OKR Journey — Introduction

A diary of one startup’s OKR implementation.

The Introduction

This is a blog series about one startup’s OKR journey and how we are trying to
implement them. The good, the bad, and the struggles. Posting weekly until we run out of things to say.

The Background

Heard of OKRs? No? They are apparently all the rage today. After all, they are
what made Google Google, right? Or so I’ve heard at least. Well, if it worked for Google it must work for us!

Seriously. I am joking. That’s not why we are doing it. We are doing it
because we need it, we believe in it and we are finally ready to try it.

Hi! My name is Ilia Mikhailov. I am the CTO of the company and my goal is to
entertain and hopefully educate you. My ambition is to check in and report
once a week on how things are going with our OKR implementation.

The idea behind these series are self-reflection, quasi-documentation, or
maybe some kind of … blogomentary, a word I just came up with.

The Startup

Our company is around 20 people where developers are the majority of the workforce. We have grown from 4 people to about 20 in roughly three years time. It’s been a slow, but also a controlled growth, that we could manage well.

The company consists of two offices — in Stockholm, Sweden and in Wroclaw,
Poland. The Stockholm office is mostly sales and management, while Wroclaw
office is mostly all about engineering.

We use all the tools that all other “cool” startups do — Slack for chat, Zoom.us for video, Dropbox Paper for quick notes and Google Apps for business.

We are into the e-commerce and logistics space. I don’t want to bore you with
the details but, in short, our belief is that the shipping part of the e-commerce is broken and our aim is to fix it. The company’s mission is — Shipping as an Advantage, and our vision is — Syncing E-Commerce with Life.

The What

I’ve heard about the OKR process earlier, mostly just that Google used it. Actually, I first came in contact with the process in my previous company when someone higher up the chain of command decided to implement OKRs on a company wide level. We where all given an account in some OKR SAAS and an order to fill in our personal OKRs. We logged in and tried to fill in our individual objectives and key results the best we understood and then … nothing happened and the whole thing just died. I quickly forgot about the whole experience.

I am not sure of how I re-stumbled on the OKRs again but they came out of one thought I’ve been carrying around for a while now — we do many things right, but do we do the right things?

This whole thing is mostly my idea as I would say I am the biggest proponent of the OKRs in the company. I’ve been wanting us to give them a try for a some time now but we weren’t ripe enough until now.

It feels like I’ve finally managed to get the rest of the management to buy in on this! Also feels like everyone else is positive so far and eager to try it out. These are all very positive indicators and a prerequisite for success! Being flexible and keeping an open mind is half the game.

My knowledge tap so far has been the Internet and especially two awesome
sites — Elegant Hack by Christina Wodtke and Learn OKR by Felipe Castro. Highly recommended!

The Hopes

There is a saying I’ve heard somewhere:

Do you want to be effective or do you want to be efficient?

Well, we want to be both! Why shouldn’t we?

In my opinion our tech team is already very effective. We are fast to produce new code, super-quick to respond to customer requests and questions, and ultra-rapid to squash bugs and deploy hot fixes. We are good and we know it
too.

But are we efficient as a company? To a certain degree, yes, but we can always
do better. As many other startups we too are distracted by many shiny things
we see around us. Because, you know, the world is full of opportunities.
They are all around us, right? That means it doesn’t matter how hard you
push that gas pedal if your gear is set in neutral. By that I mean that we
can’t go after all those shiny things because we would get too distracted
and lose focus and that’s soo not efficient!

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.
- Lucius Annaeus Seneca

My great hopes are that OKRs will help us keep the eyes on the prize and not
allow us get too distracted by all the shiny things around us. Help us achieve that laser-sharp focus that many of us dream about. Help us feel the burn and
the feeling of accomplishment for the goals that we set, even if we might not
reach them all.

The Questions

I might be getting ahead of myself but there are still some things that are unclear to us, or that we haven’t decided on, or that we simply just haven’t
discussed yet. But that’s not a show stopper. As Mark Twain once said - The secret of getting ahead is getting started!

• We haven’t defined any health metrics to track
• We are unsure on the best way to keep everyone in the loop. Weekly meetings? Weekly emails?
• We haven’t talked about weekly priorities and how and whether we should
  proceed with them as our tech team works in two week long sprints.

Stay tuned for the next week’s post where I will explain the initial steps we took to come up with our first set of OKRs and the transition phase, and remember — no system works if you don’t actually keep to it.