A few notes about Objectives and Key Results

My notes from reading the John Doerr’s great “Measure What Matters” book (highly recommend btw).

• OKR = Objective and Key Results
• Methodology of setting goals and tracking them over time
• “[…] OKRs are not a silver bullet. They cannot substitute for sound judgement, strong leadership, or a creative workplace culture. But if those fundamentals are in place, OKRs can guide you to the mountaintop.”
• OKRs are: “A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company cfocuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization”.
• Objective:
  • “[…] WHAT is to be achieved, no more no less.”
  • “By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented and (ideally) inspirational”.
  • “When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking - and fuzzy execution”
  • Can be long lived (e.g. rolls for a year or over)
  • OKRs should surface primary goals and allow to say no to things which do not contribute towards reaching the goals.
  • must be significant (to stay motivated to achieve them)
  • Andy Grove “The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them”
• Key results:
  • “[…] benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective”
  • “Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic.”
  • “they are measurable and verifiable” - “It’s not a key result unless it has a number”
  • There is no judgement/gray area - you either meet it or not.
  • evolve as work in progress
  • Ideal number: 3 - 5
• Connection between objectives and key results lies in the “as measured by”: “We will achieve a certain OBJECTIVE as measured by the following KEY RESULTS.”
• The OKRs should be roughly set in half by the specific team (in consultation with managers).
• OKRs are not set in stone - if situation changes, they should be re-assessed and changed.
• OKRs should be made public to everyone in the company (this creates accountability and makes it easier to say “no” to things)
• OKR superpowers:
  • focus and committment to priorities - OKRs make it clear to what people need to work on, key results are clearly measurable so it should be quite easy to understand what needs to be done
  • alignment and connecting the team - OKRs should be publicly visible, people should be able to view one another’s OKRs, what should enable collaboration; this should also provide context why one team does not want to focus on something you ask them to do - because they have clear OKRs which go in a different way
  • tracking for accountability - OKRs progress can be tracked (because key results are measurable); daily progress measurement are not required, but a weekly checkin is beneficial to avoid spending time on stuff that doese not matter
    • you can do 4 things when you review an OKR:
      • continue (green - all is ok)
      • update (yellow - needs attention) - think about what needs to be done to get on track
      • start - launch a new OKR mid-cycle if necessary
      • stop - kill an OKR if it doesn’t make sense anymore
    • after an OKR finishes, there needs to be a post-mortem done on it
      • if it was killed - why? was there anything that would indicate issues with that OKR that would allow to save that time?
      • it was successfull - should be scored
        • 0.7-1.0 - green (delivered)
        • 0.4-0.6 - yellow (progress made by not delivered)
        • 0.0-0.3 - red (failed to make real progress)
    • the goals should be set in a way that it is probably impossible to hit all of them (if someone does, it means the bar was set too low so they should plan for much more)
    • after the cycle ends, people who set the OKRs should reflect on them, and see if there are some learnings from misses/hits
  • stretch for amazing
    • the OKRs become a “north star”
    • even if the goal seems completely unrealistic, stretching for achieving it can make a huge difference
    • google aims to meet stretch goals at 70% (so going far in the right direction is good enough)
• At Intel, OKRs were disconnected (largely but not fully) from performance reviews and decisions about promotions.

The book provides a load of examples on how introducing OKRs worked for a lot of different organizations (bigger and smaller). It also describes practices and processes which ideally should be implemented along OKRs - e.g. CFR = Conversation, Feedback, Recognition - alternative to performance reviews.