What are OKRs?

Deiwin Sarjas
Nov 7 · 6 min read

A Simple Goal-Setting Framework

First and foremost, they are what they say they are — Objectives and Key Results.

Objectives are clearly worded goals that inspire. Key Results are measurable conditions that indicate the completion of the Objective.

At a very basic level, the framework works as follows.

  • Set 1–5 Objectives per cycle (usually a quarter), per organization, team, or individual;
  • Define 3–5 Key Results for each Objective;
  • At the end of the cycle, rate each Key Result from 0.0 to 1.0;
  • Reflect; and
  • Start from the top.

While the basics are simple, the actual benefit of using the framework depends largely on the way it is used. The following describes some of the goals and non-goals of the framework.

A Way to Align Different Groups & Individuals

Clearly defining your or your team’s main goals for the next quarter is not an easy task. What makes it worth the struggle, however, is its ability to surface differences in assumptions, understanding, and perspective. When everybody agrees on (or disagrees and commits to) the team’s OKRs for the next quarter, you can be fairly certain that they’ve aired their biggest differences and worked through them.

This has tremendous value because, without the exercise, it is not uncommon for people and teams to spend a lot of effort on work that other people think shouldn’t be done at all. Clearly communicated objectives provide them an opportunity to raise their concerns.

This also works at a larger scale — if teams see what other teams are planning to work on, it is very easy to see if these different efforts move the larger organization in the same direction, closer to its goals, or not. Teams that move in opposite directions from each other stand out.

Photo by DC Irwin on Unsplash

A Justification for Focus

Clear goals make it easier to handle requests for work.

When someone requests: “A client just asked for Z. We need to work on Z,” then the usual and not very convincing response is: “I see, but we are already very busy.” With clearly defined goals, this answer turns into: “I’m sorry, but we’re focused on X and Y for now. If you can show that this is more valuable than completing X or Y, then we can push X back a little and drop Y from this cycle. Team A has been looking forward to Y, though, so you first have to get in sync with them on this.”

Everybody in the organization has some ideas about what people on other teams could be working on. And most of the ideas are good. They are. But talking about the goodness of these in isolation doesn’t really help with neither prioritization nor getting things done. Having clear goals makes it apparent that doing one thing means not doing other things and the comparative discussions that follow are more productive.

A Reason to be Excited About Work

Good goals make work meaningful and progress apparent. Daily progress in meaningful work is a key driver of workplace motivation.

Of all the positive events that influence inner work life, the single most powerful is progress in meaningful work.

— Amabile, Teresa. The Progress Principle (pp. 6–7).

Any task can feel either mundane or meaningful depending on perspective. The beauty of goal-directed work is that it ties the boring task to an inspiring vision of the future and makes it meaningful. Even the most tedious of chores becomes meaningful if I can clearly see how it helps us reach the moon.

Goals also make progress more apparent. Inversely, the lack of clear goals makes it hard to tell if we’re moving at all. If we don’t know where we are going, then how do we know if we are getting closer?

This relationship between well-understood expectations and the sense of progress can readily be observed around us. Impostor syndrome is widespread and is fueled by vague expectations that we set for ourselves and that we think others judge us by. Agreeing on clear goals makes the expectations explicit and takes the anxiety-inducing guesswork out of the equation. This allows us to derive joy from every little step we take towards our destination.

Divorced from Compensation

Goals that have been set top-down and are tied to compensation are demotivating and prone to gaming.

Campbell’s Law and Goodhart’s Law are warnings about the inevitable attempts to game the metric when much is at stake. Gaming the metrics takes a variety of forms.

Gaming through creaming. This takes place when practitioners find simpler targets or prefer clients with less challenging circumstances, making it easier to reach the metric goal, but excluding cases where success is more difficult to achieve.
Improving numbers by lowering standards. One way of improving metric scores is by lowering the criteria for scoring. Thus, for example, graduation rates of high schools and colleges can be increased by lowering the standards for passing. Or airlines improve their on-time performance by increasing the scheduled flying time of their flights.
Improving numbers through omission or distortion of data. This strategy involves leaving out inconvenient instances, or classifying cases in a way that makes them disappear from the metrics. Police forces can “reduce” crime rates by booking felonies as misdemeanors, or by deciding not to book reported crimes at all.
Cheating. One step beyond gaming the metrics is cheating — a phenomenon whose frequency tends to increase directly with the stakes of the metric in question. As we’ll see, as the No Child Left Behind Act raised the stakes for schools of the test scores of their pupils, teachers and principals in many cities responded by altering students’ answers on the test.

— Muller, Jerry Z.. The Tyranny of Metrics (pp. 24–25).

To avoid these pitfalls but still get the benefits described above, your OKRs should not be directly tied to compensation. However, they can still be used as a signal in a continuous performance assessment by knowledgeable individuals who understand their context.

Not Written in Stone

We don’t set objectives to become inflexible. When our assumptions are proven wrong we shouldn’t plow ahead because “that was the plan!” And when the market suddenly hands us lemons and everyone’s thirsty, well, I guess we know pretty well what we should do then. It is not wise to stick to a plan when new information reveals that another course of action would yield better results.

Plans are nothing; planning is everything. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Although this may seem to run counter to the earlier point about focus, it really does not. When priorities change all the time, then yes, that is a problem. But the deliberation forced by the planning process actually improves stability. And as explained in the section about focus, if everyone knows that doing A means not doing B, then we are less likely to jump from objective to objective without finishing any of them.

Malleable

The simplicity of the basic framework makes it adapt well to many uses. This is how I think about OKRs. Let me know if you use them differently!

Glia Tech

Glia engineering and technology blog

Deiwin Sarjas

Written by

Software Engineering Manager @ Glia

Glia Tech

Glia Tech

Glia engineering and technology blog

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