OKR Journey — Planning
A diary of one startup’s OKR implementation.
In my last blog post I wrote about why we have decided to give OKRs a try and what we hope to gain by doing it. Today I want to tell how we came up with our first set of OKRs.
Preparation
A week before Christmas me and our product owner Piotr Podhajski started doing some serious research on OKRs. We shared tons of links, read a dozen of articles and I watched a couple of videos on the topic. After we gained some basic knowledge and mutual understanding of what it’s all about, we scheduled a planning session. A few days before the meeting we asked the business team and tech team for input. The question was:
“What do you think is important for us to do during the next quarter?”
In retrospective, maybe we weren’t specific enough, but we got a lot of technical suggestions from the engineering team. Most of them were related to technical debt and other system improvements. All of the ideas made sense and were important from the technical point of view, but not many of them were important from the business perspective.
Business team came up with more business related ideas, which was expected, because they are much closer the customer. Then know what our customers want and need, they feel customers’ pain.
In retrospective, both groups had valid inputs based on what they felt was
important to them. We also learned that you need to be more specific when
asking questions. Maybe, if we asked, “what do you think should be our company’s goals for the next quarter”, we would have gotten slightly different
answers.
We also spoke to the management who gave us their view on what they thought was important for us to concentrate on.
Based on all input we received we tried to identify the biggest challenges and
pains we were facing as a company and see if we could find a common theme.
Planning
Our OKR planning meeting took around three hours, where most of the time went into discussing things related, but not directly touching OKRs. It was only me and Piotr and our goal was to come up with a set of OKRs and a list of potential project candidates, that we were going to present to the rest of the management the following day.
We decided to keep things simple initially and start off with just one OKR for
the whole company. This is also known as Shared OKR, where the whole company has only one shared goal and everyone aligns to it.
Coming up with one objective and supporting key results for it didn’t take
long, because by then we already had a feeling of what was important for us to focus on. It was only a matter of putting it into words. Words that were
inspiring, words that made sense. That was the hardest part.
Our first take on an objective was “Reach N OPS” [1]. Clear, simple, inspiring
and challenging. However, after some discussion we agreed that this was more of a key result, because it was something measurable. Objective should be something inspiring and not something measurable. It should be a dream.
I like to think of it the following way. When someone comes up to you and asks — “Hey! What are you going for this quarter?” — you should tell them the objective. Then, if they ask the follow up question — “Cool! And how are you going to measure that? How do you know when you reached your objective?” — it’s now you tell them your key results.
After a few rewrites we were pleased with the results and went onto
brainstorming a list of potential project areas, or themes, related to the objective. We came up with half a dussin and sorted them by, what we thought was, highest impact, highest bang for the buck.
Here is our shared objective (O) together with key results (KR)
Objective
Increase the number of transactions, while keeping satisfaction among
existing clients high.
Key Results
- Reach N OPS
- On-board XX new clients
- Don’t lose any existing client
- Expand existing clients to enter XX new markets (overall)
- Reduce client on-boarding time to one week
- Launch an MVP of Project A
Next morning we presented our shared OKR together with a list of potential
projects to the management. After a few out of place questions, that I suspect
were due to the general lack of understanding of the OKRs, we got ourselves
a blessing.
A Single Question
One thing that I really like about OKRs is that you can use them to question
things. They help you stay on track, help you focus on essential things. If a new potential project comes in from the side or if someone suggests that we
take on something urgent or something interesting, you can just ask:
“How will this help us reach our OKR that we all have agreed on?”
This is a very powerful, and sometimes even painful, question, but it helps you keep our eyes on the prize.
What OKRs are all about
As I mentioned earlier, during the past couple of months I have digested a massive amount of information trying to learn more about OKRs. At first, the more I learned, the more confused I became. What is this OKR thing? Is it a methodology? A process? Or is it some kind of framework? Everyone, says different things, but still, everyone also says the same in some way. And then, it suddenly just clicked. It all came together.
OKRs is a tool. In its essence, it’s just a simple tool that helps you choose the most important goal and come up with a set of supporting metrics to help you measure the progress towards reaching that goal.
OKRs is also an alignment tool. That’s the biggest takeaway for me. It constantly makes sure that everyone knows what direction to run in, makes sure that we do, and continuously tells us how far it’s left and what our current pace is. In a way, it’s like one of those activity trackers you wear on your wrist when you go running.
Open Thoughts
- How do OKRs align with Scrum? We have slightly changed our development process this year, switched from Kanban to Scrum and two week sprints. We are still not sure how OKRs syncs with Scrum.
- How do you ingrain OKRs into the company culture? OKRs are new to us and I am constantly worried that we will start to forgetting or start ignoring them. I want to do much more evangelising internally but I don’t want to reach the point of being annoying.
- Monday Commitments Meetings. Still haven’t figured out the format and
the outcome of these meetings, We are having our first one today, so
hopefully things will clear. - Key Results. From what I understand you can have two kinds of key
results, quantitative, where you measure something by the number, and
“binary”, where you measure something by “yes” or “no.” We currently have both, but I am still not sure if we have set up a good set of key results for our quarterly objective.
Bottom Line
OKRs are all about alignment, to get everyone running in the same direction
and to make sure that we do. We know where we are going and we are doing
weekly reminders to help us stay on track. We still have a long way to go, but
it feels like we are off to a pretty good start.
[1] OPS — Orders Per Second. It’s an internal metric we use. The average
number of orders per second during 24 hours.
