Introduction to OKRs
A short introductory session to Objectives and Key Results.
What does OKRs stand for?
Orca’s Keep Rollin’ – watch out for those aquatic mammal gangstas.
Organophosphate Keratinization Roentgenography – I don’t even know what that is.
OK, Roger – Yeah, whatever, move on.
Or is it Objectives & Key Results?
Yep, you guessed it, OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results. So if you’re here for the talk on Organophosphate Keratinization Roentgenography, you’re in the wrong meeting.
Objectives & Key Results
OKRs are a goal-setting method that enables teams to focus on what matters most, and make changes when they don’t yet know how to achieve the goal.
There are two important bits to remember there:
Focusing on what matters, and not knowing how you’ll achieve the goal.
This is what makes OKRs different to other goal-setting techniques, and what we’ll revisit a few times in this talk. OKRs aren’t about recording and tracking all the work your team is doing, only the most important work, the stuff that contributes to the big OU strategy and priorities.
And they aren’t about defining the work you’ll do upfront, when you know least about how you might achieve the goal you’ve set. You should figure out the work later, and be open to changing what work you do to achieve your objective.
History of OKRs
OKRs were introduced to Intel in the 1970s.
And Google adopted them in 1999, and has been using them ever since.
They are also used by LinkedIn, Twitter, Uber, Microsoft and thousands of other organisations around the world.
Why does this matter? So you know that OKRs aren’t some funky new fad. They have a long history, and have been developed in lots of organisations. Books have been written about OKRs. There are OKR conferences (mostly for people who don’t get out much). They’ve been shown to be a useful technique for aligning teams with what the leaders of an organisation are trying to achieve, but doing it in a way that recognises things change, we learn as we go, and we need to be able to adapt.
Why use OKRs?
Align priorities
We use OKRs at OU to help teams align their work with organisational strategy. In large organisations in particular, the day-to-day work of the teams can get disconnected from the bigger priorities of the organisation. OKRs give us a way to leapfrog over the hierarchy of the organisation and directly connect what the team is trying to achieve to what matters most for the organisation.
Have two-way conversations
OKRs provide a means for two-way conversations between teams and leaders about the priorities for the organisation and how the work the teams do contributes them. OKRs don’t work without those conversations and the shared understanding that comes from them.
Give teams decision-making autonomy
We want teams to make the decisions about what work will achieve the Objectives, after all you all are the experts in what you do. OKR’s do this by separating the Objectives from the work to achieve them.
Track the things that matter
And they focus on tracking the outcomes that matter to the organisation, not the deliverables which may or may not contribute to the goal.
What is an objective?
An Objective is an easy-to-remember, qualitative descriptions of what you want to achieve.
It’s that simple. It doesn’t need to be complicated. It doesn’t have metrics or timeframes, it doesn’t say who is responsible. It just needs to express the most important thing the team is working on in a way that anyone can get.
Example objectives
Improve the quality of leads contacting us
This is a pretty good example. It’s easy to see why it would be the most important thing a team is working on, but it does require a bit of specialist knowledge to know what leads are, and maybe what a quality lead is.
Increase revenue by 20% in 3 months
This is a pretty poor Objective. It’s too specific and includes measures. And, although challenging Objectives are good, it’s probably unachievable.
Grow email subscriber list
This is a good Objective. It’s short and easy to remember, easy to talk about with people who aren’t specialists, and easy to see what it’s important.
When writing Objectives, it’s best not to over think it, don’t try to cover every caveat or be super specific. It’s much more important to have an easy-to-remember description of what you’re trying to achieve.
What is a key result?
A Key Result is a specific, measurable metric that shows movement from what it is now to what you want it to be.
They are always quantitative and need data to report on that movement.
Example key results
Increase form submissions from 5% to 10%.
Pretty good, tells you what the form submission rate is now and where you want to get to. Could be a bit more specific about which forms.
Motivate employees to enhance customer service.
Isn’t measurable, doesn’t show how motivated employees are now or what the change is.
Decrease user journey drop-off at step 4 from 25% to 20%.
This is a good Key Result. It’s specific about where the change will happen, and the direction the change will go.
Have a go
Write an Objective and a Key Result. It can be about anything. Work. Personal life. World peace, if you want.
Try to make your Objective easily memorable description of what you want to achieve.
And make your Key Result specific, measurable, and that shows movement from how things are now to towards achieving the objective.
Here’s mine.
Objective: Run five miles without stopping.
Key result: Reduce the time between stops from every ten minutes to every twenty minutes.
What did you notice?
Writing OKRs is easy right?
It’s often much easier to write the objective if you are clear on the bigger picture, and almost impossible if you aren’t. So, my objective of running five miles without stopping only makes sense if I know the bigger picture of wanting to take part in a marathon. Without that, it’s kind of a bit random and isolated. So, when you’re writing Objectives with your team, it’s important everyone has an understanding of the bigger picture of organisational priorities.
Key Results are often much harder. They need to be able to tell us that we’re making progress towards the Objective, not just tell us whether we’ve achieved it or not, and not just tell us that with completed steps along the way. So with my running objective, I wouldn’t want my Key Results to be ‘Go to the gym five times a week’, as that’s a done/not done task, and doesn’t tell me if I’ll ever be able to run five miles without stopping. My Key Result of reducing the time in between stops tells me if I’m getting closer to being able to run five miles without stopping because I know that distance is going to take a certain amount of time, and so if, each week I can run for longer without stopping then one day I’ll be able to run five miles without stopping.
We haven’t mentioned anything about the work we’ll actually do to achieve the objective.
OKRs is a goal-setting technique that doesn’t focus on, in fact doesn’t even mention, what work you’ll do to actually achieve the goal. And there are two good reason for this.
When we focus purely on what we’re delivering, and not on what we’re trying to achieve, the work can easily become disconnected from the goal. We could be doing the wrong work and never know it. Or we could carry on delivering more than we need to after we’ve already achieved the goal. OKR’s help us avoid that.
And, when we specify our goals as delivering pieces of work, it assumes we have a crystal ball and know that particular work is definitely going to achieve the goal. Instead, OKRs allow us to deliver a piece of work, use the Key Results to learn that it didn’t help achieve the Objective, and so change to delivering a different piece of work, all without changing the original Objectives.
What OKRs aren’t
Deliverables or initiatives
Getting a campaign or a web page live is a deliverable, it might be an important piece of work to do, but it isn’t an OKR Objective. OKR’s don’t specify the work.
Everything you’re working on
OKR’s should focus on only the most important things the team is working on, those things that achieve organisational priorities. We’re all busy working on lots of different things, but we wouldn’t put all of that work into OKRs.
KPI’s or other metrics and measures
OKRs don’t replace KPI’s and other metrics that your team tracks. Those other ways of showing performance and progress are equally valuable.
What makes a good OKR
You’ll know if you’ve got a good OKR if you can answer Yes to all of these questions.
Can everyone in the team see how our Objective contributes to an important org priority?
Organisational strategy is only achieved by the work teams do. Being able to connect the work you do directly to the big organisational priority tells you it’s important work.
Have leaders and teams talked about the Objectives?
A good OKR is one that has been well thought through, socialised, agreed and accepted. Remember our earlier definition of an Objective? It should be easily memorable. Anyone in the team should be able to say, “Our objective for this quarter is to improve the quality of leads contacting us” without even thinking about it, and definitely without having to look it up in a slide deck.
Is it within the team’s control to achieve this Objective?
If achieving the Objective relies on lots of other teams to do things that might not be a priority for them, or needs someone who’s going to be on leave, or depends on a system that isn’t set-up yet, then the team’s chances of achieving their Objective are affected by things outside their control. You don’t want Objectives like that.
OKRs are really simple, but…
OKRs are really simple, but some organisations like to make them complicated.
So, things to watch out for…
Demanding team’s set OKR’s every quarter, even if the team isn’t working on something that contributes to an organisational priority, or the work the team is doing doesn’t generate any measurable Key Results. OKR’s aren’t the only, or always the best, way to show what a team is achieving.
Objectives are cascaded down and team’s told what their Objective should be, or even worse what they should deliver. Talk to other teams and leaders about teams having the space to figure out for yourselves how best to contribute to organisational priorities.
Retrofitting work that has already been lined up into OKRs. Sometimes this can be ok, simply speaking work can be converted into an Objective by asking ‘why’ are we doing this work. But it’s a bad habit to get into as it means the team is getting locked into delivering a piece of work that may or may not achieve the Objective.
OKRs in practice
Some tips and tricks for getting the most out of OKRs:
Start small, learn as you go
Start small and learn as you go. Each time you think about OKRs, you’ll come up with more questions; how many OKRs should we have, how long should we have the same objective, what if the results only show in the future, etc., etc.? You’ll figure out the right answers for you by discussing those questions together.
Impact is better than perfection
There’s no single ‘right’ way to do OKRs. If the way you’re doing it means you’re talking to leaders to get aligned, focusing on your most important work, and measuring the results to know you’re making a difference, then that’s great.
Avoid lots of process
Avoid having lots of process around OKRs. You don’t want to create an industry around managing OKRs. They are meant to help your team focus on what matters most, not become lots of work to administer. So, if you find yourself spending more time updating slides about OKRs than learning from the Key Results, then you probably should change that.
Getting started with OKRs in six easy steps
Set the objectives
Teams and leaders talk about what’s important to the organisation right now, and what the team’s objective(s) should be. The team should write an Objective they think will contribute to that priority.
Set the Key Results
Teams figure out how they can measure the change towards the Objective.
Often the data is imperfect or not available, don’t let this stop you. Try to find some data. And use this to help you identify how to improve the data so that tracking gets easier in the future.
Do the work
Teams decide what work they’re going to do to affect the Key Result. Often you won’t know for sure, but that’s the point of OKRs, they help us deal with that uncertainty, but use your expertise to come up with a hypothesis about what work you think will achieve the Objective.
Share the Key Results
Sharing the Key Results with others helps everyone ask questions.
If they didn’t change, the team asks, did we pick the right Key Results? Did we pick the right work?
If they did change, the team asks, have we done enough to achieve the Objective or is there more we can do?
Review and learn
This is the important bit. Don’t miss it. This is the team’s chance to think about the work they did and whether it was the right work to affect the Key Results.
OKRs are a powerful tool for shifting teams from focusing on deliverables to focusing on having an impact on the things that really matter, but that only happens if you are regularly asking questions and learning what it takes to make that shift.
Repeat
Next quarter, start with the Objective again. Ask, is it still the right objective or should we have a new one. If you achieved it last quarter, you’ll definitely want a new one, but sometimes organisational priorities change so always start there.
The more you do it, the better you’ll get at it.