Thank you.
Here it is.
Here is the controversial shirt!
Hello, everyone!
Wow!
What a crowd.
My name is Whitney, as mentioned.
I'm an engineering manager at Braintree, which is a payments company.
We're based in Chicago, Illinois?
How many know Chicago, been to Chicago?
Love Chicago.
Fantastic!
I manage a team of engineers and a product designer there, and we do really great stuff,
and we too are trying OKRs so I want to dive into the talk.
I want to take you back a little bit to 1999.
A guy named John Doerr brought a goal-setting methodology to a then one-year-old company
called Google, and he called this goal-setting methodology OKRs.
Fast-forward, four years later, Google publishes a very famous video on YouTube - some of you
may have seen it - called "how Google sets goals - OKRs".
And then, at some point, after this was evangelised by Google, a lot of the companies that we
know and love, or loved to hate, adopted OKRs in some form or another.
So it was spread to the masses.
But I want to talk to you today about a few things that make the adoption of OKRs quite
challenging for our teams - I saw a lot of hands go up with Meri was referencing OKRs
and who has had trouble with them and struggled with them - but I didn't get a clear pulse
check because I wasn't standing on the stage.
Who here is familiar with OKRs?
Crazy.
Okay.
Good!
So for the uninitiated, there were a few hands not raised, maybe three or so, objectives
and key results, so OKRs are an acronym standing for objectives and key results.
Quite simply, they're a goal-setting system that enable teams to align on a shared vision,
and they allow teams to track and quantify the progress of their work.
That's it.
It's a goal-setting system.
Pretty straightforward.
This is what it typically looks like.
OKRs are a powerful tool.
I use them on my previous teams, and used them with my team at Braintree, and this is
the model here.
We will achieve some objective or goal as measured by some metric or key result.
This looks familiar, yes?
Here's an example for those unfamiliar: we build websites on my team, a front-end team
at Braintree, so accessibility is important for us.
This is what a typical OKR will look like for us: we will improve accessibility on our
sites as measured by 5 per cent WCAG compliance, the web accessibility guidelines.
If we have a 75 per cent WCAG compliance, we know we've achieved.
For this talk, it's three brief but key strategies that I encourage you to adopt when you are
introducing OKRs on your team or to your organisation, or trying to get them adopted more broadly,
or accepted by people who just hate OKRs, okay?
It's becoming a dirty word that most people don't like to hear any more, because that's
when we introduce them to our teams, typically we are jumping in at the point that Google
introduces in that video, we are jumping with reference to blogs and articles that assume
we already know how to do this well, but I, like most of you, did not know how to do this
well.
So, again, going back to my example, we will improve accessibility as measured by 75 per
cent WCAG compliance.
Simple, right?
No, it was not simple.
It took us so long to get to that point.
Let's talk about tips at strategies to get us there faster.
Strategy number one: skip individual OKRs.
What does this mean?
It means trying tasks instead.
So typically, when you see an OKR structure within a company, you have the company-level
objectives, those trickle down to team organisational level objectives which trickle down to the
individual's OKRs.
Individual OKRs are a bit like corporate meetings.
They slow us down, and they don't give a lot of added value.
They also at the end to neglect the bigger picture and focus instead on the individual's
personal development.
So I am not sure here to tell you that we got this all wrong.
Individual OKRs quickly turn into tasks, or micro management, right, where we are monitoring
the individual's key results, and less focus on the live net.
How do we improve that?
We don't.
We just ditch them completely.
I kind of heard a collective sigh of relief!
We instead want to move from a team level of OKRs to tasks, initiatives, projects.
Let's get straight to the work.
If your team is anything like mine, they're going to love you when you introduce this,
right?
They want to get the work done.
They want to do great work.
They don't want to focus on another acronym or process they have to adopt for themselves.
So, we don't improve individual OKRs, we get rid of them completely, right?
That's bold idea number one.
Skip individual OKRs.
Let's try tasks instead.
Empowering your employees with priorities at the team level and leaving them to figure
out what it takes to get that done.
Second strategy, and perhaps the most controversial, so my T-shirt isn't the only controversial
things on this stage.
I'm going to stand up here in front of you and I'm going to tell you to ignore the numbers.
All right!
Yes, there's a clap!
Okay!
So this is especially when you're first introducing your team or organisations to OKRs, right?
It's a new process.
Everyone hasn't been fully, they're not bought in yet.
You want to ignore the metrics.
You will read a lot of blog posts in a lot of articles that say, okay, try OKRs.
Set your key results to be ambitious.
Stretch goals, right?
When my team was adopting OKRs, we ran into two significant problems: one, a lot of what
we thought mattered was not actually being measured, so we spent half the quarter establishing
the baseline before we could even get to that arbitrary key result, and then, two, most
of our key results that we set up for ourselves at the beginning of the quarter were what
we call SWAGs.
Do we know what it is?
A sophisticated wild-assed guess.
That I think is 100 per cent of the key results that we set for ourselves at the beginning
of a quarter when we are trying this for the first time, right?
It's just a guess, right?
Let's decrease our time to deploy by 20 per cent.
Is that reasonable?
Is that feasible.
Achievable?
Is that good?
What about 30 per cent?
That's better.
Right?
But are we stretching ourselves?
Nobody knew.
So we spent half the quarter setting the baseline, hitting the stretched arbitrary goals.
So, I want to step away from the metrics, and just focus on the outcomes.
When you're introducing OKRs, again, referring to that earlier example, where we wanted to
achieve I said 75 WCAG compliance, instead, when you're starting, it's simple to say we
will improve accessibility as measured by WCAG compliance.
When we are more compliant with WCAG we will have improved our accessibility.
By how much, we don't know yet.
Let's figure that out.
When starting, don't worry about the numbers, 50 per cent, 70, whatever.
They're made up.
Again, it's a controversial piece of information and I challenge you to come and debate me
in the office hours after this talk.
I will tell you to step away from the metrics and find key results that look more like this,
just general outcomes.
Then after you get some traction, maybe the next quarter in, a couple of quarters in,
you've seen what your team can do and how they can perform, then you can set some stretch
goals, re-evaluate your key results and add in numbers.
First time round, let's skip those and give general outcomes.
Ignore the metrics, focus on the outcomes.
Tip number 2.
Third, somewhat controversial, not so much, if you don't take anything else away from
this talk, take away this third strategy, third tip, and that is to avoid cascading
goals.
But "But Whitney, shouldn't our goals align with those of the company, be on track to
match whatever our company wants to achieve?"
No!
Just kidding, yes!
People kind of laughed, but, you should absolutely want to I a chief what your company wants
to achieve at the business level, but here's what I mean: that earlier chart that showed
the company objectives trickling down to the team objective trickling down to the individual,
cascading flow, right, we don't want our goals to cascade that way.
The problem with cascading, our goals starting at the top trickling down to our employees,
set by well which VP of Google operations, having goals improves performance, spending
hours cascading goals up and down company, however, does not.
It takes way too much time and it's too hard to make sure the goals line up.
So cascading goals are a huge time suck, but even worse than that, they stifle innovation.
Harvard Business Review found - not some, but most of the best ideas are not invested
in that large companies because field line employees don't value their ideas.
While OKRs are a goal-setting and alignment tool, they can also encourage employees to
set the objectives for the team, and set their own direction for the team.
That's an empowering idea.
This surface is the best idea.
Remember that accessibility example I keep referencing?
Someone on my team came up with that after the introduction of OKRs.
They said we're a team that should care about accessibility.
This should be an objective that we are going after.
So surface those ideas from your employees and adopt this more bottoms-up approach, right?
A top-down management approach deserves top-down OKRs in this consist indicating of goals,
but if you want to truly spark innovation and make sure those best ideas are surfaced
to the top level of the company, make sure your employees are empowered and understand
how they can contribute by setting local OKRs at the team level.
To recap, when introducing OKRs to your teams, try tasks over individual outcomes, or individual
OKRs to ensure alignment over micromanagement.
Focus on the outcomes and not necessarily the numbers, especially at the start when
you're trying them for the first time.
And take a bottoms-up approach to setting goals with your teams to make sure the best
ideas rise to the top and are truly prioritised by the organisation.
Again, I love OKRs.
I live, breathe them.
So you can reach out to me on Twitter if you want to talk some more and dive into more
strategies, or meet me in the office hours directly after this talk and we can chat about
it some more.
Thanks so much for the time.