We love OKRs at Snipply, and we’re definitely not the only ones. OKR — or Objectives and Key Results — is an increasingly popular way to set goals, and progress towards reaching those goals, in an agile way. It’s super simple to align short term tasks and long term strategy around goals that are quantifiable and measurable when organized into OKRs
The big difference from other methods is that OKRs are frequently set, tracked, and re-evaluated at predetermined time intervals. We do ours every two weeks, and it’s something we’ve loved implementing from the start.
With that being said, let’s take a look into what OKRs are and how they are used.
History
According to Wikipedia, the development of OKRs is attributed to Andy Grove AKA the “Father of OKRs”, who introduced the approach to Intel during his tenure there and documented this in his 1983 book High Output Management.
While Andy Grove was the originator of OKR, John Doerr, is probably most responsible for making it as big as it is today. Doerr learned OKR while at Intel, and carried it over to Kleiner Perkins, who invested in a little startup named Google.
In 1999, Doerr introduced the idea of OKRs to Google which quickly became central to Google’s culture as a management methodology.
Google co-founder, Larry Page, even attributes OKRs to a large part of Google’s success in Doerr’s book, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs, when he states this:
“OKRs have helped lead us 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.”
So now that we have a brief history of OKRs let’s take a look into exactly what it is.
Simply put, Objectives are goals to be achieved. A proper goal has to describe both what you will achieve and how you are going to measure its achievement. It is important to make sure that these goals are measurable, as your key results will be tied to them. A goal without measurables is more of a wish or dream.
I like the way Perdoo defines objectives and key results:
Objective — An Objective is a description of a goal to be achieved in the future. An Objective sets a clear direction and provides motivation. An Objective can be thought of like a destination on a map.
Key Result — A Key Result is a metric with a starting value and a target value that measures progress towards an Objective. A Key Result is like a signpost with a distance that shows how close you are to your Objective.
Another simple way of think about objectives and key results is Doerr’s original formula:
I will (Objective) as measured by (this set of Key Results).
It’s important to remember that Objectives are qualitative descriptions of what you want to achieve, while Key Results are a set of metrics that measure progress towards reaching the Objective (not tasks).
Generally speaking, you should have between two and five Key Results for each Objective — having more will make it harder to track and follow. Lastly, remember to not make this a task list, these NEED to be measurable and contributing towards reaching the outlined goal.
A Real-World Example:
Nikit at the Fundamentals, provided a few awesome real-world examples. One, in particular, was Uber. Take a look at Uber’s napkin growth plan below.
An OKR for this might look like:
Objective: Increase Drivers in System
- Increase driver base in each region by 20%
- Increase driver average session to 26 hours / weekly in all active regions
Objective: Increase Geographic Coverage of Drivers
- Increase coverage of SF to 100%
- Increase coverage for all active cities to 75%
- Decrease pickup time to < 10 mins in any coverage area during peak hours of usage
Objective: Increase Driver Happiness
- Define and measure driver happiness score
- Increase driver happiness score to 75th percentile
Implementation
How you go about implementing this into your workflow largely depends on what tools you already have set up. We use Trello and are able to easily organize everything using boards, lists, and cards. Not only that, but it is super easy to integrate documents, communicate tasks to members, and notify everyone of progress made. Of course, you can use any task or project management tool, but it’s important to make sure you get the basics down before trying to overcomplicate things during implementation.
If interested in learning more about OKRs and how to implement them make sure to sign up here, as we’ll be releasing guides, tutorials, and templates on implementation everything over the next few weeks. Before that, here are some notes, tips for success, and things to keep in mind.
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