How to write Objective and Key results — Practical examples

Everybody talks about OKR! How Google used it to grow. How powerful it is to keep organization aligned and focus on what matters.

(If you missed this, you can read: Boost your growth with OKR)

But an issue still prevents many of us to successfully implement OKR for our company and get the right benefit like the story we read about all other successful companies (Google, IBM, Netflix…). The fact is, writing a good OKR is very difficult. Sometimes we write key results as objectives, tasks as key results. We really don’t know what to put in each part. But, writing OKR should not be as complicated as a rubik’s cube. With the right example for each case you can easily set an efficient OKR. So, if you want tips on how to successfully write OKR and avoid common mistake, just continue reading.

What you have to accomplish ?

The answer to this question is the objective. It must be definite and time bound.

For example if we take this objective ‘’Make our web application better‘’, This objective is not definite. To make it effective, you should be specific on what you want to improve. Another form of this objective is ‘’Reduce the time spent by our client to setup their account to 2 minutes’’.

Another example : “Improve marketers ability for writing blog post ” not “Improve marketing team”.

Your OKR needs to be measurable. A bad objective is “Make a lot of money” whereas you can say “Grow revenue by 15%”.

How are you going to get that done ?

The answer to this question is the key results. The key results needs to be quantifiable and measurable by a specific metric.

Your key result can be an activity like : “Launch X feature”

This type of key results usually start with verbs like launch, create, develop, deliver, build, make, implement, define, release, test, prepare and plan. [1]

Most times, your key results is going to be a specific metric and a value to reach. For example :

• Get 50 new paying users
• Increase user retention from 40% to 75%
• Reduce churn rate by 2%

Examples

Company OKR

Objective : Increase company revenue by 10%

Key results :

• Get 50 new customers by end of Q2
• Reduce churn rate to 5%

Marketing team OKR

Objective : Improve the new marketing process

Key results :

• Develop personal relationship with 5 potential customers
• Increase lead generation by 10%
• Launch 5 webinars

CEO OKR

Objective : Improve our company reputation

Key results :

• Launch two new products that will impact our brand in Q3
• Interview 20 customers and get feedback
• Increase customer retention to 90%

Engineer OKR

Objective : Reduce the time spent by our client to setup their account to 2 minutes

Key results :

• Implement the new onboarding system
• Reduce the number of configuration steps from 15 to 6

It’s done. Now you have the needed informations to use OKR.

Need a solution to setup OKR in your company ? Try Happierco, a simple and effective OKR management solution.

[1] http://leanperformance.com/en/okr/success-criteria-types-key-results/

This article was originally published at https://www.happierco.com/blog/okrs-examples/