What are OKRs?

From whatmatters.com:

It is a collaborative goal-setting tool used by teams and individuals to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. OKRs are how you track progress, create alignment, and encourage engagement around measurable goals.

O: Objective - What is it that we’re trying to accomplish

KR: Key Result - A concretely measurable entity that lets us know that we’re making progress towards the objective.

They are generally written at the beginning of a quarter, and scored at the end of it. However, counter to some popular belief, I’ve found that OKRs are not always a good tool for project management!

When should you use OKRs?

Just because it’s a commonly used practice at prestigious tech companies (Google, Intel, etc.) doesn’t mean it’s always the right tool for the situation. OKRs come with notoriously high overhead, and can be seen as needless bureaucracy if not implemented correctly.

You should NOT use OKRs if:

• If you are a small and nimble team
• or if your entire org is focused down on launching an MVP

For those cases, you should consider different kinds of project management (weekly or bi-weekly sprints could be a better cadence if your work is fluid!)

You should consider instituting OKRs if:

• You need cross-team or cross-product level project management
• And your work is consistent enough to be planned at a quarterly level

Because they project out a quarter at a time, OKRs will never be a perfect reflection of what’s actually been accomplished - even in large, stable companies, last minute tasks not captured during planning phase arise all the time.

As such, consider that the best use of OKRs is as a communication tool to align and manage large, disparate teams, where leadership only wants a general sense of how teams are doing without diving into the project management details. It should not be meant for task management internal to a team!

Tips for writing OKRs

When writing OKRs, it’s so tempting to co-opt the process and turn it into a personal task management tool. But now that you understand that the goal of OKRs is for external team communication, consider the following points:

1. The target audience of OKRs are people OUTSIDE the team.

Yes, I know I just said this in 3 different ways, but it’s worth repeating. It’s all too easy to generate a laundry list of bugs and tasks, prioritize them, and call it done. But, OKRs are actually a communication tool, not a task management tool! So write the Objectives and KRs in language that assumes the reader has little context - you can always tack on a notes section for yourself and your team if needed.

2. OKRs are a by-product of project management internal to a team.

While the final draft of the OKRs should be more than a laundry list of bugs, coming up with it (and scoring at the end) is a process that requires project management, task tracking, and reviewing.

Some teams do this via super intense spreadsheets, listing out each task and the effort needed to complete each one. Others managed exclusively through bug trackers or kanbans, which, depending on the workflow, can be totally opaque to anyone outside the team. Some smaller teams may even task manage via Google docs!

What works for each team is unique to them, and creating a succinct OKR report each quarter is the common interface between them so that leadership can align and manage multiple efforts easily.

3. Rule of thumb: Objectives generally take several quarters to achieve. KRs are the individual projects that help you achieve your Objective, and will change from quarter to quarter.

This rule of thumb is a good way to check if your Objectives and Key Results are at the right level of abstraction for people outside your team to understand. Some examples of good Objectives I’ve seen:

• “Become the industry standard for XXX.”
• “Launch YYY.”

And example corresponding KRs might be:

• “Roll out UX guide for AAA.”
• “Develop and review ZZZ options for go-to market campaign.”

Anything lower level than that should be captured as a part of the team-internal project management process, and at most stuck into the notes of your OKRs for easy reference by the scorer in the future :)