Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)

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Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is the goal-setting tool used by the likes of IBM, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Dropbox, Spotify, Disney, and BMW to get thousands of employees moving toward the same ambitious goals.

But you don’t have to be a multinational corporation — or even a team leader — to benefit from OKRs. This data-driven framework is equally powerful for setting personal goals too. In short, it’s a system for making sure what you want to happen, happens.

Try OKRs if you...

• Love data and are looking for a more rigorous way to set and track goals

• Put in a lot of work but feels like you’re not progressing on the right things

• Have a hard time saying “no” and sticking to priorities

• Feel like you’re plateauing in your personal growth and want to challenge yourself

• Need to set priorities and align action across a company, division, or team

This guide draws on lessons from John Doerr — venture capitalist, OKR evangelist, and author of the New York Times' bestseller Measure What Matters — to give you an overview of what OKRs are and how to make them work, individually or as part of a team.

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What are OKRs?

Let’s start with the basics. OKRs stand for objectives and key results. Put simply, objectives describe where you’re going. Key results are how you get there.

Here’s a simple example of a personal OKR to illustrate:

In Measure What Matters, Doerr describes objectives and key results as the yin and yang of goal setting. Without key results to make them actionable, objectives are just wishes. Without objectives to ground them in a higher strategy and purpose, key results are just a directionless to-do list.

However, when taken together, OKRs represent the best of both worlds, pairing inspiring ambitions with concrete actions. Big, high-level goals may motivate and give purpose, but it’s your short-term actions that ultimately drive results. You need both to be effective.

OKR examples

The more examples of OKRs you see, the easier it is to understand them. Here are three examples of OKRs in action: two team examples and one personal one.

How often should you set OKRs?

There’s no prescribed OKR cadence you must follow, but Doerr believes that 1-3 months is the sweet spot — long enough to see results but short enough to make action feel urgent. You may also have overlapping timelines. For example, you might set high-level, annual OKRs, then break those down into shorter quarterly or even monthly OKRs.

To continue with one of the example OKRs above, if your company’s annual objective is to “improve 1-month customer retention rate by 20%”, the key result “revamp email welcome series” might become the first quarter objective of your growth team with its own key results:

Remember, your objectives may stay the same for years at a time, but your key results must be time-bounded.

What makes OKRs effective?

Given OKRs’ simplicity, it’s tempting to dismiss the framework as just a trumped up Silicon Valley rebrand of every other goal-setting approach. But it’s not the framework itself but the mindset behind it that makes OKRs transformational.

In Measure What Matters, Doerr describes the four “superpowers” of OKRs that set the system apart from other goal setting frameworks:

Focus

OKRs create a clear understanding of what needs to be prioritized. They give you and your team permission to say no to everything else. Doerr describes how liberating OKRs were in his early career at IBM: “When people came to me mid-quarter with requests to draft new data sheets, I felt I could say no without fear of repercussion.

Alignment

The beauty of OKRs is that they’re both a top-down and bottom-up approach to goal setting. While the company sets high-level, strategic OKRs (top down), teams and individuals are empowered to define their own OKRs (in consultation with their managers) to best meet the company’s goals (bottom up). They then own that specific piece of work.

Doerr writes about alignment in the context of corporations with hundreds or thousands of employees, but it applies to individual goal setting too. When used well, individual OKRs align your day-to-day actions with the bigger goals and purpose you’ve set for yourself.

Accountability

OKRs support what Doerr calls a “spirit of no-judgment accountability”. Clear deadlines create urgency, objective measurement removes subjectivity, and regular check-ins ensure that prompt action is taken if a key result gets off track or needs to be adjusted. In the age of knowledge work, where output is often difficult to measure and define, OKRs can be a mutually agreed upon reference point to assess what’s working, what’s blocking, and what needs to change.

Growth

When used right, OKRs can be a powerful motivating force to stretch yourself, your team, or your company beyond their current abilities. Setting OKRs should make you feel uncomfortable, while at the same time making failure and subsequent learning a natural part of the process.

7 Key Tenets for Making OKRs Work

OKRs may seem simple on the surface, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to implement in practice. Doerr boils down decades of experience helping companies implement OKRs into 7 essential lessons for making them work in any context:

Less is more

Doerr recommends 3-5 key results per objective. Any more than that, and it dulls the clarity and focus that OKRs provide.

Set goals from the bottom up

As management expert Peter Drucker observed “When people choose a course of action, they’re more likely to see it through.” Doerr recommends that teams and individuals should set about half of their own OKRs in consultation with their managers, rather than all goals coming from the top.

No dictating

Even high-level, top-down OKRs set by company leaders should be arrived at through a collaborative and inclusive process. Collective agreement and buy-in is essential for success.

Stay flexible

OKRs are meant to be agile in response to changing circumstances. Key results can be modified mid-cycle or even discarded if it becomes clear that they no longer make sense. While objectives tend to be more long-term, they too can shift as needed to adapt to new realities and information. For example, when Motorola began stealing market share in 1979, IBM had to quickly shift priorities in response. On a more personal level, if you get injured while training for a marathon, you’ll need to adjust focus on a new objective of recovery instead. Without flexibility, OKRs will quickly become irrelevant.

Set “stretched” goals

You shouldn’t achieve 100% of your OKRs. Google famously aims for a 60-70% success rate. A 100% success rate means you played it too safe with your targets. OKRs should stretch you, your team, and/or your company beyond what you’re currently capable of. If a subset of your OKRs makes you feel uncomfortable, you’re doing it right.

Never tie OKRs to monetary incentives

For companies, Doerr makes clear that for OKRs to work, they must remain separate from compensation. Once key results are tied to bonuses and promotions, people have an incentive to play it safe. To underscore this point, Doerr quotes Andy Grove, IBM executive and the “Father of OKRs”: “[OKRs are] meant to pace a person — to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base performance reviews.”

Be patient

Setting OKRs is hard. What worked at IBM or Google likely won’t work in the exact same way at your organization or for you personally. The flexible, trial-and-error mentality behind setting OKRs applies equally to the process of applying the system itself. You’re unlikely to get it right on the first try, but by constantly reevaluating and adjusting your approach, you’ll get closer to what’s most useful for you.

Common missteps & misconceptions about OKRs

As with most popularized productivity methods, people have very strong opinions about how to do OKRs the "right" way. Unfortunately, some rigidly held misconceptions keep people from realizing the full potential of OKRs or discourage them from applying the OKR framework in the first place.

“You have to be data-savvy to do OKRs.”

Setting key results can be daunting, particularly if you don’t consider yourself a “data person”. While key results must be measurable, that doesn’t mean you have to have a sophisticated data system to track them.

If you’re a writer with an objective to write a bestselling novel, one key result might be “Write 1,000 words a day”. If your objective is to hire a VP of marketing, a key result might be to “interview 10 candidates”. You don’t need fancy tools or specialized knowledge to track either of those numbers.

“Measurable means numbers.”

Lots of people will tell you OKRs have to be based on numbers — eg, Make $10,000 of new sales, get 5,000 new subscribers, reduce churn rate by 25%. That’s not necessarily true. While many key results are numbers-based, plenty of worthy key results can be measured only as a 0 or a 1 — either you did it or you didn’t. The more important question to ask of your OKRs is: “At the end of this time period, will I be able to say I accomplished this or not?” If the answer is yes, then it’s a measurable result.

For example, “Create final design spec with buy-in from the team by April 15” is a perfectly good, measurable key result even though it has no numbers attached to it. Viewed this way, key results become a much more flexible and useful tool that can encompass both the planning and execution stages of a project.

“OKRs are only for teams and companies.”

While OKRs are usually talked about in the context of companies, you can use OKRs just as effectively for yourself, whether you’re a company of one or just want a more rigorous way to track your personal goals.

“OKRs should encompass all of your work.”

Your key results are not a laundry list of every task you need to complete in a day. For example, most of us have to respond to emails as part of our regular job duties, but you wouldn’t set “get to inbox zero every day” as a key result. Rather, OKRs should be used to shine a spotlight on just the most important work you need to do to move toward your objectives.

How to track your OKRs in Todoist

For OKRs to work, your day-to-day tasks need to align with your key results. An easy way to visually prioritize OKRs in your Todoist is with projects and sub-projects.

Setting up your OKR projects

Start off by creating a project for each of your objectives. In each objective project, create a section for each key result.

Add tasks for the steps you’ll need to take to reach each key result along with due dates to stay on track. Keep adding more tasks throughout the cycle as needed.

Be sure to include a weekly recurring task to review each key result, identify what’s going well and what needs to be adapted, add any new tasks that have come up, and plan out your priorities for the coming week.

Depending on your OKRs, it may make sense to keep track of one or more key results as tasks rather than sub-projects. For example, if you’re objective is to “Self publish a novel”, the key result “write 1,000 words a day” probably makes more sense as a daily task rather than its own project.

Remember to stay flexible! Each OKR is unique and may require a slightly different setup.

Creating an OKR filter

Add even more emphasis to your OKR-related tasks by separating them out into their own filter view. Use the filter query “next 7 days & #objective project” to see all of the tasks in your “objective project” that are due in the next 7 days.

At the start of the day, open your “OKR Tasks” filter to see the work you should be focusing on next.

Keeping track of team OKRs with Todoist Business

If you use Todoist Business to manage your team tasks, add your team’s OKRs as tasks in your Team Inbox so everyone can reference them at any time.

Use project sections to split OKRs up by team and assign each key result to the person who will own it. Each key result owner can post regular updates in the task comments so everyone knows where each OKR stands.

This level of transparency reinforces all four of OKRs’ superpowers for your team:

• Focus: Everyone can clearly sees the company’s priorities.

• Alignment: Everyone understands how each team’s OKRs fits with the rest to support company-wide OKRs.

• Accountability: Each key result owner commits publicly to their OKRs and is responsible for reporting progress back to the whole team.

• Growth: With public OKRs and updates, the whole company can see that “stretched” OKRs are something to be embraced and that failures are a learning opportunity, not something that’s punished.

When it comes to accomplishing your goals, there’s no substitute for hard work. But hard work won’t get you where you want to go if it’s aimed in the wrong direction. The next time you sit down to think about where you want to be next month, quarter, or year, try using the OKR framework to set big, audacious goals and lay out a concrete, measurable path to get there.