As you know OKR stands for Objective and Key Results.
Objectives inspire purpose — they provide direction. Key Results make the Objective specific and quantifiable.
I often say that in the anatomy of an OKR, Objectives are the heart and Key Results the brain.
As such, Key Results are fact driven and tend to be connected to metrics,
which makes coming up with good Key Results a bit challenging at times.
The two main challenges I've seen are:
1. Not having tracking in place, and 2. Having lagged metrics.
This means you'll see the results further down the line and not by the end of the quarter.
This is incredibly common in Product teams, for example.
If you're struggling because you don't have tracking in place, ask yourself: is this something I should be tracking?
or, is it more of a one-off metric?
If it's the latter and setting up tracking is not worth the time investment, don't use it.
You'll end up abandoning your OKRs.
If you have an OKR with lagged metrics reduce the scope and think, what are the main outcomes I need to have by the end of the quarter.
Let me give you an example: one of the OKRs for the success team at Perdoo was to build a solid foundation for customer success.
This was especially important because our processes were not documented,
which of course impacted our ability to scale.
But also because we were missing key information to monitor the success of our customers.
Building processes and documentation was something that would no doubt improve our efficiency.
But, 1. It was difficult to measure because we didn't have the tracking in place,
and 2. The results were going to be visible further ahead.
So instead we asked ourselves, okay so what are the immediate outcomes here? How do we know this is something that we need to fix?
The answer was simple, the team constantly felt that they were looking inside a black box.
They had no clarity and no direction as to how to do their everyday job.
So the Key Results sounded a little bit like the following: 1. The teams feel they have all the tools and frameworks to do a good job
and 2. the team feels they have a good overview of each client and know what to do next.
Now to balance it out we added a Key Result that helped us validate the quality of our documentation externally.
So we created this third Key Result: our CTO is able to onboard a client without asking more than five questions.
Our immediate outcome was feedback.
We first detected this was a problem because the team was complaining about not having clarity.
So, we would know this was fixed if the feedback changed positively.
It's also important to mention that for this specific OKR, Key Results started progressing further into the quarter
because we first needed to do all the groundwork.
This meant that progress was mainly happening at Initiative level, which made it crucial to keep them updated and recognized when achieved.
In Perdoo we're strong advocates of metric Key Results, but we've also learned that sometimes outcomes are more qualitative.
This is absolutely fine as long as it's an indicator of success.
My only recommendation is that you're careful and keep it balanced.
You don't want to end up with a bunch of Initiatives as Key Results, so make sure that your Key Results still represent an outcome.