Let’s talk about OKR
Starting with a quick reflection
This article is an intro to OKRs, but at this point besides give you some basic information about what is an OKR, I want you to think about the way you have been measuring success in your projects, and how these projects are connected to your corporate strategy.
We are all in a daily race. Racing against timelines sometimes set in a not fair way without proper analysis or delivery team involvement. Racing against our competitors to gain market share. Racing to get your project prioritized over a list of hundreds of initiatives.
With so much to do and very limited resources, time becomes even more precious. Right? Yes, but I would like to review this line of thinking going in a different direction rewriting the sentence as “With so much to do and very limited resources, value becomes even more precious”.
But what is the difference between these two sentences.
It is obvious that the first approach puts all the focus on time, what makes project deadline more important than the value it releases, and success is measured through “easy to measure” metrics. In this type of thinking going live is a success metric, doesn’t matter if what just went live adds value to customers or not.
The second approach drives towards strategy and customer value, and this is what we are always looking for. Don’t get me wrong, time is important but the main goal is to provide a great customer experience through solutions aligned to your strategy. In this case you will measure deep metrics that are aligned with your corporate strategy, that sometimes are not easy to measure, but they are the right thing to measure. Going live is just a milestone.
OK, now it is a good moment to reflect about how you have been measuring your projects. My proposal is to start this reflection from the very beginning, and I wrote 3 questions to help you:
· Is this the most valuable project in your backlog?
· Is this aligned to your company and product strategies?
· Are the metrics relevant to your business?
We will cover all these topics in this article, but it is important to understand that OKRs can help you to focus on what matters the most to your org. If you want, you can keep celebrating project launches, but using a well written OKR your team will know that going live is just a milestone before releasing real value.
What is an OKR?
OKR stands for Objective and Key Results, it was created by Andy Grove and is evangelized by John Doerr. It has been used by Google since early days, but also by companies like Intel and the Bono Foundation.
I consider OKR as a great vehicle that helps translating organizational goals into actions, by breaking down larger and strategic goals into bite size, timed and measurable pieces.
An OKR has two parts: one objective and up to 5 key results. Actually, there is no limit on the number of key results an objective can have, but you will learn later that fewer key results help to keep the focus.
Objective is the What and must represent the most important things the team is trying to get done in the next 90 days, for example. Time frames are crucial for a good objective.
If the objective is the WHAT, key results are the HOW. Starting from an inspirational objective, how do we get there.
Key results must be clearly measurable, what allow the team to track progress identifying when a KR is completed or not. OKRs help you to describe and invest resources on what matters the most, with that it is crucial to define meaningful metrics. Measure what matters is not easy.
OKRs help to get things done. But beyond that, OKRs help to get the RIGHT things done.
Defining a good objective
Define a good objective is not that easy as it seems to be. Remember, the objective you are trying to achieve must be meaningful and inspirational to the whole team. There are a few points you need to take care when creating a good objective. But nothing will replace a temp check meeting. As soon as you have the draft of your objectives ready, run it through your team checking understanding, excitement and capturing feedback.
A good Objective must be:
Meaningful:
This project must be the highest priority to your organization and customers. Always ask yourself if this work is a top priority to the organization and if it aligned to the corporate strategy. When you look up to your product or corporate strategy but don’t see a strategic pillar supporting your work, it is a red flag. A big one.
OKRs will help you to focus on what matters the most. It means that a good prioritization round must be done on your backlog.
Action oriented and concrete:
the very first advise here is to avoid buzzwords. Write your objective using clear and simple language that everyone can read and understand. Going in the same direction don’t use acronyms or terms specific to your business that only you know. Some people like to say that a good objective is a “vaccine against fuzzy thinking”. People working with you must look at your objective and immediately understand what you want to achieve.
Inspiring:
Personally, I consider this part the most important in an objective. This is the objective sense of purpose, or a big all caps WHY. Why accomplish this objective is so important to your organization and customers. Understand why this is so important will energize people around you.
I like to see the WHY as the objective’s soul, adding a bigger purpose behind the objective. It will for sure help to inspire people.
Audacious:
as inspiring is the most important for me, I see Audacious as the most difficult to calibrate. I must say that in a pair of OKRs I left it out to avoid confusion.
What I like the most regarding being Audacious in my objectives is the opportunity to exceed expectations. Audacious is a contract that must be done with your organization, where must be clear what is the minimum work to be completed when you achieve the objective. Again, it is a matter of communication between teams.
If you have this part added to your OKRs and constantly achieve 100% of your objectives, believe me you are not stretching enough. You should be more audacious in you next objective.
Time bounded:
this item is a bit curious as you will find authors that like adding time metric only on key results, and others like me that like to see time added on both objectives and key results. So, pick your side, but the most important is to have time clearly defined on your OKRs. Later on this article we will discuss about time.
The most important point that I want to share with you is that to write a good objective is like to exercise your muscles. If you are not used to go to the gym, you shouldn’t try the heavy weights on your very first day. As far you keep training your muscles will get stronger and you will be able to lift heavier weights. One day :)
It happens with OKRs as well. Write good OKR is a constant effort and as far you keep exercising your brain you will do better and better. It is not easy to write a good OKR in a single shot, even when you have your “muscles well trained”, but one tip that I can give you is as soon as you think your OKR is ready, present it to your team, capture their feedback and update the OKR. This loop will help you to improve faster.
Now that you know how to create a good Objective, I want to share with you a pair of examples where you will be able to see how objectives can be written and rewritten helping on communication and engagement with stakeholders and teams.
For the next examples imagine that you work on an organization that sells products and has a Sales Force team visiting your customers. Samples are an important strategy to this company, but also to the customers who get to know more about the products through free samples.
To be able to improve the samples distribution process making samples available also to non-visited customers, your company is developing a new website where customers will be able to order free samples. Remember, your company is known to do things accordingly the higher standards, so a website following the accessibility standards is a must have.
The first OKR is related to Accessibility, and this is the first draft:
“Make the samples website compliant with accessibility standards, by August/2021”
You can see that our first draft is action oriented and concrete. But it is missing the inspirational part. There is no bigger purpose. No soul, and without this part it will be hard to inspire people to achieve this goal.
Let’s rewrite this objective adding the missing elements from our checklist:
“Transform our sampling website into a website that helps Customers with disabilities in their journey ordering samples, by August/2021”
And now we have a bigger purpose, the objective’s soul here is to help people with disabilities in their process ordering samples.
Let’s go for a second example, but that time the Objective will be related to the website creation itself:
“Develop a website where customers can order samples, by August 2021”
I like to call this a “cold objective”, because similar to the example 1, the what is very clear and everyone in your organization will understand what to do, but the missing “why” will make hard to explain the objective across the organization.
So, let’s rewrite the objective making it meaningful and inspiring:
“Increase our customers database allowing them to order valuable samples through an online and personalized platform, by August/2021”
Rewriting the objective, we have now inserted 3 very important elements that helps people to understand the value of this objective. The first one shows what you want to achieve, “Increase our customers database”. This is your main goal, and we all recognize how valuable a good customer database is.
The second and third parts are related to customers, what they will get (“order valuable samples”) and how they will get (“personalized platform”). I would like to call your attention to this 3rd part, related to the personalized experience the website will provide, as this is the Audacious part added to the objective, as we know that it might not be possible to be delivered in the defined timeframe. This is a way to stretch the objective creating a challenge to the engineering team.
It is possible to break down the objective into 2 parts: have the website live with samples order functionality working properly and add the personalization.
If the team can do both parts in the defined timeframe, you will achieve 100% of this objective, but it will require extra effort from engineers developing the new website.
If your team only delivery the website with the samples order functionality without personalization, the objective is partially achieved (which is OK!!!) , but the website will go live with the samples order functionality, what deliveries value to the customers anyway.
The problem is when your team isn’t able to delivery something that can be used by customers. In this case there is a problem in the estimation process.
This closes the loop in a very good way. This new objective can be easily presented and discussed with your tech team but also with marketing people.
Defining key results that matters
If objectives are the “what”, key results represent “how” do you want to achieve the goal. Ideally one objective should have 3–5 key results. I have created a few of them with 2 key results, but never more than 5 as it will add complexity creating misalignment.
There are 4 criteria that I often use and will help you to write key results that matters.
Specific:
don’t create soft goals! What must be done must be crystal clear using your organization language. I like to think that an OKR can be presented to both tech and marketing teams, and they must understand what and how you will achieve it. Buzzwords are not welcome in a good key result.
Time bound:
by when it needs to happen. As I mentioned before, I like to add the time variable in both objective and key results, but if you want to pick one go with time on your key result. Time variables must be discussed and committed with teams.
Aggressive but realistic:
good key results must be aggressive enough to make the team uncomfortable. It doesn’t mean it will be impossible to achieve. Be fair.
Measurable:
my favorite one and the first advice is measure what matters, and not what is easy to be measured, but avoid too sophisticated metrics. What is important here is to be able to identify that the key result was completed.
For our examples I will use one of the Objectives we have already written, and I will give you a few examples of key results that you can use depending on your business strategy
Objective:
“Increase our customers database allowing them to order valuable samples through an online and personalized platform, by August/2021”
Key Results:
· Launch the website/functionality achieving 100 people registered, by August/2021
· Launch the website/functionality achieving 100 individual orders, by August/2021
· Launch the website/functionality achieving 1000 samples ordered, by August/2021
Take a look to the way the key results were written using very simple language, but also to the way we are measuring. Actually, I wrote 3 key results varying the metrics to exemplify how the metrics can change depending on your business strategy.
As you are launching a website there is a huge temptation to define the metrics as website live or XYZ website visitors. The fact is a website going live is simply a task and achieve XYZ website visitors doesn’t contribute much to your business strategy.
But when you start seeing metrics like “achieving 100 people registered”, “achieving 100 individual orders” or “achieving 1000 samples ordered”, you can easily make a connection between the OKR and the business goals.
Time is flying
As I mentioned before, I use time criteria as part of objectives and key results. It gives me some flexibility as in objectives I consider the total time, and each key result has its own time frame. This is what works for me.
But what is the ideal timeframe for OKRs? I like to work with 90 days as it’s a significand amount of time to release a feature that adds value to customers, but it is not long enough to observe changes on the market place that will make your feature obsolete.
It doesn’t mean you will release a feature only at the end of the 90 days. As soon you have a deliverable ready, push it to production and start capturing customer feedback. Deliver early and often.
Another important point regarding time, is when to review an OKR. The best scenario for me is to review every month. The review must be done with teams and communicated to your organization showing progress.
The reflection questions
We are about to close this article, but before I want to go back to the reflection I proposed in the beginning. I hope you have had quality time to reflect about the points I’ve suggested. Actually, to complete this reflection you need to have your business strategy on the top of your mind, because this is your North Star.
Is this the most valuable project on your backlog?
I am sure you have a never ending list of projects on your hands to be delivered by limited resources, but the point here is how you ensure company resources are being used at the most valuable initiatives. There are several questions that you can make to help you uncover the value, like: how many customers will be impacted by that new feature, is it specific to a market, is it a legal requirement, can it be localize to other markets, is there any study saying that customers want that feature,… and is it aligned to the company and product strategies.
Is this aligned to my company and product strategy?
this is a continuation from the previous challenge. For me projects not aligned with product or company strategy must be deprioritized immediately. Radical! Yes, it is, but strategy is the glue between projects and the direction the organization wants to go.
Are the metrics relevant to your business?
this is basically the discussion about measure website visitors or any other measure more connected to your business strategy.
On my first article “Content is King!” I wrote something that can be used here: “Remember that your organization has a strategy, and your work is to help to achieve the bigger goals, and not measure number of page views on a website.” This is the spirit. It is OK to take easy to measure metrics when they somehow are related to your strategy. A good team discussion will help you to measure what matters.
Keep practicing
I hope this article helps with you with OKRs. I have been working with OKRs since 2019 and the most important advice I can give you is to keep writing, sharing and capturing feedback. It is a loop and I can ensure your next OKR will always be better than the previous one.
