The Benefits of OKR
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Welcome to Shared Narrative #20!
“Those who want to reap the benefits of this great nation, must bear the fatigue of supporting it.”
- Thomas Paine (one of the Founding Fathers of United States)
The quote is aptly appropriate to describe how if you want to reap the benefits (of something) then you need to work for it. Only after a solid amount of effort and your willingness to work for it, can you feel and see the benefits.
The same goes for OKR.
Implementing OKR has its challenges. Our experience shows us that it takes many, many iterations just to be able to write the right Objective and Key Results. In addition, we saw teams having difficulties in determining their focus for the week. In other words: once you know how to write OKR, you’ll be challenged on the content of the OKR that you wrote. OKR challenges you to think critically, especially when it comes to prioritization and strategic planning both for yourself and for your team (if you’re a team leader or a manager).
However, don’t be discouraged. You can look at these challenges as the things you need to anticipate and overcome when adopting OKR practice. Once you pass these challenges, there are many benefits waiting on the other side.
From the beginning of this year, we have been engaging with Midtrans (part of the GOJEK group), a company that has been instrumental to provide one of the most crucial pillars in online commerce: a simple, reliable, and secure payment solution. After coaching several of their teams (close to 20 people in the span of 6–8 weeks), we gathered their feedback about the experience using OKR. And, we’re happy to report that the feedback has been positive; they saw and felt the benefits of OKR firsthand.
Below are some of the feedback from both the team members and the team leaders about OKR practice.
Please click here to read the full version of this article.
Others were saying . . .
Google is widely recognized as one of the biggest company in the world. For all of Google’s success, much of the credit was given to OKR and its ability to revolutionize goal setting. Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, shared the same sentiment, so much so that he agrees to write the foreword in John Doerr’s book about OKR, Measure What Matters. This is what he has to say.
“OKRs have helped lead Google to 10x growth, many times over. They’ve helped make our crazily bold mission of “organizing the world’s information” perhaps even achievable. They’ve kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most.”
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Want to find out more . . .
Check out our website to find out why we set up Product Narrative.
Or you can read past editions of Shared Narrative here: #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, #15,#16, #17, #18.#19
Visit our blog to read more articles and writings like this.
Have a great weekend!
— The Product Narrative Team
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