Who Cares About OKRs!?
You may have noticed there is a lot of talk about OKRs lately. When you first learn about them, they may seem foreign and yet another difficult skill to master in the agile universe. It does not have to be complicated though, so if you’re overwhelmed or struggling with OKRs, let me try to simplify them a little.
Who should care about OKRs? The short answer, of course, is that everyone should care about OKRs at your company. From the executives and division heads to every team of teams, team, and individual team member. And if you do it right, OKRs can be a lightweight way to align key strategies at your company from the very highest level, defining who you are as a company, down to how every single team is going to help the company achieve its short and long term objectives.
John Doerr has been called the Johnny Appleseed of OKRs. In part, it’s because of his influence at Google, helping the Internet giant tackle some very audacious goals and focus the company and its teams on the same mission. (Doerr’s 11 minute Ted Talk is a fantastic summary of his point of view on OKRs. And his Measure What Matters book is required reading)
Jeff Gothelf has shared some great content on OKRs vs Strategy and how to create OKRs using the Lean Canvas. Jeff does a great job reminding us that OKRs are not the strategy itself (you have to know what your purpose and product vision are!) but instead OKRs are the articulation of your strategy in an easy way for all to understand.
So, if you’ve read about OKR templates or had some training recently to teach you about using OKRs, it may still be a bit overwhelming. I’ll see if I can simplify some of it for you. The Objective should be easy to understand and elucidate a portion of your vision that will relate to a theme of your work. You may be prompted to imagine the lifelong journey of your customer and imagine the most important ways in which your company can deliver value to them. Objectives can be very longterm (a 3+ year horizon), big audacious annual goals, or even tighter, measured in quarters. Make your objectives as big as you like. Big fluffy goals are good if they describe your intentions.
The Key Results that go with each Objective are intended to explain how you will measure progress against the goals you’ve stated in your objectives. And yet, you should not describe the exact work (epics and stories), so as to leave room for innovation and allow the teams to define the solutions that will accomplish these measurable goals. The KRs should sound like stretch goals, and yet should also be plausible goals you might achieve in the next 3 months. So getting the KRs right is tricky. You may be asked to create “We’ll know this to be true when…” statements and be instructed to assign specific percentages for these targets, creating Key Results like “Increase sales from Canada by 10%”. Sometimes KRs are big guesses at things we’ve not measured yet (can we really sell anything to Canadians?) but as long as you know how you can get the data, it’s fine to go big. And if you can’t assign a specific percentage improvement, reduction or numerical target, you may be forced to treat the KR like a milestone (let’s at least accomplish X in the next 3 months. e.g. launch our first web presence).
So, what should you know about writing and using OKRs?
- They are, first and foremost, a communication mechanism or information radiator to explain strategy and intent simply and succinctly (upwards, outwards, and inside your team).
- More than just goal setting, OKRs are meant to inspire and guide your work using both short (the key results) and long term timeframes (the objectives).
- Great OKRs for a team-of-teams, for example, will also reflect and align to the cohesive strategy in the OKRs set at a company or division level and dovetail nicely with the OKRs of the individual teams in your team-of-teams. It may take some iterating to get everything aligned.
- OKRs are a flexible framework to explicitly state intentional direction, define boundaries, and most importantly provide the specific and measurable key results you (and your team) will use to understand your progress definitively. Then, as per usual, inspect and adapt and carry on.
- The key results should be revisited at least monthly (Have we made progress yet? Are we on track to meet our quarterly key result measures? Even just a quick gut check with the team is good). Then, OKRs should be refreshed, renewed, or replaced perhaps quarterly so that the focus remains on a small number of relevant and short term items. This ensures you deliver the right value to customers and establish feedback loops to verify that impact. It also helps you, your Product Managers and teams avoid working on too many things at once (and be able to say “no” to things not specifically called out in your current strategy).
- As any good strategy does, OKRs connect all involved to WHY the work matters and ultimately HOW the customers and end users will benefit from your work. Ultimately, this encourages the team to deliver value incrementally against those goals to be sure all the work you do aligns with the intended direction.
How should you NOT use OKRs?
- They are not a roadmap of exact features (or tasks or epics or user stories) implemented in a specific priority. Instead, they are the desired outcomes and intentions that leave room for innovation and creativity to flexibly inspect and adapt the right solutions that achieve the results, however the team sees fit.
- The objectives are not meant to be literal or exact or even easy to accomplish, but instead be inspirational and perhaps audacious to inspire our teams to be the best we can be.
- Because Objectives and Key Results are meant to set strategic direction and inspire teams, they may often not be achieved fully and therefore should not be connected to any individual performance or HR related compensation. (The team learns something from the experience and adjusts the key results and measures next quarter, no big)
- They are not a checklist and they should not spread your teams too thin, but instead, OKRs should focus on a small number of strategic objectives that concentrates your efforts on the work that truly matters most.
Lastly, if you find yourself struggling to write Objectives and Key Results using a template or with all of the constraints in mind, start with a blank piece of paper and just imagine two things using the context of the business and customers. How would you describe your team’s purpose to the CEO? These are your objectives (likely a very short list of very high level things). Next, what is the simplest and most concise way to say what are the most important things to work on in the next three months? These are your key results. How would you make sure you and the team were making monthly progress on those things? These are the metrics in your key results. No matter what the format and however you would say those things would be an excellent start to writing some OKRs and getting your team focused on the right work to achieve the right outcomes.
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach and AI Advisor who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the complexity of the Agile and AI universes into easy to understand and simple common sense.
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