Top 5 reasons why we failed at OKRs

The concept of structured goal setting isn’t a new concept especially in the New Year. You have likely heard of several frameworks such as SMART, HARD or OKRs. While each framework has their own nuance, I have found using goals successfully typically comes down to the effort you put in. Given the amount buzz around OKRs, I thought it would be interesting to see what they were all about and apply within my team. 

If you are not familiar with OKRs there are plenty of online resources. I would recommend picking up Measure What Matters by John Doerr or better yet listen to the audio book (in my top 5 audio books).

We kicked off this experiment adapting our regular planning/goal process last Fall. Over a period of about a month there was high energy validating what problems the team/product needed to solve, finding ways to express them with meaningful Objectives and Key Results. Overall, I thought the framework worked quite well and was something that most everyone on the team could relate with, and then hopefully apply to how they think about what work needs to be done.

That said I think we ultimately failed at making the most of the OKR framework in our first attempt. We are going to take the following lessons and apply to how we kick off 2020. For those of you that are newer to OKRs these might be useful for you as well.

1.      We ended up with too many Objectives

It’s natural to turn OKRs into an exhaustive list of every work item the team is working on. It’s important to emphasize that this is not just another tool that will replace proper use of your favorite work tracking tool. Of course, they should be related, but save your time trying to morph them into one. Keep it simple. Best practice suggests that you try to stick to a 3 X 5 framework. That is three objectives and at most 5 key results per objective that you are driving at in the specific period. You should feel comfortable to adapt the KRs on a regular basis as you learn and drive success towards your Objective.

2.      We didn’t measure often enough

For OKRs to be truly effective you need to evaluate progress on a regular basis. It might sound a bit much to talk about the results so often, but I would recommend looking at the KRs and adding commentary weekly. By looking every week it’s a good reminder for everyone where they should be spending the significant amount of their energy to knock out their key results. Focusing on the outcome vs. activity. Looking each week just helps people look back, think critically, and quickly adjust.

Finding the right tool to facilitate the weekly conversation is critical. Look for an upcoming review on what’s the best tool for the size of your organization

3.      We failed to make our OKRs public

There are multiple advantages to making your OKRs public. The most straight forward reason is others can immediately understand what you are working towards. Specifically, this helps them understand what you are *not* doing, creating an opportunity for a great conversation around prioritization. The second reason this is useful is that it creates a sense of accountability. If you tell everyone you are going to do something in most cases, you are more inclined to ensure that you either publicly course correct or make it happen.

4.      We Tried to make all Key Results a quantitative metric

It’s natural for me in my current role to immediately start thinking about metrics or KPIs as a measurement of success. In reality, this isn’t necessarily always the best way to look at key results. Milestones for a significant design, prototype or MVP may be just as important to reaching your objective. Be flexible and think carefully what the most iterative and meaningful progress indicators are. This will not only save you time in defining your key results but will likely result in a way for your team to better relate.

5.      Not all the Objectives need to ladder to the top of your organization

It’s natural to want to make sure that your work aligns with the broader goals for the organization. One way to accomplish this is to try an approach where every Objective ladders up to the broader organization. I found this has two disadvantages. First you will tend to need to create significantly more than 3 objectives to cover all the types of work that you or the team are doing which is in spite of keeping things simple and memorable. More importantly, you likely will miss out on the ingenuity and passion from folks on your team who are closer to the work product with great ideas on how to drive impact for your Customers. Try having a dual approach where you have both bottoms up and top down OKRs. It’s worth having happy arguments to ensure there is general alignment but there is no need for everything to perfectly align.

It’s OK to not get everything perfect the first time. Simply iterate each period and learn what works for your organization from your own experiences and from others.

Here is to an awesome 2020!