Better, Useful, OKRs
Some Simple Rules for Getting Value out of OKRs
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a common way that organizations set goals for a planning timeframe (a Quarter, a year, or other). Despite how much sense the concept makes on the surface, the approach often gets mixed reviews, being seen less as useful and more as a necessary bureaucratic evil. This is often because it’s implemented poorly, not aligned with the core principles.
John Doerr’s book Measure What Matters, describes Objectives and Key Results in a way that seems simple and sensible:
An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action-oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. …. KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable.
He goes on to say that OKRs are:
a set of stringently curated goals that merit special attention and will move people forward in the here and now. They link to the larger purpose we’re expected to deliver around.
While I’m not an expert in OKRs, I’ve seen the process work with varying degrees of usefulness. Reading Doerr’s book helped me to understand why the process broke down at times.
Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
There are so many ways OKRs can be misapplied, adding no value or even causing more frustration than value. The more common issues I’ve seen fall into one of these categories:
Insufficient guidance on how to define OKRs.
Lack of the right connection with larger-scale goals
Incorrect number or size.
Guidance
While the idea of an Objective and Key Results seems straightforward, the process is at least part art. A good Objective has certain qualities, as do the associated Key Results. The details can vary slightly depending on the organization, but Objectives and related Key Results should have the attributes Doerr describes.
A large part of the value of OKRs is communication, so there needs to be a common understanding of how to frame them. The What Matters site has a number of examples of Objectives and their associated results.
A common problem is confusing an Objective (a goal) with a Key Result (a measurable step that you can achieve or not). While they do go together, be thoughtful about whether you are talking about an Objective, a KR, or the two together:
An Objective provides a clear direction in a way that is motivational. If you see a number with an Objective, be cautious.
A Key Result should follow the SMART goal framework, and be easy to evaluate as complete or not
Make sure teams (and management) have a clear, shared understanding of why you are using OKRs and how to structure them. Ideally, read the book. While it might be tempting to focus on the KRs, which are the deliverables, start with the objectives (and get alignment on them), then identify which results will help you achieve them.
Connection
Another value of OKRs is that they support alignment, helping everyone move in the same direction. If you are in a larger organization, telling everyone to “write OKRs” might yield a batch of random things that sound useful, but don’t move the organization in the direction it wants to go. While OKRs can be driven top-down or bottom-up, it’s often the case that there’s a set of top-down objectives in mind, and clarifying those makes it easier for teams to write Objectives that align with the business goals.
Some organizations overdo it, with many levels of Objectives, and force strict cascading (“sub team objective B3 maps to team objective A2 maps to company objective C1”). This isn’t helpful: too many levels can make it hard to write team objectives that don’t seem trivial, and forcing a strict mapping can have ill effects, taking away agility and flexibility, marginalizing team contributions, and leading teams to ignore horizontal linkages.
Limit the number of levels, encourage teams to contribute objectives, and don’t overdo the cascade. As Doerr says:
To promote engagement, teams and individuals should be encouraged to create roughly half of their own OKRs, in consultation with managers. When all goals are set top-down, motivation is corroded.
Alignment still matters, but you can achieve that with a conversation about whether a Team Objective really aligns with one or more higher-level ones (at any level).
While a lack of business direction can lead to less than useful Objectives, the objectives need to be actionable. Setting high-level objectives so vague that they don’t really focus effort doesn’t give any guidance, no matter how inspiring they are. For example, saying that a company wants to “Improve Efficiency” without qualifiers or a tie-in to business impact provides no real guidance on whether team-defined objectives align with any real organizational ones.
Number
Doerr suggests limiting yourself to 3-5 OKRs per cycle, per level, to help you focus on work. If your planning horizon is a quarter, saying that you can do 3-5 things sounds reasonable. If you think you can do more, you are probably looking at objectives at the wrong level (or conflating Objectives and Key Results). OKRs aren’t your work items backlog. They are your goals, which your work items should support.
Moving Forward
There are, of course, other things that can go wrong, and you’re not going to get the process right all of the time. Done well, an OKR process can help a team (and individuals) focus on the most valuable work and reduce status-reporting overhead. Even if your organization isn’t following an OKR process, doing the exercise at a team level can be a helpful input to planning conversations.