Don’t let OKRs bring you back to feature factories
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a tool for empowering product teams. But if applied wrong they promote a culture of risk aversion, low innovation, and focus on features instead of solving customer problems.
Nowadays OKRs are a commonly used framework in startups for collaboratively setting the direction and aligning interests. Invented at Google by John Doerr to foster a culture of innovation and trust, they help leaders on all levels to empower focus and plan forward. Unfortunately in my observation, not many companies are really set up in a way that OKRs result in the promised autonomy and accountability for their teams.
Instead, OKRs are used as quarterly planning, to-do list, and alignment tool. That can be fine as long as you’re aware of it and keep in mind that it probably will lead to a culture of risk aversion and low experimentation.
For innovation you also need uncertainty. Defining OKRs using only “success metrics” often leads to favoring exactly the opposite. Especially at quarterly OKRs on a product team level, where the timeline is already focused on short-term achievements, having a scope defined by success metrics can kill any space for identifying new opportunities.
Please rethink what you’re using OKRs for. Pure planning and alignment management or empowering (product) teams to take ownership, learn, and innovate?
For Product Managers that might feel affected, I recommend:
- Set your OKRs at least 50% higher.
- Don’t fix your scope to specifically defined Key Results (KRs) based on success or business metrics.
- Focus on what you want to learn instead.
Let’s have a look at two examples:
Case A) Focus on realistic success metrics:
- Objective: Improve the web signup flow to increase our SaaS subscription conversion rate
- KR1: Improve the signup funnel conversion rate by 30%
- KR2: Lower the signup flow bounce rate of the first page by 50%
- KR3: Reduce steps for signup from 5 to 3
Case B) Focus on learnings:
- Objective: Double our SaaS subscription conversion rate
- KR1: Identify 10 reasons why website visits don’t convert
- KR2: Run 5 tests to validate reasons and implement winners to increase the conversion rate
- KR3: Test 3 approaches to re-engage with bouncing or bounced visits
Case A is not very inspiring and defines already which parts to tackle (web signup funnel, the first page of signup, steps in signup). KR1 and 2 target top-level success metrics and basically say: rework the signup process by doing X and Y. Of course, you can argue it’s not saying anything about the HOW (doing X and Y) in the OKR, and that the expected results are positive and reasonable, but this often misguides the product team or anyone from leadership to think in actual solutions (HOW) instead of establishing a mindset of discovery and learning.
Case B sets a strong objective of doubling the conversion rate that is focused on a success metric. The key results might seem a little bit more clear about WHAT you want to do, but they don’t indicate HOW. Overall they aim for valuable outcomes based on learnings without defining how or what the solution is.
Due to the limited timeframe of quarterly OKRs, they often lead to the tendency of formulating tasks and actions within the key results. This is reasonable to a certain degree. Adding a perspective on learning paired with high, unreachable objectives, will help you to avoid feature factories. And prevents using OKRs as a pure planning and performance management tool.
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👨💻 by Oliver Kaiser (LinkedIn) — Product Management Consultant
📌 I am supporting growth startups with hands-on product management, product leadership, product strategy, and establishing product-led company cultures.
