OKRs are a simple, incredibly effective approach for setting, monitoring, and achieving your goals. But they are commonly misunderstood. How to start? Six proven tips: 1. Empower your teams OKRs work only with a culture of empowerment. In companies with a dysfunctional organizational culture, OKRs will become a tool to impose control over employees. 2. Set vision and strategy Before defining your first OKR, set a vision and strategy. While the vision provides a long-term "Why," the OKR motivates and guides a team in the shorter term, defining: - Why it's important. - What we want to achieve. - How we will know we succeeded. 3. Start with just one team First, get one "pilot" team to try OKRs before the whole company jumps in. Ensure it's cross-functional and can reach its goals without relying on others. After a few months, celebrate what they've achieved. This will get other teams excited about OKRs. 4. Select just one OKR Start with a single OKR for the entire company. This simplifies the implementation and allows you to identify teams that need more coaching. 5. Reverse-engineer the outputs For example, if you're adding a new search feature, think backward. Ask yourself: What’s the goal of this initiative? How would we measure that we succeeded? What are the expected outcomes? This helps you turn the task into an OKR and make data-informed decisions. 6. Learn and improve Don't expect to figure out everything from the start. Test ideas, learn from them, and get better over time. --- Based on Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke: https://lnkd.in/eMe-SFfN This is a must-read for any PM. --- Hope that helps. What are your thoughts? --- P.S. Enjoy this? In the free part of my full post (1,351 words), I described: - Two Approaches to OKRs - Why Do We Need OKRs? - What Exactly Are OKRs? And in the premium part (2,440 words), we deep-dive into: - OKRs and Scrum - OKRs and Product Roadmap - OKRs and Continuous Product Discovery - Extending the traditional OKRs - OKRs vs. alternatives The full post: https://lnkd.in/daktsc7E
I’ve noticed some common challenges with OKRs, like objectives that are unclear or confusing, teams setting overly safe goals, a heavy focus on short-term wins, or teams losing steam over time because they find OKRs hard to manage. Curious to hear if alternatives have worked better for others?
A very interesting way to visualise this - this can make it clear for each team and can provide more specific directions towards customer satisfaction!
Thanks Pawel, This is a brilliant and simple explanation of OKRs. While the concept of OKRs is fairly straightforward, I find it incredibly challenging to convey the idea and persuade high-level organizational leadership to shift their mindset. from setting highly detailed objectives with rigid schedules as part of annual roadmaps to establishing clear priorities for simplier and fewer OKRs. The situation becomes even more frustrating when these overly detailed plans inevitably fail to hold up for even a quarter, requiring complete rework and the addition of new OKRs by Product teams again, with the same excessive level of detail.
Somehow I too agree to the left hand side of the OKRs, this is how any organisation can become a market leader and this model will help as a differentiator, which is beyond 'JUST Ordinary'. However, most of the organisations stuck with the waterfall approach which rest of the OKRs completely dependent and driven via Company OKRs.
Companies in general set the okrs per isolated teams and this is absolutly a mess situation for business, product, tecnology and end users.
Too many companies skip culture when adopting OKRs. Without empowerment, it's just a control tool.
Empowering teams is the secret sauce of OKRs. Without it, they risk becoming a control mechanism, Paweł Huryn. How have you balanced empowerment and structure in your goal-setting process?
Great points, it's not just a linear waterfall, and that's what makes it more relevant and dynamic.
Fractional CPO | People, strategy and culture (in that order)
1wI do wonder why "Good" OKR's should not be measurable? What is "exceptional customer support" or "delighted"