HOW TO PUT THIS THEORY INTO PRACTICE

• Define what attributes you‘re looking for to make your OKRs useful. What do they have to do for you, so they‘re worth looking at and making decisions based on them?
• Create a continuously updated and evolving pool of metrics options by getting together with UX, Engineering, Data, Marketing, etc. Domain experts from your product area.
• Use your previously agreed attributes to select metrics that are ready to use or that are starting points for further discussions.
• Ensure to avoid the streetlight effect: If a metric is important but not influenceable and detectable, invest in why it isn’t and what you need to do to change it.

OKRs can be simple

OKRs backfired a little bit, because something that was meant to allow for flexibility and outcome based decision making actually turned into this like really rigid and inflexible system, because everyone would commit to OKRs at the beginning of the quarter, put them into the system, and then couldn’t really budge off of their roadmap for that quarter, because they had committed to these OKRs. And everyone was slightly more focused on whether or not they’d be able to say that they did their OKRs at the end of the quarter, then whether or not we’d actually achieved the outcome. So everyone in product ended up hating it, because there’s a lot of process around it.

Are You Sure You Want to Use OKRs?

If you are spending weeks refining the language of the objective and pinning down just the right metrics, your company is in the business of process management. That’s wasteful. Try to make good OKRs but remember there is a time when you have to say, good enough for now. You don’t want to spend three weeks setting your goals and lose the time you could be working toward them instead. Often people ask me, how do I know what key result to set? How do I know how much it should improve? I say “Go ahead and guess.”

Practical KPI Trees

Here are a few ways we can work together:

Learn through my free, in-depth Product Strategy, Product OKRs, or Product Discovery content libraries.

​Hire me to work with you or your team(s) 1:1 in workshops or coaching.