Source: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/mtp-panel-defining-your-okrs-in-2022/

OKRs: the essence of what we do, building metrics, achieving outcomes.

What are the foundational steps of building good OKRs?

Prerequisite: psychological safety and a real vision: where are we going? Understanding where you are as an organisation helps. The organisation needs to be comfortable with metrics.

The reason we are doing OKRs is alignment: we want to work towards the same goal and everyone needs to have the same expectations.

Questions

• How does the organisation needs to evolve to move to OKRs?
• What does the organisation want to achieve with OKRs?
• Do we want to deploy OKRs on team, organisation, or company level?
• What is the outcome (goal) we want to achieve? (moving from output to outcome)
• Ask the why: really understand what is going on. If this idea works, which numbers will move? Then widen the solution space on the moving numbers.
• You can set OKRs to start measuring outcomes.
• What does success look like?
• What lever are you using for prioritisation? How do you chose the objective with the highest impact?
• Who do you involve in crafting OKRs?

Objectives

Use SMART: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevance, Time-bound. Focus on outcomes over outputs. Focus on positive change.

If you’re spending less than 50% of your time on achieving the objectives then you should ask what the goal of using OKR is? If you didn’t work on the objective, it might not be the most important objective to achieve. Does the priority fit?

Key results

Here is what I want to do to achieve this objective.