OKRs — where we are struggling
Screenshot from our OKR tool
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We introduced OKRs at Scout24 around 2018, if I am not mistaken. I still recall me writing my first OKR draft on a Confluence page. I got it terribly wrong.
Since then, things have improved. A lot, actually. Today, I am a strong OKR advocate. OKRs help us achieve focus, transparency, collaboration and ownership / accountability. In other words: I am a fan.
We just had our cycle 3 OKR planning a couple of weeks ago, and it went well. So now it would be a good opportunity to write about all the good things that come with OKRs. But you are probably tired of reading all these shiny success stories. So instead, let’s talk a bit about the things that don’t work for us and maybe you can help us make them better.
So here is where we are struggling with OKRs:
First: Culture & Engagement.
How do you press your culture and engagement goals, priorities and initiatives into OKRs? We always end up with a stand-alone “culture” or “people” OKR — which feels odd. Why? Because it is not integrated. Because it feels isolated. We all know that engaged employees are the foundation for every successful company. However, we struggle to reflect it properly and in an integrated way in our OKR structure. Which is a pity. Any thoughts on how to do it better would be greatly appreciated.
Second: Red tape.
I don’t like red tape. But OKRs only work with a certain rigor, cadences and check-ins. In other words: A certain level of red tape is required. We don’t want to drown our OKR owners in reporting and meetings but we want to push accountability as well. For some in our organization, we are not strict enough in enforcing our OKRs. For others, we are doing too much already. So finding the right balance is a continuous journey for us.
Third: Beyond builders.
Our tech function was the very first one inside Scout24 to experiment with OKRs. Product and marketing followed and soon what we call “the builders”, our org of product & tech, were in love with OKRs. But for quite some time we struggled to bring this concept beyond the builders org. This is a pity as I don’t see a structural reason why this would not work in every function. More importantly, OKRs should empower cross-functional work and collaboration. It is getting better with every cycle, but it took us lots of blood, sweat and tears to get to the place that we are today.
Fourth: Long term strategy.
We have a vision of building an ecosystem for real estate. We have a product strategy which is about digitizing the real estate journeys over the next three years. We have an annual budget and a plan. We are delivering against the annual budget in three 120-day development cycles. So everything is connected. Still, sometimes it is hard to keep the connection and the transparency between the long-term strategy and the cycle work. All initiatives contributing to the cycle work require a lot of coordination between the teams and each team is working on their own (short and long-term) projects all connected to the overall strategy. In a dynamic environment such as ours the challenge is to adjust and keep track of the projects while sticking to the strategy.
I am less concerned about moving in the wrong direction, and more about getting a sense of how much we are already contributing, and how much is still missing. For example, it would help to literally visualize and practically quantify the direct connection between the progress on Key Results in one development cycle and how it contributes to the famous “big picture”, i.e. the long-term strategy. But maybe I am also over-engineering here. I would be interested to know which tools you are using for your OKRs in particularly to gain a clear view and to understand the coherence. Let me know!
Thomas
