”Measure What Matters” by @johndoerr is by far the best book on strategic planning I have ever read as an entrepreneur. If there are important activities on your team (or a significant fraction of its effort) that aren’t covered by OKRs, add more. Measure What Matters (OKR) OKRs push us far beyond our comfort zones. Like its paid version, the free-version of Koan is simple to set up and integrate into an organization. A team’s committed OKRs should credibly consume most but not all of their available resources. The litmus test: Is it reasonably possible to score 1.0 on all the key results but still not achieve the intent of the objective? Make sure that the “horizontal” OKRs (projects that need multiple teams to contribute) have supporting key results in each subteam. Koan, formerly a paid-only OKR software, now has an unrestricted free tier. We use OKRs to plan what people are going to produce,track their progress vs. plan, and coordinate priorities and milestones between people and teams. A committed OKR that fails to achieve a 1.0 by its due date requires a postmortem. A classic example: “Launch X,” with no criteria for success. If every key result happens on the last day of the quarter, you likely don’t have a real plan. Using Google Docs or Sheets is useful for smaller teams. Objectives and Key Results. Our government delivers results when things work well. It’s been a foundation of OKRs since Andy Grove had a young John Doerr and the rest of Intel post their personal OKRs outside of their cubicles so everyone could see them. By contrast, aspirational OKRs express how we’d like the world to look, even though we have no clear idea how to get there and/or the resources necessary to deliver the OKR. You can do this, too, whether setting OKRs for yourself or a small company. But to do that, policy must define clear outcomes. NerdWallet created both culture and process to help consumers make healthier financial decisions. . In John's book Measure What Matters (https://www.producthunt.com/post...), John lays out case studies and best practices for creating, committing to, tracking, and communicating your OKRs. more effective use of them. Corollary: It is good to move an aspirational OKR to a different team’s list if that team has both the expertise and bandwidth to accomplish the OKR more effectively than the current OKR owner. OKR is a simple yet powerful tool for startups to stay focused on what really matters … “Measure What Matters” OKR Starter Kit by John Doerr & Coda Coda wants to bring the digital document experience to the next level and “combines the flexibility of a doc with the structure and depth of a spreadsheet.” … OKRs must promise clear business value—otherwise, there’s no reason to expend resources doing them. If you are aiming to roll out OKRs across a larger organization, there are paid OKR software tools that can help. If you’re interested in starting our OKRs 101 course, click here. We print them and just post them all over the walls to say you now know what you’re striving for and if you’re hitting it or not.”. How to make meetings more effective with OKRs. In … The successful achievement of an objective must provide clear value for Google. OKR criteria explanation template for objectives and key results parts Quote slide on OKR from book “Measure What Matters” OKR setting three steps process timeline flowchart: define, measure, wrap-up … TRAP #6: Insufficient KRs for committed Os. Pay attention to the following simple rules: Objectives are the “Whats.” They: 1. express goals and intents; 2. are aggressive yet realistic; 3. must be tangible, objective, and unambiguous; should be obvio… All are simple ways anyone in any organization can monitor goals transparently. But to do that, policy must define clear outcomes. Teams who can meet all of their OKRs without needing all of their team’s headcount/capital . Cross-team OKRs should include all the groups who must materially participate in the OKR, and OKRs committing to each group’s contribution should appear explicitly in each such group’s OKRs. This is how John Doerr explained objectives and key results (OKR) in his book Measure what Matters. That’s a superior objective. TRAP #5: Low Value Objectives (aka the “Who cares?”OKR). John Doerr, Grove’s mentee, would later adopt, spread, and popularize the OKR system throughout Silicon Valley and beyond with “Measure What Matters”. Building on a career-long legacy of sharing the power of OKRs with established and emerging leaders alike, Measure What Matters includes a broad range of first-person accounts that demonstrate the focus, ambition, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. Sam Prince. How to make meetings more effective with OKRs. Instead, describe the end-use impact of these activities: “publish average and tail latency measurements from six Colossus cells by March 7,” rather than “assess Colossus latency”; must include evidence of completion. . An OKR that requires no changes to any group’s activities is a business-as-usual OKR, and those are unlikely to be new—although they may not have previously been written down. Author: If you say “1 million users,” is that all-time users or seven-day actives? It is critical that KRs are written such that scoring 1.0 on all key results generates a 1.0 score for the objective. OKRs are ideally suited to commit to this coordination. We use a process called objectives and key results (OKRs) to help us communicate, measure, and achieve those lofty goals. If your objective doesn’t fit on one line, it probably isn’t crisp enough. Well done OKRs are a motivational management tool that helps make it clear to teams what’s important, what to optimize, and what tradeoffs to make during their day-to-day work. Still, by … Better: “Launch Foo 4.1 to improve sign-ups by 25 percent.” Or simply: “Improve sign- ups by 25 percent.”. Or, if you have encountered other free OKR-tracking tools or software, please reach out and let us know so we can add them to our list! Practical Guide to Enterprise OKRs. Aspirational OKRs very often start from the current state and effectively ask, “What could we do if we had extra staff and got a bit lucky?” An alternative and better approach is to start with, “What could my (or my customers’) world look like in several years if we were freed from most constraints?” By definition, you’re not going to know how to achieve this state when the OKR is first formulated—that is why it is an aspirational OKR. Join Ryan and the rest of the team for our new videocast, CFRs.Click below to check out the most recent episode, OKRs Then and Now!