Plan to Measure

Starting up with OKRs and a (free) Asana Account

OH! Wait, What are OKRs?

There was a point a year-or-so into my own startup, Mantle., where things began moving too fast. I had a few folks working with me, we were talking about loftier goals, and it seemed like we were going in circles. I had personally made it this far using Bullet Journaling, but that was not translating to a team.

That’s when OKRs dropped into my life.

Objectives and Key Results are an open and transparent way for your company to know what the team is working towards and the roadmap for getting there. This management technique of setting goals and measuring progress was born alongside silicon chips from Intel management guru Andy Grove. The evolved, modern version of Grove’s set-and-measure technique is famously used by Google, among hundreds of other large and small businesses and organizations, and was broken down by former Intel employee and Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist John Doerr in his 2018 book Measure What Matters.

For Startups, OKRs are a survival tool for focusing on a small number of achievable milestones. More importantly OKRs are a collaborative goal-setting protocol for companies that can create a yardstick for showing results to your team and to investors. As Doerr writes:

OKRs cannot substitute for sound judgment, strong leadership, or a creative workplace culture. But, if those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can guide you to the mountaintop.

By setting your goals and measuring your progress through those goals using objectives and key results, you can give yourself four ‘superpowers’ as broken out by Doerr in Measure. The four OKR Superpowers are:

• Focus and commitment to priorities,
• Alignment and connection for teams,
• Accountability tracking, and
• The ability to stretch for amazing results.

Early on in a startup, the need to do some management trick seems like unnecessary and extra work that distracts from the real mission: getting out the first product and proving traction with your first customers. Management and organization can come later, right?

However, as stated by Susan Wojcicki of YouTube in Doerr’s book, “No company is too young to adopt OKRs, and for no company is it too late.”

The point of the OKR exercise is actually to hone your focus and create structure and efficiencies in your organization that will actually output more time and focus than the inputs we first thought we didn’t have time for in the present. For me, Mantle. had picked up OKRs too late — I know Susan says it’s never too late…but, sometimes it can be just the wrong time. I tried to implement OKRs but everything was moving much too quickly on way too many fronts.

I wished I would have thoughtfully set up our mission and goals into a format that our team could have adopted when things were moving slower. I wished I would have baked in OKRs and ownership from day one.

Mission Control

We all know when we start a business that we must have a mission, set values, and create a five year plan. That’s what the internet and business schools tell us. But, once we go through this very aspirational exercise for injecting soul into our company, much like working out in real life, if we don’t continue to work towards our aspirations, we will never move forward — and sometimes we may move backwards towards stasis.

Once we know where we are going, we have to map out the way we will get there. We won’t get there in one leaping bound — most of the times. We have to work towards our destination, examine our progress, and make changes if the environment and circumstances change.

Objectives and key results maintain our focus on our mission and milestones by making us commit to moving the ball forward towards our goals. If we collaboratively set our objectives and determine our key results for achieving those objectives with all levels of the organization and display those OKRs transparently to the entire organization, our team will be more aligned and connected both vertically and horizontally.

Giving the entire team or organization access to the company’s OKRs, we remove our employees from silos and allow them to cross-pollinate on activities they may be able to contribute to but on which they may not already be working. It also allows us to create accountability for success or failure by giving each key result and objective an ‘owner’. This responsibility, even when paired with collaboration, allows individuals to stretch their talents to do amazing things.

So now that we have decided that setting OKRs is how we want to frame our new startup (hopefully?), we need to set no more than four objectives for a time period; generally monthly, quarterly, and (less often) annual. Objectives should be aspirational. In other words, if goals or tasks are easily achieved, they are not good enough. Our OKRs must also be measurable as a percent of 100. Perfection is not the goal — stretched progress without too much frustration is the goal. When setting KRs, you either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t — there is no grey area — measuring OKRs is discussed further in the next section.

Objectives are simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less; they are: 1. Significant, 2. Concrete, 3. Action oriented, and 4. Inspirational.

Key Results are our benchmarks and monitor HOW we reach our objectives; they are: 1. Specific, 2. Time bound, 3. Aggressive, yet realistic, 4. Measurable, and 5. Verifiable.

Knowing about OKRs is one thing. Putting them to work for our organizations and teams is another. Before we can organize our OKRs in a transparent and shared medium, we must first set our priorities and goals. Not sure where to get started on understanding these intricacies about your organization? Head over to GV Library (previously Google Ventures) and try GV’s Brand Sprint.

Action Items:

1. Write down your mission.
2. Determine your company’s values.
3. Determine a 10 Year Vision for your company — GV sets a 20 year Vision, you can try and look that far out while we are stretching anyway!
4. Create 5 Year Milestones for what you plan to accomplish at each year’s end.
5. Set an OKR cycle as monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
6. Create 1–4 Objectives for the current cycle that moves you closer to reaching your 1st year Milestone.
7. Set the Key Results for realizing each of your Objectives.

Photo by Oscar Nilsson on Unsplash

OI, Measure from Zero to One

Without frequent status updates, goal slide into irrelevance; the gap between plan and reality widens by the day. At quarter’s end, you are left with zombie OKRs, on-paper whats and hows devoid of life or meaning.

From Measure What Matters

In Peter Thiel’s startup manifesto Zero to One: Notes on Startups and How to Build the Future, going from Zero to One means going from nothing to something — not just creating the next iteration of something. Whether your company is going from Zero to One in the Thielian-view or going from 1 to n, an iteration of an existing product, you can do so measuring from Zero to One on your OKRs.

As mentioned above, all of our KRs should be measured as a percentage of 100. One way to do this is to measure your 100% as displayed by a range from 0.0 (we haven’t started, yet!) to 1.0 (completed, Yahtzee!).

This is the same way that Google measures its KRs:

The simplest, cleanest way to score an objective is by averaging the percentage completion rates of its associated key results. Google uses a scale of 0.0 to 1.0:

0.0 to 0.3 = Red (or, we failed to make real progress),

0.4 to 0.6 = Yellow (or, we made progress, but fell short of completion), and

0.7 to 1.0 = Green (or, we delivered).

From Measure What Matters

So, for example, if you set up a measurable KR that is key to reaching your “Deepen Ties with Investors” objective as ‘Call 5 Investors every week for a month’, you can easily see a data point for reaching your objective. In attempting to meet this objective, you reach out to connect with 2 investors in the first week, 5 in the second and third week, and 3 investors in the final week of the month. Your Zero to One measurement is a 0.75 (or 15 calls out of 20 possible calls — or 5 for 4 weeks).

Here you hit Green on the Google scoring index — maybe you should set a more aggressive goal next time!

Measuring, however, is only one part of the story though. Measuring something is worthless, unless you reflect on what you measured.

Reflection should be done both during and after an OKR cycle. Post-cycle evaluation is done in a Quarterly Objective Meetings (QOMs, or whatever timeline you choose) with leadership and objective owners. The goal of a QOM is to tie a bow on a completed objective and make a new one, trash objectives that are no longer relevant, or re-evaluate non-completed objectives that carry over from a previous cycle. Similarly, Monthly Key Result Meetings (MKR meetings, or some interval during your cycle) occur mid-cycle with team leaders and KR owners to evaluate or troubleshoot current KRs. Either way, we maintain a pulse on where we are and communication lines stay open — this helps us avoid catastrophes that could have been avoided or fixed mild surprises upstream rather than as time is expiring.

When evaluating objectives or key results, Doerr suggests a few reflections for during QOMs or MKR meetings:

• Did I accomplish all my Objectives?
• If so, what contributed to my success?
• If not, what obstacles did I encounter?
• If I rewrote a goal that was achieved in full, what would I change?
• What have I learned that might alter my approach to my new OKRs?

So, we know how to make OKRs and how to measure and reflect upon them, but how do we make all this transparent so that everyone in the organization can follow our OKRs and measure the organization and individual success in real time? That’s where Asana, a team task management software, comes into play.

OM, Build for Free in Asana

I love Asana and I know that I don’t even scratch the surface of what the task management software can do. However, much like how starting out with OKRs from day can establish good habits from the foundation of your company, so does using a task management software like Asana build muscle memory into your team for establishing great communication habits.

(As a side note, ASAN went pubic today — 9/30 — and I bought a small piece of the company — why not, I’m using it right!)

The nice thing about Asana for startups is that it is Free for up to 10 seats and you get most of the core features that you need to get started building that muscle memory. The product is constantly changing and indeed they just recently released an update with a Goals feature, which is an OKRs function with all the bells and whistles. Unfortunately, if you are an individual or a small team that is bootstrapping every available dollar, you may not want to dole out the $13.49/per seat/per month just to track your OKRs.

Luckily, over the course of the past few years, as I have been on my own startup and OKR-tuning journey, I have hacked together a free version that creates transparency for any organization’s mission, values, milestones, and OKRs. When you cash your first VC check, you can upgrade to get the bells and whistles — or maybe it’s a ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it’ kind of thing and you stick with this method!

Step One | Create a Companywide Team

Asana is broken down into teams, projects, and tasks, which mirrors our mission, objectives, and key results of the OKR framework. To avoid the need for premium features, we can use these hierarchal similarities to hack Asana to share our vision and roadmap for our company with everyone from the Founder to the newest hire (at least up to 10 employees).

You may end up having many ‘teams’ in your Organization’s Asana platform, however, when we get started let’s just start with one: Your Company. Startups are so small that you are just one team anyway. Click on ‘+ Add Team’ on the left-hand panel and name it something simple, like your company’s name — we are going to use ‘Acme, Inc.’ for the purposes of this exercise.

Underneath this new team we will start adding a few projects. Click the ‘+’ next to your new Company Team on the left panel and choose ‘Use a Template’. We will either be creating a ‘Blank Project’ or ‘Company Goals & Milestones’ today.

We will create at a minimum of three new projects to begin with — your final number of projects will depend on the results of your Brand Sprint from the first exercise of this post. Each project exposes our newly transparent company to the entire team. The base projects are:

1. Mission;
2. OKRs;
3. Objective #1— one project for each objective set.
4. Objective #2 (if needed)
5. Objective #3 (and so forth, and so on)

Step Two | Set the Why, How, and When

Create a ‘Mission’ project using the process described above and choose the ‘Company Goals & Milestones’ template. Delete all the placeholder content and create three sections for this project:

1. Why Acme (Remember, that’s what I’m calling my company);
2. How Acme (You will replace Acme with your company name);
3. When Acme (I probably did not have to explain that, sorry);

These three sections will outline why we are doing what we are doing: our mission; How we are expected to do our jobs: our values; And, finally, when we expect to accomplish certain milestones: our vision and roadmap.

The Why: Our Mission

Under your ‘Why Acme’ Section, click ‘Add task…’, Type ‘Mission: _____’, and fill in the blank with the shortest version of your mission possible. Then, click on the task and within the ‘Description’ field of the task fill in your entire raison d’etre in detail, i.e., your mission.

Now, if any employee wants to know what they are doing at Acme, Inc., they can easily find out. Similarly, if what they are doing in their day-to-day does not align with that mission, they can speak up. Equally important, if there is something the company is not doing that could help expedite progress, the employee can also feel empowered to speak up.

Hopefully, the content of this section rarely, if ever, changes.

The How: Our Values

Under the ‘How Acme’ Section add a task, name it ‘Values: _____’, and fill in with your top three values. Within the task you can elaborate on your values and describe sub-values within the ‘Description’ field.

Much like the Why Section above, the How should rarely change. These values, if set with intention and mirrored by leadership, should provide the filter to which all employees run each decision they make. If fine-tuned, we should be able to give our employees free-ish reign to make decisions on their own and free from micro-management.

The When: Our Vision and Roadmap

Finally, create one more section: ‘When Acme’. Under that section we will create two tasks:

1. 10 Year Vision: _____ , and;
2. 5 Year Roadmap.

Within each task we can elaborate further on our long-term vision and we can set forth a year-by-year roadmap that advances us towards our mission and vision. Unlike the two sections above it, the When tasks can be re-evaluated every new year to determine if our vision has changed and whether we can advance on our roadmap.

Much like a family road trip, things do not always go as expected. We know we wanted to get to milestone number one three hours ago, but a backseat full of kids asking ‘are we there yet’ with full diapers and empty stomachs can change our progress. Or, sometimes they fall asleep, we hold our pee, and we make unexpected progress!

Either way, when we get to that metaphorical gas station we reevaluate our map, refuel, restock, and set out to the next or new milestone. Or, sometimes, we may question where we are going in the first place.

All that’s to say, check in on the When section annually.

Setting Ownership

If you take a look at the screenshot from the Why-How-When Mission section above, you will see that each task has an assignee — me! In my one person (for now) startup, I am the person responsible for achieving those tasks. I will set the mission, values, and vision/roadmap with my team (me, and I will reset as I set a team in place). However, me, and only me, is responsible for the realization of the goals assigned to me, no matter who helped set them. I am the owner of the mission, values, timing of my startup, and any other KRs that I get assigned in the process.

I am the founder after all. Any other employee would similarly ‘own’ the objectives and/or key results that we agree they should accomplish.

As Doerr puts it in Measure, “For an OKR system to function effectively, the team deploying it — whether a group of top executives or an entire organization — must adopt it universally.” He suggests designating one or more OKR shepherds to make sure everyone joins and participates in the OKR framework.

Early on it may be the founder, as in the screenshot. Later it may be HR or someone who’s sole goal is to usher OKRs along, checking in, pushing, pivoting, or reflecting on the company’s goals.

It doesn’t matter who it is, it should be just one person responsible for each objective and each key result. Ownership is reflected, as mentioned, in Asana as the assignee.

Step Two | Set OKRs

Our next step is to create a new project named ‘OKRs’. The content of this section should be pretty self-explanatory, however, there are few neat tricks that can tie our Objectives and Key Results to their own separate projects, which will be discussed in Step Three.

The key to step two, however, is to add each of the current cycle’s objectives as a Section in the OKR project (e.g. in screenshot, ‘Objective | Ship MVP to Test Flight’). Then, within each section ‘Add task…’ to add the key results needed to achieve the objective.

Just like in Step One, it is important to assign each Key Result’s owner as the assignee. Additionally, OKRs must be time constrained, so in this project each Key Result gets a ‘Due Date’ that corresponds with sometime before the end of the current OKR cycle. You can also use the ‘Tags’ column to add Importance notes about a KR or the Team that is primarily working on that KR.

Finally, within the OKR project, you will want to add a permanent task at the top of the project named ‘How to Use OKRs’. Within that task, you can write out instructions for new hires and old employees to know the expectations of the OKR framework and the company as a whole.

Or, you can just point them to this article!

Remember, you will have a section for each objective you and your team come up with for reaching the next stop on your milestones.

Step Three | Create Objective Projects

Next we want to add each Objective as its own stand along project. Doing this will keep our OKR project clean and effectively turning the OKR project into a Dashboard for OKRs rather than a workspace. Also, Asana has a great Boards feature which lends itself perfectly for visualizing progress of our objectives.

To get started, let’s add a new project using the ‘Blank Project’ template. Name the new project after one of your Objectives you created in Step Two in the ‘Project Name’ field and make the privacy level ‘Public to team’ — remember, we want complete transparency to encourage cross-company-pollination. While the previous projects were list based, Objective Projects are going to be ‘Board’ based — so choose ‘Board’ and click ‘Create project’.

The Board’s feature allows us to drag and drop our key results into three categories: ‘To Do’, ‘In Progress’, or ‘Done’. You can add or modify these categories, but this tried-and-true simple visual is easy for owners and contributors to see what is in motion and what is left to do.

What’s really cool is that we can connect the Key Results we created in our OKR project to this Objective Project by clicking the ‘+’ within our Key Results and next to the Projects field and connect the KR to the Objective project we just created. That means that each team can go to one place to work towards their own objective and their individual key results therein and that work will be reflected up to leadership who can monitor all OKRs in one place.

Now, each KR can have an entire list of subtasks (essentially sub-KRs) that are needed to accomplished and reach our objective. Each one of those ‘Subtasks’ as they are named in Asana can be assigned to its own owner and given its own due date. Additionally, relevant files and discussion can happen and be found attached to that Objective, KR, or subtask. No more searching for a file or missing revelation.

Finally, because our objectives and key results are open, make sure your team feels free to jump into that project to follow, or ask to be invited onto the team by requesting access from the team (Objective) leader so they can possibly add outside knowledge or perspective to the goal when necessary.

Measuring What Matters

We already discussed measuring at intervals to stay on top of our progress and to reflect upon our goals. But, one way for all parties to really stay aware of their current position at any given time is to evaluate KRs weekly.

Every Friday, each KR or subtask Owner should adjust the progress of their KR or subtask to a number between 0.0–1.0 — with 0.0 being ‘yet to start’ and 1.0 meaning ‘completed’. This number can be inserted as a tag within the task or in the column of the OKR project. If a project needs immediate attention and is to be put on hold for review by leadership, then an Owner should put an ‘XX’ in the tag field (an XX would measure as a 0.0 for calculations purposes).

You can also color code these weekly scores using the Google/Intel Red/Green/Yellow coding system. The best way to score these is quantitatively by counting the number of remaining tasks to be completed and dividing by the total number of tasks outlined in each objective, key result, or subtask. This number will then filter up all the way to the Objective level where we can get a visual representation of where we are in our journey during any given cycle.

OK, Reflection

Installing and harping on OKRs, no matter the size of your company, is a simple way to not only encourage productivity and efficiencies within your company, its a way to establish a strong culture. When everyone on your team feels like they are a contributor, not just a pawn, relationships will tighten, commitment will increase, everyone will pull harder in the same direction.

By giving your entire organization a transparent view of everyone’s goals; by giving everyone the chance to get frequent and ongoing feedback from up, down, and across the company; by making your employees part of a team with goals and a mission, you are empowering your team to not only work for your company, but to own it. When people own something, they care for it. They fight for it.

To create this team of owners, it’s as easy as a free piece of software, a few new vocabulary words, and a little attention. Focus on a mission. Commit to priorities. Align your company in every direction. Connect more often. Track your progress. And, finally, stretch for something great.

If you shoot for the stars, you will at least hit the moon.

A Couple Related Items

In Principals, by Ray Dalio, the uber-successful hedge fund manager preaches ‘radical transparency’ for his organization. It’s nearly impossible to get in trouble at Bridgewater Associates for speaking up when you mess up, and no matter who you are, Ray or the janitor, your idea will get consideration by the leadership team if you just speak up. In this spirit, which seems aligned with the transparency and empowerment of the OKR framework, I like the idea of adding a project for ‘Ideas’ where anyone from the organization can add any idea to a list of ideas that will move the company forward. However, having an Ideas list is only successful if the company transparently entertains the ideas on the list. If they are ignored, the list will remain empty.

Finally, Google is famous for its policy of allowing its employees to spend 20% of their time working on side projects that can even be unrelated to any of their work. Gmail, Google Maps, Twitter, Slack, and Groupon all started as side projects in Google and different companies. If you decide to implement this idea in your own company, creating a project called ‘Playgrounds’ where anyone at the company can see (and assist) with side hustles can bring the OKR framework to even the moonshots being worked on by your killer team.

I hope this primer on OKRs and our suggestions on how to visualize them helps put your company on an organized and innovative path. Look out for new articles from Lyceum Labs on starting and organizing your own company.

If you are a startup and are looking for more community, check out what we have going on at our startup community: Lyceum Labs online. If you need a legal partner for getting your project started, come say hey to me at www.lomaxadvisory.com.

The Beginning!