OKRs — what?

A guide to get started with Objective Key Results (OKRs) and how it’ll help us steer DevX

“I wish I had had this book nineteen years ago, when we founded Google” — Larry Page. Banner Credit.

History

OKR or Objective Key Results (OKRs) is a goal setting framework created by former Intel CEO Andy Grove (Time Magazine’s “Greatest Manager of his or any Era) to help drive growth and focus for a corporation with multiple teams in an accountable and transparent way. It was brought to Google by VC John Doerr (invested in Google, Amazon, and Intuit to name a few), and seeing its growing effectiveness and popularity was adopted into the book “Measure What Matters”. Here’s a short review from Bill Gates about the book.

Why at DevX

DevX’s foundation is quite different from most student clubs, and is very similar to tech organizations. Hacky and instantaneous ways of doing things have served us well in the past to grow explosively, but it lacks any framework to effectively sustain our operations. By adopting a systematic approach to DevX (and my team Bruin Bite), we will not only identify and focus on our goals in a measurable way but also help everyone feel part of the bigger picture. Members will know exactly what’s expected of them, and will help them align their work to broader goals.

Structure of OKRs

OKR structure is very simple:

I will (Objective) as measured by (this set of Key Results).

Objectives. You start by defining 3–5 key objectives on company, team or personal levels. Objectives should be ambitious, qualitative, time bound and actionable by the person or team.

Results. Under each objective, define 3–5 measurable results, not more. Key results should be quantifiable, achievable, lead to objective grading and be difficult, but not impossible. OKR results can be based on growth, performance, revenue or engagement. Often they are numerical, but they can also show if something is done or undone, so a binary 0 or 1. As Marissa Meyer, former Yahoo CEO, said: it’s not a key result unless it’s a number.

Implementing OKRs

Communicate objectives and key results with everyone. OKRs shouldn’t be completely handed down from the top to the bottom; they are a mutual effort between people and teams. Almost half of the OKRs should be set up bottom-up. It shouldn’t be forgotten that OKRs aren’t chiseled into stone; they are always evolving!

At DevX we’ll be reviewing OKRs at the first weekly meeting of each month. Key results will be measured on a scale of 0–1.0.

The following metric for grading from Atlassian seems good

.3 = you missed the mark by quite a lot

.7 = you didn’t hit your target, but made great progress

1 = you hit your stretch target (awwwww yeah…)

If you are always achieving 100% of the goals, then they are too easy. OKR must be ambitious, and a sweet number if 60–70% of the key results for the ambitious goals. Some goals are predictable and this success rate shouldn’t be generalized.

Examples of good OKR’s

Objective: Implement user-testing process

Key Results:

1. Conduct at least 4 face to face testing sessions per week
2. Receive at least 15 video interviews per month from usertesting.com
3. Make sure sure at least 8-% of people interviewed are from our core target group

Objective: Improve our testing procedure

Key Results:

1. Discover at least 10 bugs and open issues in old code not reviewed in 2 months
2. Increase unit test coverage to 75% of code
3. Set up a pipeline for automated testing before each new build gets pushed

Objective: Successfully launch version 3 of our main product

Key Results:

1. Get over 10000 new signups
2. Get published product reviews in over 15 publications
3. Achieve sign-up to trial ratio of over 25%
4. Achieve trial to paid ratio of over 50%

Apply to DevX as a product manager if you are curious about these and want to explore a managerial career path!