So What are OKRs? A Beginner’s Primer

You open your inbox one morning and take a sip of coffee. The TV hums in the background. You’ve lowered the volume after having your fill of the latest details about Coronavirus. It’s time to get to work before the kids get up and demand breakfast.

You pause.

You see an email from your manager. She’s asking you to put together some OKRs for your team. They need to be ready to present in two weeks.

You sigh and open a new tab to google the unfamiliar acronym. Servers around the world fire up in unison. They frantically pull the near-infinite number of articles, thoughts, and opinions about OKRs to share with you. Their combined heat begins raising the global temperature. You consider turning on a fan.

You began scanning some of the results. “So,” you say to yourself, “OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results.”

You gawk at a myriad of diagrams and realize something.

There is no one way to build OKRs.

You, dear reader, have made a key observation. I have a fair amount of experience with OKRs as an engineering manager for a number of years, and I can tell you, they are highly subjective.

But one thing I can say with certainty. Though OKRs may be a subjective art form, beautiful or terrible in the eye of the beholder, like the frescoed ceiling in the Sistine Chapel or the Ecce Homo by Cecilia Giménez, they are all created to serve a single purpose.

OKRs are a tool to organize teams within an organization toward common goals.

As an OKR beginner, this is all you need to know. If you allow yourself to drown in the details of how to make the OKRs, you’ll miss the mark of their purpose. So at the beginning of your OKR journey, I recommend preparing for three things.

1. Know that your first try at OKRs will be clunky.
2. Your organization and management will ask for lots of revisions (this is good, it gets you to where you need to go).
3. Your ego might be bruised. After all, art is created by the soul, it hurts when people don’t like it.

If you manage to embrace these three things, you’ll be well on your way to mastering this powerful tool of organizational unity with confidence and grace.

Example 1: A First OKR Attempt

Let’s look at what a poor OKR might look like. Let’s say you’re currently working on a new landing page for your company to better funnel in prospective clients. With a now cursory understanding of OKRs, you might be tempted to email your boss something like this:

Objective: Build a new company landing page.

• Key Result 1: More clients are funneled into our system
• Key Result 2: We meet our company conversion goals

So why is this example poor? First off, the Objective, as stated, is not actually what you are trying to achieve. Building a landing page is actually a “project” you are planning to do to fulfill the actual objective to increase conversion. You can find the real Objective hidden in Key Result 2.

Additionally, there is nothing stated in any of the key results that actually lets you “measure” if you’ve achieved an objective. What does “More clients are funneled into our system” actually mean? Is one extra client a month enough to say you achieved that result?

Confused yet? This is normal and expected, but I wanted to share how tricky it is to get these right before we start to talk about how to actually approach OKRs.

Example 2: A “Better” OKR

Let’s consider what a successful set of OKRs should achieve.

Your OKRs should be good enough to enable you to have the conversations needed to ensure you and your organization are aligned on the most important objectives.

Additionally, you will be able to measure if you met those objectives, after a predetermined amount of time (often a quarter).

Let’s step away from the bad example I shared, and any specific OKRs you might already be thinking about providing your manager. In fact, let’s think way outside the box of what OKRs might look like within and in service of a typical organization or company.

You’re likely stuck at home. After all, there’s a pandemic going on (at least at the time of this writing). Your house is probably a mess. You can’t go out to eat anymore to save time on cooking. Your kitchen looks like it would fail a health inspection. If you have kids, they are now homeschooled and quite likely making your life at least a tad less orderly.

You’d really like to get a better routine established such that there is more order at home. After all, watching those dishes pile up on the counter is not doing much to help you focus on writing these OKRs.

If only you could have more focused time over the next week to put them together.

Hey, that sounds like a great objective! Let’s write that out.

Objective: Increase mental focus time to think about and write OKRs.

Notice this does not give any indication of what projects you’ll need to do to achieve the Objective? It simply states what you would like to see happen. Now, let’s think of some ways to achieve that goal. How much time are those dishes taking up?

More than they need to.

Why? The kids leave dishes lying all around the house, and on the table. You have to constantly collect them, empty any remnants into the trash, rinse them off, and stack them on the counter so you can eventually load them into the dishwasher. What if the kids did that instead of you?

We’re honing in on a measurable change you could make to move you closer to your objective. But let’s zoom out just a little as we write it out.

Key Result 1: Reduce the amount of time to do the dishes from 1 hour to 30 mins per day.

Notice we avoided writing down a specific “project” as our Key Result? Instead, you have the flexibility to determine how you want to reduce the dishwashing time. For instance, do you want to teach the kids (with an upfront cost in time) to start rinsing and stacking, or maybe even doing, the dishes? Or, if you don’t have a dishwasher, should you purchase one and install it? All that ultimately matters is that you eventually settle on specific projects to move that 1 hour of dishwashing down to 30 mins.

Let’s continue. You realize that preparing dinner takes in upwards of 2 hours. You have to scout out what food you have available, then think of a recipe based on what you have, and finally, put it together. It would be great to bring that 2 hours down a bit. I think we’ve found another KR.

Key Result 2: Meal prep time reduced by 25%.

You already have some ideas on how to do this. You’ve been meaning to put together a weekly meal plan on Saturday, such that you can shop for (or order Instcart) any groceries on Sunday. Alternatively, you’ve been thinking about dusting off that old crockpot and making some simple meals you could let slow cook all day. That way when dinner time rolls around, food is ready.

Let’s review what you have so far.

Objective: Increase mental focus time to think about and write OKRs.

• Key Result 1: Reduce the amount of time to do the dishes from 1 hour to 30 mins per day.
• Key Result 2: Meal prep time reduced by 25%.

Not a bad start! If you invest in some of the projects you’ve already thought of over the next few days, you’re likely to achieve those Key Results within one week. They are also measurable, assuming you keep track of how much time you’re spending day to day on dishes and meal planning. After one week, you should have the desired extra time to focus on preparing the OKRs for your manager within the 2-week deadline.

I hope this simple primer gives you a sense of how to approach OKRs, as well as how to think about Key Results, and the projects that allow you to achieve those Key Results. To review, the thinking process goes like:

1) Establish the high-level objective. Keep it simple. What are you (or your company) really trying to accomplish?

2) What needs to happen such that the objective is met? These are your Key Results. They should be “measurable”.

3) You and your team have flexibility to define the projects needed to hit the measurable key results. These projects are what you will focus on during whatever timeframe you have to fulfill the objective.

Bonus points in that, your team now has the autonomy to define what work they think would accomplish the KRs. And everyone loves some autonomy in their jobs.

If you’d like to watch me think through a similar example in real life (while I hold my baby daughter), it may add another angle on how to approach OKRs. Disclaimer, the video is not of great quality. My Youtube channel is brand new. But I’m of the mentality that you need to start somewhere, then iterate, until you get to where you want to go.

Just like how you build OKRs ;)

This article is meant to be a very approachable primer to OKRs for the earliest of beginners. If you’d like to start going deeper into the rabbit hole, here’s a place to start.

*Views expressed in this article are purely my own.