective grade is the average of your key results. ie — if your 3 key results got grades of .2, .6, and 1.0 — the overall objective score would be .6. Again .6–.8 is your target range.

Failure

OKR’s help you turn failure into data to figure out why something went wrong.
Use low grades to initiate retrospectives to find out the ‘why’, and how you will do better in the future.
Hold people accountable for not properly setting OKR’s and taking the time to break them down properly.

Public shaming of those who haven’t updated their OKR’s

In Closing

OKR’s should be ambitious, measurable, transparent, and aligned.
OKR’s help shift conversations to be more data/goal oriented, because everyone understands what needs to be achieved.
Company/team wide grading reinforces commitment. Get together to review OKR’s, scores, failure, and if/what you will do differently going forward.
Great examples of OKR’s based on domain: http://okrexamples.co/