Radically Simple OKRs: Presented by Jason Brady

ABOUT Jason Brady:

With 15 years of Agility experience, Jason Brady is a highly experienced agile coach and consultant, who is currently shepherding bp (oil & gas) through their Agile Transformation. J

ason has enjoyed helping companies such as Walt Disney, MotorTrend, and Auction.com to get better at being responsive to change while still achieving their goals.

His passion is to help others reduce the importance of being busy and coach them toward achieving a more rewarding, outcome-driven, and result-oriented way of working.

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Overview

Introduction to OKRs: A Comprehensive Guide to Implementing Objectives and Key Results

In this video, we explore OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), a powerful framework for achieving business success through clear and measurable goals. The purpose of this video is to provide a thorough understanding of OKRs, including their setup, benefits, and best practices. Whether you’re new to OKRs or seeking to enhance your strategy, this video offers essential insights and actionable advice.

Key Aspects of OKRs Covered

The video delves into several crucial elements of OKRs:

• The Beginner’s Guide to OKRs: An essential resource for those starting with OKRs.
• Insights from Measure What Matters by John Doerr: A foundational book on OKRs.
• Overview of the Scaled OKR Fieldbook: A comprehensive guide for effective OKR implementation.

The discussion also addresses how to balance routine tasks with strategic OKRs and adapt to evolving market conditions. Regular review—ideally quarterly—is emphasized to keep OKRs relevant and impactful.

Expert Opinions on Effective OKR Strategies

The video features expert insights on setting realistic and achievable OKRs. Key advice includes: “Business-as-usual tasks should not be set as OKRs, as these are operational necessities rather than strategic goals.” Experts also discuss how OKRs can help organizations navigate significant changes, such as geopolitical events, highlighting that while OKRs should be challenging, they must remain feasible to drive success.

Applying OKRs in Real-World Scenarios

The video provides practical tips for applying OKRs in various contexts. For instance, security teams are advised to focus their OKRs on strategic outcomes rather than routine tasks. This strategy helps manage emergent issues effectively while pursuing impactful goals. Viewers are encouraged to adapt OKRs to current conditions and ensure they are achievable to maintain team motivation and drive.

Conclusion and Key Takeaways for Successful OKRs

In conclusion, the video offers a detailed introduction to OKRs, equipping viewers with valuable resources and strategies for successful implementation. Key takeaways include starting with the Beginner’s Guide to OKRs, utilizing insights from Measure What Matters and the Scaled OKR Fieldbook, and focusing on achievable and impactful goals. Viewers are encouraged to regularly review and adjust their OKRs to stay aligned with business objectives and market conditions. For further learning, exploring the recommended resources and integrating the discussed strategies into your OKR practices is advised.

Learn more about OKRs in Hyperdrive’s Certified OKR Training - Coach & Champion Course

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Transcription

Speaker 2
(0:07) I’m Steve Claus, VP of Enterprise Agility here at Hyperdrive, and I’m super excited about today’s topic. (0:20) As a longtime Enterprise Agile coach, there’s just so much to learn out there, and OKRs have been one of those topics that I’ve been kind of tangentially aware of, and I understand conceptually how it works, but having not had the opportunity to go in and really do an implementation has been one of those things on my bucket list, and so I’m super excited for Jason to give this talk today. (0:49) So Jason Brady is a longtime Agile coach.
(0:53) He’s passionate about OKRs and how we can use this tool to really help our Enterprise customer. (1:07) It doesn’t even have to be Enterprise customers, all of our customers in their businesses. (1:12) So yeah, like I said, I’m super excited.
(1:15) So with that, I want to give Jason as much time as possible, so please welcome my friend Jason Brady.

Speaker 1
(1:23) Thank you, Steve. (1:25) Appreciate it. (1:26) Great to be here today.
(1:27) Thank you, everybody, for attending and showing interest in learning a little bit more about OKRs today, or if you’re just being introduced to them, learning what they are and why they might be valuable for your organization. (1:41) I’ve been an Agile coach for quite some time, about a dozen years or so, and I’ve actually been doing OKRs for about five years. (1:53) I recently became an OKR coach, so as Steve mentioned, I’m really passionate about getting into it, so I decided to pursue my coaching certification as well, and we’ll talk a little bit about that a little later.
(2:07) We’re not going to PowerPoint you to death today. (2:09) We’re going to keep this light, interactive. (2:13) I’m going to try to tell you some great stories today of things that have gone well for me in introducing OKRs, and more importantly, things that didn’t go well, because I’ve been doing this for five years, and it wasn’t always great.
(2:27) My first steps into this journey were, there was a lot of discovery to be done. (2:33) So hopefully we can talk a little bit about things that you can avoid, or at least be aware of, as Roadhousers, as you begin your OKR journey. (2:45) For our agenda today, we’re going to do a couple of things.
(2:49) The first one is we’re going to talk a little bit about origins of OKRs. (2:53) Where did they come from? (2:54) Where did they just appear from?
(2:56) Secondly, one of the problems I’ve noticed that people have when adopting OKRs is visualizing how they fit together and work as a unit. (3:11) So we’re going to take a look at a visual I created that will hopefully paint a picture for you as you begin with OKRs. (3:19) We’re going to talk about writing some great OKRs.
(3:22) What are some good tips for writing meaningful, well-stated OKRs that are powerful? (3:31) We’re also going to talk about OKRs versus KPIs. (3:35) I hear a lot of people blending those two words as if they’re one thing.
(3:39) So we’re going to differentiate what a KPI is, what an OKR is, and how they complement one another. (3:46) We’ll go over some gotchas, tips, and tricks. (3:49) And at the end of the presentation, the chat today, I will give you some great reading that you can do on your own as you start getting your feet wet.
(4:01) Any questions? (4:03) Does that sound OK? (4:05) All righty.
(4:07) All right, so my goal for you today is to not only understand what an OKR is, but how to really construct some great ones that are going to be meaningful to both your teams and the people that you work with. (4:23) Let’s talk about what an OKR is. (4:25) An OKR is an objective, which is a goal, and a KR is a key result, which is really a metric for how we measure how we’re doing against achieving that goal.
(4:40) So essentially, if you think about it, OKRs are a goal-setting technique. (4:44) Now what the beauty of OKRs is, is unlike traditional planning, if you think about traditional planning and goal-setting, it’s mostly a management activity. (4:57) It’s a very top-down, management-driven, arduous event that happens about once a year.
(5:10) Goals are set infrequently, they are set by management, and a lot of times we don’t engage the teams that are going to be doing the work in setting those goals. (5:21) OKRs tries to get away from that by offering shorter life cycles. (5:27) So we’re always, kind of like Agile, we’re always in planning with Agile, and OKRs, we’re frequently setting objectives and key results.
(5:36) We’re frequently setting our goals. (5:39) In 2023 here, we want our teams not to be compliant with what management’s goals are. (5:45) We want our teams to be engaged, right?
(5:48) So OKRs are a way of really bringing everybody into the conversation.

Speaker 2
(5:55) Hey, Jason, a quick question. (5:57) Are you sharing slides, or are we just having a discussion to start? (6:01) I’m just discussion today.
(6:02) Perfect, thank you. (6:03) Thought it was just me. (6:04) Appreciate it, sorry about that, go ahead.

Speaker 1
(6:06) I’m going to go really easy on slides today, just so we can have a conversation. (6:10) With that said, if you have questions or comments along the way, please let me know. (6:15) Let’s have a conversation today.
(6:17) So that’s really the framework of what an OKR is. (6:22) It’s a quick, frequently set goal-setting technique. (6:26) You know, one of the things that I’ve been reading over the last couple of weeks is traditional goal-setting, when we’re doing that, can take up to three months from an organization, from a beginning of a fiscal year to when they’re ready to roll out their goals, can take up to three months of just planning and goal-setting before the team really understands what they’re doing.
(6:49) OKRs really helps to alleviate that by providing a much shorter duration. (6:58) So that said, where did OKRs come from? (7:03) Off the top of your heads, does anybody know where they originated?
(7:09) Quiz time. (7:10) We’re going to have another quiz at the end, too. (7:11) It’s going to be fun.
(7:13) Andy Grove at Intel. (7:15) Yeah, actually, that’s right. (7:17) There is a lot of understanding that John Doerr, who was a capital investment guy for Amazon, a venture capitalist over at Amazon and Google, that he introduced.
(7:33) But John actually learned about OKRs from Andy Grove while he was at Intel. (7:42) And then John took the nucleus of what an OKR is, the first iteration of it, started to expand upon it with metrics, putting numbers around things, and introduced that to Google over in 1999. (8:03) Google has attributed utilizing OKRs as the reason that they were able to grow so rapidly from, what, 90 people to 30,000, 40,000, whatever they have on staff today.
(8:17) So John Doerr, Measurement, What Matters? (8:20) We’ll talk about that book in a little while, but great book. (8:24) Well, Steve’s plugging it.
(8:27) It’s a great book because it really is the origin story of OKRs, but then there are some really neat case studies in there where you learn about how Bono and his organization are using OKRs, and some other folks have rolled them out, and anything from startups to more mature companies. (8:46) So when we think about OKRs and who’s using them right now, it’s really the best and the brightest of Silicon Valley. (8:53) We’ve got Walmart.
(8:54) We’ve got Amazon. (8:55) We’ve got Google’s, of course, Target. (8:59) I used to have Twitter on this list, but I don’t know what the heck Elon’s doing these days, so he’s kind of like rewriting all his own rules.
(9:06) So we’ll have to see what he’s doing down the road. (9:11) That said, I am going to share a screen and get started with some of the visuals here. (9:20) Can everybody see my screen?

Speaker 4
(9:26) Yes. (9:27) Yeah.

Speaker 1
(9:27) Got it. (9:28) Great. (9:33) Okay, so I was talking about being able to visualize this.
(9:38) About five years ago, I was working for a bank, and the head of the Agile COE came up to me and pretty much voluntold me to start introducing OKRs to the teams that I was working with.(9:51) I was very green on OKRs. (9:53) I didn’t know what they were, but here I was teaching them to others.
(10:00) So that presented its own challenge. (10:02) And as I was reading and familiarizing myself, I couldn’t really visualize how everything fit together until I started whiteboarding it out and saw how everything works together. (10:13) So I’m going to draw your attention to what I call the anatomy of an OKR.
(10:19) So the top section is the hub, and that’s our objective. (10:25) Our objective is a – it’s our goal. (10:31) The objective should be memorable.
(10:34) You know, it’s a memorable, qualitative description of what we want to be able to achieve.(10:40) Some of the attributes you might find in an objective are it should be something that’s memorable. (10:46) Okay?
(10:47) If we can’t memorize what it is, if we can’t state it succinctly in an elevator pitch, it just loses impact. (10:56) Objectives need to be short. (10:59) My rule of thumb is if it’s more than a sentence or two, you’re doing it wrong.
(11:05) An objective is not a dossier. (11:08) It’s not a paragraph. (11:09) It’s not a business case.
(11:11) It’s something for the team to really rally about or rally around, which brings us to it should be motivating. (11:18) It should be something that the team gets out of bed for. (11:24) OKRs are one of the things that we talk about.
(11:26) They should be ambitious. (11:28) All right? (11:28) And this, again, is why Google was so successful with OKRs because they were continuously building OKRs for things that they knew they couldn’t do yet, but they would get towards that goal if they were achieving their OKRs.
(11:45) It should be inspirational. (11:47) We want the team to really get out of bed, say this is what we’re doing. (11:54) This is our purpose.
(11:56) This is the value that we’re adding by working on this OKR. (12:00) And the other thing that we want to make sure they are is challenging but achievable. (12:05) OKRs are not the day-to-day work.
(12:08) I think Stacy or somebody in the description said that OKRs can start becoming task lists, right? (12:16) We don’t want that to happen. (12:18) When we’re doing an OKR, we want to have very few OKRs but be hyper attentive to them.
(12:28) So the general rule of thumb is that we want really between three and five OKRs to begin for our organization at any given time. (12:39) When I say that, I’m talking at two levels, and we’ll get into this a little bit later. (12:44) But that would be at the strategic level, right?
(12:48) Board of directors, the executives, all that sort of stuff. (12:51) And then at the same time, at the tactical level with our teams, they have their own OKRs that they are rallying behind. (13:00) My advice when you’re starting with new teams, start small.
(13:04) Don’t automatically assume that you need to have three to five. (13:08) That’s where you want to get to, right? (13:09) That’s your objective while you’re rolling these out is to be able to handle three to five OKRs at any time.
(13:16) But you know what? (13:17) Get good at doing one. (13:18) Get good at doing one first.
(13:20) Perfect your cadence. (13:22) Make it meaningful. (13:24) Adopt it.
(13:24) Make it part of your culture, right? (13:27) And then expand and iterate on that. (13:32) Quick question.
(13:33) Let me go into KQ Results, and then I’m going to ask something else. (13:36) So when we have our goal, we have our goals out there. (13:39) That’s great.
(13:39) That’s something that we’re going to do. (13:41) But everybody loves metrics, right? (13:44) Everybody wants to measure things.
(13:45) How many times as coaches or scrum masters or anybody that works in agility are you asked about where’s my metrics, where’s my metrics, where’s my metrics? (13:54) Metrics are built into OKRs, which is really cool. (13:59) And these are intended to be quantifiable metrics that show our progress towards achieving an objective, right?
(14:11) So we have a number, ideally, that we can look at that will tell us how close we are getting towards moving the needle and achieving the objective. (14:21) And at the end of the day, what are we focused on? (14:23) We’re focused on outcomes, right?
(14:24) Not keeping people busy anymore. (14:27) We want people to be outcome oriented. (14:29) So metrics can be gamed, as we all know, but if we actually have some sort of key result that is showing us progress towards our achieving our goal, we really have something to work with and to have a meaningful conversation around.
(14:46) There are three types of key results. (14:50) The first one is going to be metric-based.(14:52) That is one that has a number.
(14:56) There’s a saying out there that is if it doesn’t have a number, it’s not a key result. (15:03) However, sometimes you’re just beginning a project, you have an OKR that you’re setting up, and you need to set that baseline. (15:13) So in that case, we have a baseline type of OKR, which is to find what the number is that you’re going to measure against.
(15:20) And then finally, the third type of key result that we have is a milestone. (15:27) It’s either done or it’s not done. (15:29) Probably not making for the best key result, but they occur.
(15:34) What do you all think is the preferred way to do this? (15:36) Which of the three? (15:37) Metric-based, baseline, or milestone?
(15:39) What do we want to do with key results? (15:49) Any suggestions? (15:50) The type of key result that we want to have.
(15:54) It’s got to be metric-based. (15:56) We’re always looking for the number. (15:58) There you go.

Speaker 2
(15:59) It looks like Alex in the chat nailed it. (16:02) So good job, and so did Casey. (16:04) Nice work.
(16:05) Theresa’s on it. (16:06) Cool. (16:08) Perfect.
(16:09) Well done.

Speaker 1
(16:11) All right. (16:11) So if we look at this holistically, an OKR is typically written as I will, and then you state your objective. (16:19) And then as measured by, and then you state your three key results.
(16:26) So that’s called DORS formula. (16:28) And that’s a great way to get going out of the box is to use that. (16:33) So I will do something as measured by X, Y, and Z, right?
(16:38) And that gives me my OKR. (16:42) As I’m measuring my key results, if I set a target in order to achieve 10 subscriptions to a newspaper for the quarter, what’s my measure of success?(16:59) Any idea?
(17:00) What percentage would you think would be successful? (17:05) And Steve, let me know if anybody responds to that in the chat, please.

Speaker 2
(17:15) We have a guess at 50 or 60, couple people, 70 maybe.

Speaker 1
(17:20) Yeah, great, great. (17:24) We’re actually looking for 80%. (17:28) Any thoughts on why 80% is seen as a successful number as opposed to 100?

Speaker 7
(17:39) Can be the stretch goal.

Speaker 1
(17:41) Yeah, yeah, yeah. (17:43) Well, the idea with OKRs, as I said before, is we want people to be ambitious, right? (17:50) And if we are, I don’t know, if we have bonuses that are tied to OKRs, which you should not do, by the way, but if we have bonuses that are tied to OKRs, are people really going to be ambitious or are they going to be safe knowing that they have Johnny’s tuition on the line?
(18:08) If they don’t have their bonus, they’re going to set themselves up for success no matter what. (18:13) So we want to kind of decouple that thinking from the OKRs so that people are stretching, as you just said, and trying to be ambitious and not just playing it safe. (18:27) Okay, so let me pause there.
(18:29) So we’ve got the structure of an objective. (18:32) We’ve got a key result. (18:33) We’ve got the different types of key results.
(18:36) Is that all that clear at this point?

Speaker 6
(18:40) Okay. (18:42) Pardon me, Rupaul. (18:42) Could you say the three types of key results again?
(18:44) Metrics?

Speaker 1
(18:45) Yep. (18:47) Metric-based, baseline, and milestone, with the preferred one being the metric-based. (18:52) When we can get numbers around things, we actually have hard data points, right?
(18:58) Otherwise, you know, what happens when you have a milestone? (19:00) It’s done or it’s not done. (19:01) You get to the end of the quarter, sorry, it’s not done.
(19:03) I mean, that’s not the best way to do that. (19:05) But there is the need sometimes to dig in and find out what those numbers are going to be, and that’s when you use a baseline.

Speaker 6
(19:12) I’m sorry. (19:13) The difference between the baseline and the metric is?

Speaker 1
(19:18) The baseline would be your job is to find out what your metrics will be in the future. (19:24) Okay? (19:25) It’s to dig in and find what can I measure?
(19:29) You may be starting a project that doesn’t have any data points yet. (19:33) And therefore, your okay or your key result on that might be to find out what those data points are going to be that you’re going to measure in the future.

Speaker 2
(19:41) Ah, so like a research spike-ish kind of a, okay, I got it. (19:45) Okay, makes sense.

Speaker 1
(19:46) Thanks, Steve. (19:47) That helps.

Speaker 2
(19:47) Yep. (19:48) That helps.

Speaker 1
(19:49) Okay, so we’ve got our goals, which are objectives. (19:52) We’ve got our key results, which are our metrics and measurements for the goal. (19:57) But there’s another component that’s in here.
(20:00) If we have a goal and we have a way to measure the goal, we’re not doing anything yet.(20:08) And that brings in a kind of behind-the-scenes entity here, which is called an initiative.(20:15) Now, you can think of an initiative as a project.
(20:19) Okay? (20:20) As, I don’t know, an initiative we’re going to do as a project. (20:25) But it’s really the work that we’re hypothesizing that if we do this body of work, we will have some intended result.
(20:36) Right? (20:37) So we’re betting that if we do initiative X, Y, or Z, it will somehow impact that key result. (20:46) Is that clear?
(20:48) Yeah? (20:49) Okay. (20:49) Now, the thing about initiatives is sometimes we’re wrong, right?
(20:55) We’re not always right. (20:56) Sometimes we say we’re going to do this project because we think it’s going to do this. (21:00) And if we see that the key result isn’t moving, we need to take corrective action.
(21:06) Okay? (21:06) And that means sometimes canceling the initiative and the project because, again, we don’t want people busy. (21:13) We want people focused on delivering outcomes.
(21:17) So if we’re not moving and advancing towards our key results, we’re not delivering towards our objective, why are we doing the work anymore? (21:26) Let’s abandon it. (21:27) Let’s find something else that can be meaningful.
(21:31) And let’s take on some new projects and initiatives. (21:35) All right? (21:35) And then all the work that goes under the initiatives is just all the day-to-day work that we’re doing.
(21:39) So does that kind of paint a picture for you all about how an objective interacts with the key result interacts with an initiative?

Speaker 8
(21:50) Can you tell an example of an initiative? (21:53) Just a simple example.

Speaker 1
(21:55) I’m going to give you an opportunity. (21:58) We’re going to have a quiz towards the tail end of this talk. (22:05) And it’s got some super silly examples in there.
(22:07) But I believe that you will walk out of that quiz and you will have several examples of initiatives. (22:13) Is that okay, Trudi?

Speaker 8
(22:14) Sure. (22:14) Thank you very much. (22:15) Just want to make sure we have strong initiatives.

Speaker 1
(22:18) Yeah.

Speaker 7
(22:20) One question, Jason. (22:22) How to prevent or how to stop the leaders when they’re trying to create this key result as initiatives? (22:30) Like, you know, they’re just key results as my initiatives.
(22:32) You know, sometimes they transfer as a feature of the initiatives as a key result. (22:37) Like, you know, key result they are transferring. (22:39) That’s what the issue I’m seeing when I’m facilitating the OKR.
(22:44) Yeah.

Speaker 1
(22:45) You know, that’s a great question. (22:48) And what I would start asking is where’s the numbers? (22:52) How are we going to move the needle?
(22:54) How are we evaluating moving the needle? (22:57) And you can go ahead and take this anatomy of an OKR. (23:00) And I would highly, highly, highly suggest sitting down with the people that are doing OKRs in your organization and putting this up on a board and running through all of this.
(23:11) Because otherwise it’s so conceptual and it’s all based on things that we’re reading. (23:15) But if you actually see it, you can see how they all relate to one another. (23:18) I would take a step back and I would draw this out so they understand it.
(23:22) I cannot tell you the amount of people that I have had problems with before I actually started visualizing this. (23:33) So I will send you as a follow up. (23:36) Sherianne, if you just remind me, I’ll send out this anatomy of an OKR so everybody can take that as a gift of purchase here today.

Speaker 4
(23:43) Yeah. (23:44) Sorry to kind of like intrude here. (23:46) When I was doing this at one client, what I did is I often said, when I get done, what do I get?
(23:52) And the get is the key result. (23:54) The initiatives were the things I needed to do to get that.

Speaker 1
(23:58) Correct.

Speaker 4
(23:59) Yeah.

Speaker 1
(24:00) Those are all the, well said, they’re the projects, they’re the action items. (24:04) They’re the things that you think are going to have an impact on your delivering your goal. (24:11) But we’re not always right.
(24:12) Again, we’re not always right with that. (24:14) So something to think about. (24:17) All right.
(24:19) Other questions about the anatomy of an OKR? (24:21) All right. (24:27) Thank you.
(24:27) Thank you, everybody, for the questions and the feedback.

Speaker 5
(24:30) I have one more question. (24:32) So when defining it for the teams, if they are starting safe, so the OKRs have to be defined for each PI program increment?

Speaker 1
(24:47) We’re a little decoupled from that. (24:49) I suppose they could work in conjunction with one another. (24:53) I know certainly that SAFE has gotten rid of, Steve Klein, help me out here, they got rid of what themes are?

Speaker 2
(25:03) They just renamed strategic themes and then you can use OKRs for strategic themes.

Speaker 1
(25:08) So strategic themes are OKRs now. (25:10) So when you’re defining what you would have defined as your strategic themes, you’ll use OKRs instead. (25:21) Okay.
(25:23) So moving on from the anatomy of an OKR, there are different types of OKRs and they’re at different cadences. (25:28) There is one which is a strategic OKR. (25:33) Strategic OKR is usually set by management.
(25:38) It is something that would be of interest to a board of directors, let’s say, but it is something that is for the overarching good of the enterprise. (25:49) Typically when we’re doing strategic OKRs, our cadence is about a year. (25:53) We’re looking a year in advance at putting together an OKR.
(25:57) Now, at the team level, we need to align with that. (26:01) What we have is something called tactical OKRs. (26:04) The tactical OKRs are what are we going to do for the next quarter?
(26:10) What are we going to do in the short term? (26:11) That’s why we don’t want to have more than three to five of these things, because three months is not a lot of time in order to achieve something. (26:18) So your strategic OKRs are going to be much more lofty than your tactical OKRs.
(26:24) But the tactical OKRs are going to be more for the teams with boots on the ground to define. (26:31) So yearly and quarterly. (26:36) Now, the important thing is when we’re setting strategic and tactical OKRs, there needs to be a bidirectional alignment because at the end of the day, the value of OKRs is that they’re also an alignment tool.
(26:49) So if we understand the vision of our senior leadership, what they want to do for the year, that provides us with a whole lot of direction and a whole lot of conversation. (27:00) So we can say, OK, well, here’s what I’m going to do for this quarter in order to advance this yearly objective or multi-yearly objective. (27:09) So two levels of OKRs, strategic and tactical, and the other one is bidirectional alignment.
(27:16) There usually is a period of review where the strategic objectives are circulated, they’re made visible and transparent to the teams. (27:28) The teams then develop their quarterly OKRs, their tactical OKRs, and then there’s some back and forth. (27:33) Are we aligned?
(27:34) If I do this for this quarter, am I helping to deliver what you’re looking for from a strategic standpoint? (27:42) OK. (27:47) So a couple of benefits that I’ve seen of doing OKRs.
(27:52) We talked about rapid goal setting. (27:54) We’re doing goal setting rapidly at the annual enterprise, at the strategic level, and we’re doing it quarterly at the team level. (28:04) We’re doing it quick.
(28:05) We’re not trying it out. (28:06) We’re not making a bunch of meetings and conference calls and back and forth and PowerPoints and all that sort of stuff. (28:13) We’re getting in a room for a day, we’re getting aligned on them, and then we’re going to work.
(28:19) For those of us who have been through some of those goal setting exercises, they go on and on, and there’s a lot of follow up meetings and all of that. (28:26) We’re trying to get rid of some of that overhead so we can focus on delivering value and providing great outcomes. (28:35) So first reason for doing OKRs.
(28:39) Aligning work with the priorities that are out there. (28:43) Are we working on the right things, right? (28:45) That’s always a question.
(28:46) We’re all busy all the time. (28:47) But how do we know if we’re working on the right things? (28:50) If we have clear goals and we have aligned goals, chances are that we are going to be going the direction and making the progress we want to as a team.
(29:01) Now here’s the thing that I love about OKRs. (29:06) They also give me a way to prioritize and to say not now or why now. (29:14) And I can tell you with my current engagement, I’m just going to give you a quick story about how I started using OKRs at my current engagement.
(29:26) About a year and a half ago, I went into a room full of executives and they broke up into, I don’t know, six, seven teams. (29:32) And everybody was told, write down your current priorities, write down all your priorities. (29:37) And they did that.
(29:38) And each table had, I don’t know, 50 different items that they were working on. (29:42) And I started circulating throughout the tables and I said, OK, what’s priority number one on here?(29:51) Well, you know, let’s do some stack ranking on these and see what your priorities are.
(29:55) Answer was they’re all number one. (29:57) OK, well, that’s a little hard to work with, right?(30:00) If nothing is number two, everything’s number one.
(30:03) Your chances of making progress on any of this stuff is pretty unlikely. (30:08) So my next question to them is, what are your goals? (30:12) I figured if I could if they could give me clear goals, I can say, OK, well, which of these items here aligns to this goal?
(30:19) Instead, what I got was a big shrug. (30:22) We don’t know what the goals are now. (30:24) Their leadership, I know, had their own goals, but they weren’t being circulated.
(30:28) There was no bidirectional conversation about what the goals were. (30:33) And without that, it became very hard for the teams to say this is not a priority right now. (30:41) And my takeaway from that is if I could get these teams doing OKRs, then they have their goals front and center.
(30:48) And any of these 50 items that don’t fall into one of these OKRs, we need to have a conversation about if it’s really important to the organization. (30:59) If I don’t have an OKR that this fits into, is this just extra work that I’m doing because somebody is yelling loud or is there some sort of strategy behind it? (31:10) So that’s how I got involved with rolling out OKRs.
(31:13) And it’s been really successful and a lot of fun. (31:17) But I think, you know, the nicest thing is for my teams, they feel empowered to be able to say not right now and not to have the weight of the world crushing them because they know what’s a priority and what’s not based on their quarterly OKRs. (31:32) Does that make sense?
(31:36) OK. (31:38) Moving on, the cadence for OKRs. (31:42) OKRs are traditionally at the executive level.
(31:45) Those should be set annually. (31:48) But let’s talk a little bit more about where you’re probably going to start, which is with the teams. (31:53) And those are quarterly.
(31:54) What I recommend is for teams to get together about six weeks in advance. (31:59) OK.(32:00) Have their leadership provide the strategic OKRs.
(32:05) And then six weeks in advance, have the teams get together and start talking about their tactical OKRs six weeks before the quarter starts. (32:16) That gives us ample opportunity not only to write some great OKRs and revise them and get them super detailed, but to also have that conversation about does this support what we’re trying to do as an enterprise? (32:28) Does this support what the board of directors is intending to see from strategic OKRs?
(32:34) Once that happens, we start doing the OKR within the quarter. (32:39) And then this is something I do get pushed back about, but every week the OKR should be discussed. (32:45) Now, one of the things that Dor talks about in his book is that they made their OKRs super visible.
(32:53) You can do this by hanging it up in a common area, putting it on a mural that you’re using.(32:58) But the point is you want to be talking about it all the time. (33:01) I think what Dor said is actually when they were over at Intel or something, they hung the OKRs up in the restroom so that there was no way that nobody was going to see it.
(33:09) Everybody’s going to see that at least once a day, I would imagine. (33:13) I don’t know if we need to go to those extremes, but find some creative ways in order to provide visibility and transparency about the OKRs. (33:24) So weekly quick conversation, not a big PowerPoint, just a how’s it going?
(33:29) Are we on track? (33:30) Have we moved the KR at all? (33:32) Real quick conversation.
(33:34) That may be a little bit more formal, the OKR review midway through the quarter. (33:41) So there are no surprises and we can pivot and we can call on other teams. (33:47) We have dependencies that are out there that aren’t coming through for us.
(33:50) We can have that discussion, but that’s really going to help us to ensure at the end of the quarter that we’ve delivered hopefully what we want. (33:57) Now, the first team that I worked with, and this is another learning exercise, first team that I worked with on OKRs, we wrote a bunch of OKRs. (34:08) We got in a room, we agreed to them, and that was it until the next quarter.
(34:15) What do you think happened at the beginning of the next quarter or the end of the quarter?

Speaker 5
(34:22) They didn’t make the key results.

Speaker 1
(34:25) They didn’t do it. (34:27) They didn’t pivot. (34:27) They weren’t responsive to change.
(34:29) They weren’t responsive to change while still achieving their goals, all that sort of stuff because it wasn’t right in front of them. (34:36) It wasn’t part of the daily conversation. (34:38) It wasn’t used to describe the work that they were going to be doing.
(34:44) So without having that cadence and that rigor and the discipline around looking at the OKRs, making them part of the conversation, checking in with one another, they’re unlikely to be successful. (34:58) You might succeed. (34:59) I don’t know.
(34:59) Maybe everybody’s just super entrepreneurial on the team. (35:02) But in most cases, I think that’s pretty tough. (35:08) Okay, I’m ready to move on to the next topic if there are no more questions about cadence.
(35:14) If there are, let me know.

Speaker 5
(35:18) I have a question to the previous in meeting the key results. (35:24) So basically, if it’s metric driven, maybe halfway through, we should know that 50% was met or something like that.(35:35) That signals the team they’re on the right path.

Speaker 1
(35:40) Yeah, Ramya, great point. (35:42) You want to see movement there. (35:43) If I don’t see movement week over week over week, something is not wrong.
(35:48) I probably need to revisit my initiative, right? (35:50) I need to revisit people are busy doing stuff. (35:53) But if we’re not moving that key result, we’re not seeing any progress.
(35:58) And maybe it’s not exactly half. (36:00) It’s not apples to apples. (36:02) But there should be some progress that I’m seeing all throughout the quarter.
(36:07) And if I’m not seeing that progress, something’s not working. (36:10) We need to have a conversation about that.

Speaker 5
(36:13) Thank you.

Speaker 1
(36:14) Sure, sure. (36:19) Okay. (36:20) So OKRs versus KPI.
(36:22) Current engagement that I have, when I walked in, we started talking about OKRs. (36:31) People were using OKRs and KPIs, key performance indicators, right? (36:35) We have objectives and key results and the key performance indicators.
(36:39) People were using those two phrases completely interchangeably. (36:45) They’re not interchangeable. (36:47) When you have a KPI, it is telling you how something is performing.
(36:54) Okay? (36:54) If something is not performing, it may warrant the creation of an OKR to change something. (37:03) But an OKR and a KPI are not the same thing.
(37:06) And I’m going to make this real simple example. (37:13) So let’s say I’m a baker. (37:14) And I need to bake – I need to sell 100 baked goods in a week in order to achieve my budget and all that sort of stuff.
(37:27) And I see – so my KPI is 100, is one of my top, and I’m only delivering 50 for some reason.(37:34) Right? (37:35) So I might create – in order to get back to selling 100 baked goods, I might create an OKR that says, okay, I’m going to add wedding cakes into my portfolio of baked goods, and I’m going to sell 10 of those a week.
(37:50) And I’m going to add cookies, and I’m going to sell 20 of those. (37:53) But those are things that I’m doing. (37:54) Now I have an OKR, and I believe that by doing this OKR, I can get that KPI back on track.
(38:00) So they’re complementary for one another, but they are not interchangeable. (38:05) Does that make sense? (38:06) Because it is going to come up as you’re having this conversation with folks.

Speaker 4
(38:16) I just – I kind of want to throw something in here, and I’m sorry I got here late because I was in another meeting. (38:22) Did you discuss leading and lagging indicators? (38:25) Because that can sometimes help you with this kind of thing.
(38:28) Or is that not a topic you’re covering?

Speaker 1
(38:31) I’m not covering leading indicators, no. (38:32) Just KPI, because it gets blurred so much.

Speaker 4
(38:35) It gets blurred, yeah. (38:36) Okay, no, that’s fine.

Speaker 1
(38:38) Okay, thanks. (38:38) Yeah, and it’s just something I’ve seen over and over as a pattern.(38:41) I’m like, this is just not one client or one person that is doing this.
(38:45) Many people were doing this in an area that was at, so I felt it was necessary to call out.(38:51) Okay.

Speaker 6
(38:53) Well, the results, this could be KPIs. (38:58) Could be.

Speaker 1
(39:02) Results could be. (39:03) Changes to KPIs.

Speaker 2
(39:06) So talk more about that, Michael. (39:08) What are you seeing or what are you thinking about?

Speaker 6
(39:11) Well, you could make them, because KPIs could be more of a milestone. (39:19) They could be milestones in the case they fit in here as key results, wouldn’t they?

Speaker 1
(39:25) I think a key result might be, the key result might be the milestone. (39:33) Am I achieving a milestone? (39:34) Right.
(39:35) Could that be a KPI? (39:38) Is what I’m saying.

Speaker 6
(39:40) Say again, sorry. (39:41) Couldn’t that be a KPI?

Speaker 2
(39:45) I’ll have to give that some thought. (39:47) Okay. (39:47) Yeah, I’m thinking about that one too.
(39:49) Yeah, that’s a good question, Michael. (39:51) All right, I took a note, Jason.

Speaker 1
(39:52) Yeah, I just usually see key performance indicators. (39:56) Am I on track, or do I have problems that need to be addressed? (40:00) All right.
(40:07) Okay. (40:08) So great questions. (40:10) Tips for writing great OKRs that I would like to get into with you.
(40:15) Number one, keep them short. (40:17) You should be able to give an elevator pitch to somebody about what your objectives are. (40:23) People should have them memorized, right?
(40:25) That’s why we’re not doing 10 of them. (40:26) We’re doing two, three, starting with one.(40:29) If you have to pause to communicate your OKR, again, you’re not doing it right.
(40:34) Make sure your objectives are not boring. (40:36) They can be informal. (40:37) They should be fun.
(40:39) However they fit into your culture. (40:41) I mean, the point is we want to be able to look at these things. (40:43) We want to be able to use them in rallying around the goals.
(40:46) We want our employees to know what our goals are. (40:49) I’m always baffled by how many people that don’t know, like the room I told you about, how many people don’t know what goals are. (40:55) Keep your key results from becoming tasks.
(41:00) They should measure the progress towards our goals. (41:03) It’s not a laundry list of everything that we’re going to do. (41:06) Those belong in subtasks under initiatives and, I don’t know, your ADO board or something like that.
(41:14) Only establish a few key results for each objective. (41:17) So you only want about two to three key results for every objective, for total objectives that you want to take on at any time, you know, really two to three. (41:28) And practice.
(41:30) Nobody is great at this to get going. (41:32) If you are struggling with this out of the gate when you’re first rolling out OKRs and when you’re first teaching this to your teams, completely normal. (41:43) If you go back to, you know, I’m assuming everybody here has written user stories in one form or another.
(41:49) That was difficult when we first started doing it, right? (41:51) It wasn’t intuitive. (41:52) It was a different way of capturing requirements and all of that.
(41:55) And it is the same thing for objectives and key results. (42:00) The area that people are going to get hung up on and what’s going to be really tough, just anticipate this, is in coming up with your metrics for your key results. (42:10) Getting numbers and getting data points.
(42:13) Those are not always at the surface for your teams. (42:17) And they may have to do some digging in order to come up with data points for themselves to use. (42:25) And it may be a little painful.
(42:28) It may be a little painful. (42:29) But if it is and they’re struggling with it, you probably are doing it right, because you’re starting to overturn stones that have not been looked at before.(42:39) So just keep practicing.
(42:41) It will get easier and easier. (42:43) A couple of reasons that I see OKRs and implementations fail. (42:49) Teams set them and forget them.
(42:51) They lack cadence. (42:53) They lack discipline, rigor. (42:56) And without those things, they don’t have any visibility.
(42:59) If these things aren’t visible, your OKRs are not going to be effective. (43:02) They need to be a discussion and a discussion with a frequent cadence and review and conversation. (43:10) Another reason they fail.
(43:11) There’s lack of engagement and alignment with leadership. (43:15) This is a big one. (43:17) I see a lot of teams that they say, okay, we’re going to do OKRs.
(43:22) Great. (43:23) What are the enterprise OKRs? (43:25) Well, they don’t want to do this right now, blah, blah, blah.
(43:28) That’s going to be a struggle, because OKRs really are most effective when they’re used for alignment. (43:35) So if you don’t have engagement from leadership, you know, it’s almost like doing a transformation, an agile transformation, if that whole leadership level isn’t involved with the conversation and they’re not supporting it, there’s only so much success you can have.(43:50) You know, you kind of like doing agile rather than being agile.
(43:53) Same thing with OKRs. (43:54) You’re doing OKRs rather than living OKRs. (43:57) So something to watch out for.

Speaker 2
(43:58) Hey, Jason, along those lines, there’s a question in the chat about how do you tie your OKRs at the highest level to the team level or vice versa.

Speaker 1
(44:06) Yeah, that’s a great question. (44:11) A common approach is to look at the strategic level OKRs, and then the team will look at a specific key result, and then they will create a tactical OKR that has an impact on the strategic key result.

Speaker 2
(44:28) Ah, gotcha.

Speaker 1
(44:30) One strategic yearly annual board of directors OKR has key results. (44:36) And then the teams that roll up to that, they have OKRs that make an impact on that key result.

Speaker 2
(44:43) Gotcha. (44:43) Cool. (44:44) Thank you.
(44:45) If people need more info about that specifically, and they want to dig in more because we’re getting short on time, any thoughts on that?

Speaker 1
(44:56) Yeah, let me finish up my final bullet point. (45:03) The final bullet point I want to talk about is the third reason I think that OKR implementation fails is ad hoc implementation. (45:12) And this is a big one where the teams just decide we’re going to do it.
(45:17) In Agile, we have established frameworks, right? (45:19) We have Scrum, we have Kanban, we have SAIT, all that sort of stuff. (45:26) But OKRs until fairly recently have been pretty ad hoc.
(45:32) I would recommend starting to follow a framework. (45:35) Now, there is a great framework that is being socialized a lot right now that is called Scaled OKRs. (45:41) And rather than just saying, here’s how you write an objective, here’s how you write a key result, there is a whole blueprint and roadmap about who do you have to get on board?
(45:52) What are the cadences for just getting set up? (45:54) What do you have to do to run a sprint zero, so to speak, for your OKRs? (45:58) But there’s really a roadmap about what an implementation looks like.
(46:03) And it’s got cadence around it. (46:05) It’s got discipline around it. (46:06) It’s got rigor.
(46:07) It’s got all those good things. (46:09) When I first rolled out OKRs the very first time, it was super ad hoc. (46:14) There was no framework.
(46:16) I discovered this with others, discovered this Scaled OKRs. (46:21) And it’s a game changer, I think. (46:23) So I would recommend taking a look at that.
(46:25) And if this is the 101 course, then that’s the 201 course. (46:31) And that’s where you really get deep into this stuff. (46:36) We are running out of time.
(46:37) So I’m going to bypass the quiz game. (46:41) Let’s see if we can roll through it quick.(46:43) Let’s see.
(46:45) Can you all still see my screen? (46:50) Steve, how are we doing on time?

Speaker 2
(46:51) Do we want to take a look at some examples really quick? (46:53) Yeah, absolutely. (46:54) OK.
(46:54) And maybe just a few, and then we can open it up for questions.

Speaker 1
(46:58) Yeah, we’ll just do it. (46:59) OK, so this is a quiz. (47:01) Just shout out if you think it’s an objective, key result, or initiative.
(47:04) First one, increased weekly person visit to Jason’s Bakery from two to four times. (47:11) Initiative, key result, or objective?

Speaker 5
(47:15) Key result.

Speaker 3
(47:16) There had to be a key result.

Speaker 1
(47:17) Key result. (47:18) The numbers are right. (47:19) I’ve got it very clear.
(47:20) Here’s where I’m starting, and here’s where I want to go. (47:22) Improved customer engagement with Jason’s Bakery.

Speaker 4
(47:26) It’s an objective. (47:27) Objective. (47:28) It’s an objective.

Speaker 1
(47:29) Create an advertising campaign.you

Speaker 4
(47:31) Initiative.

Speaker 1
(47:32) Initiative. (47:33) You got it. (47:34) Perfect.
(47:35) Trick question. (47:36) Yeah, we’ve got some other fun ones in here, but I’ll just send those out, and you can play with them. (47:40) So that is it for right now.
(47:45) I would like to let you know for continuing education, I recommend three readings, the first one being Beginner’s Guide to OKRs by Philippe Castro. (47:53) Totally free. (47:54) There’s a PDF out there.
(47:56) Measure What Matters, the book that Steve held up by John Doerr, Godfather of OKRs.(48:02) And then the Scaled OKR Fieldbook is the third one. (48:09) All great reading.
(48:11) Start with the Beginner’s Guide to OKRs. (48:14) Get your feet wet with that before moving on to some of the other stuff, but I think they’re all great resources to put in your toolkit. (48:20) I’ll open it up to questions.

Speaker 2
(48:22) Awesome. (48:22) Thank you, Jason. (48:23) Appreciate that.
(48:24) And Jason did say that he’s available to hang around for a few minutes after, since we’re short on time. (48:30) But go ahead. (48:31) Feel free to ask your questions.

Speaker 4
(48:34) What was that second book?

Speaker 1
(48:36) Second book was the Beginner’s Guide to OKRs. (48:41) So measure what matters.

Speaker 4
(48:42) The other two then?

Speaker 1
(48:44) OKR Fieldbook and Measure What Matters. (48:52) OKR Fieldbook, Field Guide. (48:56) Great book.
(48:57) And the thing I love about that book is it really shows you what a journey looks like from soup to nuts when it’s implemented with some real thoughtfulness. (49:07) Awesome.

Speaker 2
(49:08) Alex, question.

Speaker 3
(49:12) So this one, let me know if this is too nuanced, but I’m a senior PGM for a series of security teams. (49:19) And one of the challenges we run into is security teams are highly impact. (49:26) Like, let’s say there’s an emergent issue or security incident.
(49:30) It ends up cratering our backlog and our committed work. (49:35) So it’s always sort of looming there. (49:37) And then the other sort of facet of that is the team does a lot of repeated routine business-as-usual tasks to keep sort of the system running.
(49:47) And so we always get into this scenario where it’s like, well, we have to think about the feature or, you know, delivering a new function, but then it could easily get demolished if something happens or if we need to investigate something. (50:02) Do you have any tips or philosophies for teams that are operational in nature or highly impact emergent work? (50:13) Yeah.

Speaker 1
(50:14) Yeah, I do. (50:15) It seems really close to some of my experiences over the last couple of years. (50:21) Number one, business-as-usual, we need to keep the lights on, should not be an OKR.
(50:25) Remember that OKR, we want ambitious items in there. (50:28) These are things that are going to move the needle for our business. (50:31) And that work is super important.
(50:33) It needs to be done, but don’t create OKRs around there. (50:36) The other thing, and here’s what I love about it. (50:39) I work in the energy business.
(50:40) When the whole thing in Ukraine happened, that changed everything. (50:44) That changed our whole strategy for like the next couple of years. (50:48) But that’s the great thing about OKRs is you’re revisiting them quarterly at the latest in order to say, how do we pivot to current market conditions or to what’s happening right now?

Speaker 4
(51:04) I don’t know. (51:05) Can I add something there? (51:07) I would also like, don’t make them too ambitious.
(51:11) There’s a huge amount of stuff you knew was going to come and whack you over the head, right? (51:18) Don’t make something realistic. (51:20) Set your capacity.

Speaker 1
(51:23) Yeah, we’re not trying to set people up for failure. (51:26) We want these to be achievable.(51:29) It’s not a good OKR if it’s not something that’s actually achievable.
(51:32) We don’t want to set people up to fail. (51:34) We want them to be able to achieve. (51:36) Difficult is OK.
(51:37) Difficult is OK. (51:38) That’s what keeps people inspired, engaged, and all of that. (51:40) But it should be achievable.
(51:45) Good feedback.

Speaker 2
(51:47) Thank you. (51:47) Other questions? (51:55) All right.
(51:56) Well, thank you very much. (51:57) This was great, Jason. (51:59) Thanks much for walking us through it.
(52:01) I know that it’s one of those places that I want to carve out the time to really go deeper and broader in since we’re hearing it a lot out there in industry. (52:12) And so if you have additional questions, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. (52:17) For the regulars that are here, you know how to get a hold of us.
(52:20) Sherry Ann is always available. (52:23) And Sherry, anything in closing?

Speaker 3
(52:27) I think we’re good. (52:28) Thanks for joining, everyone. (52:29) Thank you, Jason.

Speaker 2
(52:30) Thanks for having me. (52:32) Take care, everyone. (52:33) Have a great day.