Understanding OKRs

(Photo Credit - Lisa Meece; Thank You)

During last week’s offsite, my boss let us know that he wanted to go down the OKR rabbit hole in 2020. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results and is a management philosophy promoted by John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins who most famously got it internalized by Google with great success. According to Wikipedia:

Objectives and key results is a framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. OKRs comprise an objective—a clearly defined goal—and one or more key results—specific measures used to track the achievement of that goal. The goal of OKR is to define how to achieve objectives through concrete, specific and measurable actions. Key results can be measured on a 0-100% scale or any numerical unit (e.g. dollar amount, %, items, etc.). Objectives should also be supported by initiatives, which are the plans and activities that help to achieve the objective and move forward the key results.

Although the core idea of OKRs is that you have both Objectives and Key Results and that seems obvious, I’ve always found that examples give things clarity. So here are some examples:

Objective:

• Research and improve customer satisfaction

Key Results:

• Exceed Net Promoter Score (NPS) of over 8.0
• Get 1000 survey responses to annual satisfaction survey
• Conduct 50 phone interviews with top customers

Objective:

• Improve internal employee engagement

Key Results:

• Conduct 3 monthly “Fun Friday” all-hands meetings with motivational speakers
• Implement tracking system in 3 different teams
• Reach weekly employee satisfaction score of at least 4.7 points

Objective:

• Finish raising new capital for our growth needs

Key Results:

• E-mail and phone outreach to 100 VCs and seed funds
• Get at least 30 second contact meetings or conference calls
• Solicit at least 3 term sheets of our minimum required terms

Objective:

• Simplify & clarify our product, messaging, presentation of things we do

Key Results:

• 25 on-site user-testing sessions to understand key product misunderstandings
• 10 tests of our recent infographics and slide decks for customer understanding
• Get 1000 answers to an online user survey sent to all last quarter’s signups

Objective:

• Grow Our Corporate Global Business

Key Results:

• Hit company global sales target of $100 Million in Sales
• Achieve 100% year-to-year sales growth in the EMEA geography
• Increase the company average deal size by 30% with upsells

My thanks to the Steer blog which published these examples.