[product] FOKRs! aka Fractal OKRs
A talk about alignment and management from the micro to the macro of your IT organisations.
In my last talk at the Agile Roundabout in London, I was happy to introduce this concept: Fractal OKRs.
Before jumping into the description of what are those I would like to roll back and give some context on the whole concept of OKRs.
When I was Head of Product at kijiji.it I was lucky enough to work with the Silicon Valley product group.
A significant level of focus was dedicated to modern and new (at the time) agile product practice such as Dual Track agile and cross-functional teams.
In the last 10 years, I experimented a lot and I saw a lot of things that worked and many other that they didn’t.
Objectives and Key Results are an incredible tool to create alignment in product and development team.
Before then you need to create cross-functional teams.
An incredible amount of attention and time needs to be invested in what “cross-functional” really means.
Only people from product and development does not make a squad a cross-functional one. You should have representatives from every department in the business that has anything to do with your objective.
Let’s say that your squad’s objective is about “making our website the safest in the UK”. In this case, I expect your team to be composed of developers, QAs, product managers, and designers, but also CS representatives, marketing people, and so on.
Cross-functional also means cross-disciplinary.
Let’s start by saying that everyone who gives you suggestions on how to build and manage teams is potentially, and hopefully in good faith, lying to you.
This statement is related to the fact that there is no silver bullet for managing teams; every company is composed of different people, and this creates an infinite number of permutations that no rule can explain or contain (thank God).
Back to our OKRs. As a business, you need to provide clear objectives to your squads.
If in your company, there is an SEO squad, you should provide them with a meaningful and precise objective: “become the second SEO player in the market” or “increase social visits.”
Objectives should be vague and high level; you will delve into details with the KRs.
Key results are the way you align your teams or squads.
Once the squad received the objectives, they design the key results and the initiatives so that they will allow for the KRs and the Objectives.
Since we gathered together everyone in the company who has expertise in a specific area, we can and should trust the list of initiatives as the best it can be.
KRs should be S.M.A.R.T., where the M stands for “measurable.” A good KR is a KR you can measure every week or every other week as a worst-case scenario.
“Increase organic visits by 10ppc” is a good KR.
“Improve the checkout flow” is not.
Then, there is a light approval process with the management team by which the KRs and initiatives are approved.
At this point, the cross-functional squad will execute the initiatives in the order they think is more efficient to achieve the KRs.
This level of independence comes at a price; squads and people should be accountable for achieving the Key Results.
When I say “achieving,” I don’t mean reaching the numeric value that has been set, but more like moving the metrics in the direction of the KRs.
Back to the examples above. At the end of the quarter, we achieve “an organic traffic increase by 7ppc.” Even if this is not equal to or greater than the value we set, we can say that, as a squad, we steered the company in the expected direction, which was to “increase organic traffic.”
Your activity was then a success!
Apologies for the long intro, but I needed to set the stage. Now, let’s talk about FOKRs.
In the above example, we applied OKRs at a team level. This is the most common example and is also in line with the “Spotify” model.
What I am proposing and doing with my teams is trying to apply this at different “zoom levels”.
You can apply OKRs at an individual level but also at a portfolio level.
This realisation comes to me while applying and discussing Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). SAFe tries to use agile methodologies usually employed at a team level applying them at a company level.
I am proposing to adopt the same “fractal” approach to the OKRs.
I have chosen the term “fractal” because of how these mathematical functions work. You can see a fractal and then zoom in or out 100x, and they will behave and look the same.
With FOKRs, you can apply OKRs at an individual level.
Discuss and communicate the objectives to your direct report and expect him or her to come up with the initiatives to achieve those.
Let me give you an example of an objective: “become more efficient in the executive presentation”.
I then expect my direct report to come up with initiatives like presenting in front of the rest of the crew, talk to a conference, or similar.
This empowers people and gives them the feeling they are in control of their performance.
At the same time, you will know that they will be pushing he the direction you expect: become better in presenting.
Caveat: can be very tricky to define measurables KRs with individuals.
I don’t have answers on this; I am experimenting as well!
Back to the fractal concept; you can apply OKRs even on a portfolio level.
As a corporate management team, you can give clear Objectives to your divisions or local business such as: “Increase the RMS to 70%”.
Apart from the scale, the OKRs execution does not change if you are a single contributor or a thousand people business division:
1) Define objective
2) Expect initiatives and metrics to be proposed by the teams
3) Agree on the key results
4) Let the teams execute independently (empower them)
5) Hold them accountable by checking the KRs periodically
This is the nature of the fractal OKRs!
