Objectives & Key Results: Everything you need to get started

We put together a useful workbook to help you with this course and with writing your OKRs.

"Software is eating the world."

Marc Andreesen famously said that in 2011. 10 years later software has eaten the world. This lesson covers what that means for business and why we need to change the way we measure success.

100 years of manufacturing era management training has taught us to value the delivery of a product to market as a measure of success. We don't live in that world anymore.

Getting started with OKRs means understanding the problem you're solving first.

Now that you’ve got a current problem written down, ask yourself the following questions, “If we solve this problem, what does that look like?” In other words, if you turned the problem statement into a positive statement that explains the success of your product in the marketplace, what would you write?

If your objective is the qualitative part of OKRs, key results are quantitative. This is where we put actual metrics.

Now that you have your initial target audience defined it’s time to think about what changes you’d like to see if we solve the problem statement we’re focused on and achieve our objective.

Now that you’ve written an objective and a few key results, it’s time to put them together.

Sometimes the easiest way to differentiate between concepts is to put them into a familiar context. Let’s take a look at the three critical concepts you need to understand to make your OKR implementation successful: Impact, outcome and output.

Much of the material in this course focuses on teams that build digital products and services -- websites, apps and other technology-based products. But what if that’s not where you work? What if you work in Human Resources, Finance, legal or accounting? Do OKRs make sense for you? The short answer is yes. Let’s take a look at how.

Roadmaps are the primary planning tool for product teams. They provide a visual representation of the direction the team is headed and the choices they’ve made to get them to their destination. The problem, as I’ve described throughout this course, is that there is no end to the systems we build these days. In other words, there is no finite destination. How can we then redesign product roadmaps for an OKR-based world? Let’s take a look at how OKRs change the way we plan work.

There are many benefits to working with objectives and key results. Here are the top 3 that I believe make them a powerful goal-setting framework for your teams and organizations. While these are certainly not the only benefits of using OKRs they clearly illustrate why, when done right, they are so powerful.

At their core, OKRs are a relatively simple concept yet they prove difficult for many organizations to implement. There are many challenges to making them successful, let’s take a look at four of the most common challenges starting with how to ensure the entire organization is working towards goals they believe in. Many organizations believe that leaders should dictate their OKRs to the organization and that they should cascade down to the teams through the layers of management until everybody in the company has been given a goal by their manager. I’ve found this to be an anti-pattern for several reasons.

Another common anti-pattern in OKR writing is putting outputs where the key results should be. Here's why that's problematic.

Once OKRs are set, teams need an ideation and decision-making framework for determining what to build. This is where product discovery comes in. It's the process that enables continuous learning and evidence collection.

Finally, one of the biggest challenges to successful OKR adoption is existing incentive structures. For decades companies have rewarded the delivery of products to market and the individual heroism of team members. Successful OKR implementations eschew those behaviors in favor of achieving outcomes, collaborating with your colleagues and winning (or losing) together as a team.

We are living at a time of incredible opportunity. The technology that drives our world gives us the power to not only deliver new products and services to market but to learn whether or not we’re delivering something of value quickly and cheaply.

Objectives and Key Results help us determine if we're doing all we can to maximize this opportunity.

I hope you found the course valuable and that it's given you a big step forward to writing and implementing successful Obejctives and Key Results. In case you didn't already download it, the OKR companion workbook is available here as well as a PDF.

I write a lot about OKRs on my blog and I would recommend reading there as supplements for this course.