7 Steps to Laika* or: Our Way to OKRs
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are around for quite some time. Initiated by Andy Grove in the 1970s at Intel and later refined and brought to broader attention by John Doerr with its introduction at Google and in his corresponding book “Measure what matters”, many companies jumped to adopt the framework which actually boils down to a simple idea: Define ambitious and motivating objectives (the what) that help to engage and align on the operationalization of the goals and vision for an organization and its members. Then measure their achievement with corresponding Key Results (the how) and all of that not top-down but in a collaborative way across the organization. But as we know from Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle and his corresponding book “Start with Why”, you need to have a clear purpose and a vision for your organization first.
Why OKRs and why now?
The application of OKRs was already discussed every now and then in the past for Sclable but the time didn’t feel quite right. During the pandemic hitting planet earth in 2020, the urge to rework and sharpen our vision and mission as an organization came up so we shaped out a common vision, a mission as well as our Golden Circle that we wanted to work on. This shaping happened with a very inclusive approach involving the perspectives of many team members. But despite our inclusive approach, how do we make sure that we are all aligned, engaged and progressively working towards this vision — especially in a hybrid/distributed work setting? Enter OKRs.
OKRs in a pure B2B professional service company?
A lot of companies using OKRs have their own products or services they offer in a B2C-like setting, e.g. Google, LinkedIn, etc. Objectives and Key Results can be used pretty nicely to work towards a product vision. Progress towards the vision can be measured via product metrics that are chosen by the product teams as key results to focus contributions to the corresponding objectives, e.g. a key result “Reach an NPS of x for product y” could contribute to an objective “Make our users advocates of product y”. But what if the products you create are not chosen by the organization you are engaged with but emerge from projects together with your clients?
As a professional service company like Sclable, you may not even know which kind of product you will be working on 2 months from now. You need to switch your thinking to see your company as “the product” you are offering to your clients and think about how you can measure progress — and these measures are not necessarily the classic KPIs you know from a corporate world, they can look quite different and should fit the purpose of your objectives.
Another very important — maybe even harder — aspect to consider as a professional service company is to find the right balance between time spent working on projects for clients (that generate revenue directly), training/personal development of team members and working on the company itself. So we had all of those perspectives in mind when working out our OKRs.
How we did it — 7 Steps to Laika*
We had two people in our team that already had experience working in an organization applying OKRs. This was very helpful but we didn’t have experience in setting it up from scratch for a whole organization.
Setting up and creating OKRs is a collaborative process that should involve everyone in the organization — it is not a top-down approach but inputs must come from all directions.
So here is how we did it in 7 Steps:
Step 1) Roughly define OKRs on a company level
Based on our vision and mission — which is essential to be clear about before coming up with OKRs — we started in our management board and brainstormed goals we want to achieve mid to long-term, e.g. in the upcoming 12 months (really rough as we know that things change quickly). We then prioritized the first draft of Company Objectives for our first OKR cycle that we thought would be most important to achieve.
Step 2) Involve team leads/scale via team leads
After we had the first draft of our company level OKRs ready, we immediately shared them with our team leads for feedback and also made sure that the concept of OKRs is understood by them, so they can explain it to their team members and answer questions as well as how their involvement looks like in the process of co-shaping our OKRs.
Step 3) Form OKR groups
Together with our team leads, we drafted OKR groups. These groups were not solely formed following the organizational team structure but along with the topics that we wanted to work on as an organization.
Step 4) Bring it to the team
As with our team leads it is, of course, important that OKR as an approach is understood by everyone in the organization. So the next step was to give the team a comprehensive introduction to the method and our first draft company objectives and to give the team members a voice so they can engage and come up with a draft for key results for their respective groups that contribute to the company objectives.
Step 5) OKR drafting sessions in each group
After the introduction, each group drafted a group OKR sheet to come up with corresponding key results they would see as valuable to contribute to the company objectives. We also made this a fully open process so everyone in the team could see what everyone else was working on in the respective groups at any time.
Step 6) OKR alignment session with representatives — the remote way
The OKR alignment is a critical step, it’s where the different groups (or in our case 1 representative per group) come together to clarify and challenge how the groups plan to contribute to the company objectives — and also to challenge the company objectives themselves. There are open questions, misunderstandings might be present and sometimes support from other groups is needed to achieve a KR and so on.
We thought that a kind of face-to-face marketplace would be a nice way to create alignment and understanding, but how could we achieve that if everyone is working remotely? Our tool combination of choice was miro supported by wonder.me as the latter allows for freestyle discussion grouping with video and voice and somehow resembles a marketplace feel. We created areas in wonder.me that matched the OKR groups we defined. So if you found a group representative lonely in the corresponding area in wonder.me during the alignment session you could simply approach her for a topic you needed support with by the group in the upcoming OKR cycle or just talk about the OKRs of her group to foster alignment and understanding.
That’s how our wonder.me room looked like:
In miro, we used color-coded comments to highlight where questions were open (yellow comments) or help was needed (red comments) from other groups. The goal for the alignment was then to resolve all of those comments in order to create an aligned understanding.
After the alignment and based on the feedback gathered, the representatives returned to their groups to finalize their respective objectives and key results. Additionally, the grading details that are necessary to measure progress for the aligned key results were finalized (blue comments) and the owners for the specific key results were defined collaboratively.
The end result in our miro board looked like this
Step 7) Kick-off the 1st OKR cycle
So the time has come to actually start working on the identified and aligned topics. Here it’s important to arrange regular check-ins and reflections about the progress of the OKRs within the groups right from the start so the focus can be kept and progress is visible to everyone at any time.
Our weapons of choice to align and track progress a.k.a Tools
A key aspect of OKRs is to make them transparent to the whole organization so everyone can see what everybody is working on and how everyone contributes to reaching our common goals. So following the definition of the OKRs after the alignment, we were searching for a tool that would help us to make progress transparent. This can be done in so many ways like shared Google spreadsheets, miro boards, etc. (there are many templates available on the web).
After some research and testing, we decided to give Koan a try. It’s a quite simple tool that helps to share and track the OKRs you are working on (and also the free plan is pretty complete for an organization sized like ours).
For drafting our OKRs and everything upfront to the actual execution phase we recommend a tool like miro as it’s easy to use, super flexible and allows the inclusion of the whole team without much effort in a collaborative way.
Our first OKR cycle — what we learned so far
We are currently at the end of our first cycle and are gathering our learnings but we already have some insights to share, our key learnings so far:
- Formulating KRs is hard — if you are not used to thinking in OKR-terms and don’t have proper references in place to measure your progress, outcomes might be hard to evaluate. Invest time to think about measures.
- Leave perfectionism behind — perfect is the enemy of good. Start small and slow down to speed up. OKRs are not a sprint but should be sustainable and continuous.
- Don’t obsess on tooling — choose what seems to be useful for your organization and give it a try. For us it was Koan for tracking our OKRs but we might learn that a different tool (miro?) makes more sense.
- If you don’t have anyone in the team with experience working with OKRs it might make sense to look for outside help as your team members will need help to understand and implement them right.
- Don’t stick to OKRs by the book — see them as a guideline, listen to your team and take constraints (availability, workload, etc.) into account.
- The duration of OKR cycles is not set in stone. A quarterly cadence might be a good starting point but don’t obsess that you have to continue the once chosen cadence indefinitely. Adapt to what makes sense for your organization.
- Less is more. This is stressed so often when starting to implement OKRs. Be ambitious, yet realistic, especially at the beginning.
So, what’s next?
In a truly agile way, we want to inspect and adapt what we have done so far so we won’t just continue without looking back. We will take a look at our first approach and see how we can improve the process going forward. Our journey towards OKRs has just begun.
*In case you are wondering why we chose “Laika” as the name for our project: Laika was the first animal to orbit the earth and marked an important milestone for humankind and a starting point for a lot of progress that followed. So we thought that’s a nice tribute and a somehow fitting analogy to our ambitions.
This article was written for Sclable’s blog on Medium.
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Thanks to Julia Kraft for feedback and review on this article
