profile

Product Practice Newsletter

🛠️ PP #301: How to Pick Useful OKRs from KPI Trees

Published almost 3 years ago • 2 min read

How to Pick Useful OKRs
from KPI Trees

READ ON

​HERBIG.CO​

PUBLISHED

Nov 10, 2023

READING TIME

4 min & 5 sec

​Dear Reader,​

Frameworks must be in service of the intention product teams try to achieve. One of the most helpful ways to do that is by combining them with the attributes and principles of useful Discovery insights, OKRs, or Strategy components.

​As I wrote before, finding valuable metrics for your NSM or OKRs comes down to building your KPI landscape through a KPI tree. Through continuous questions about what a given metric drives or is driven by, you‘ll create your metrics landscape.

But this range of metrics options can be overwhelming, and you shouldn‘t use every metric you could measure. Instead, use practices like the IDLE attributes of useful Product OKRs as a lens to assess the items on your KPI trees to find starting points for your next OKRs.

This could be as simple as a 5-column table. First column: the metric, Other columns: the attributes you look for (like with IDLE). You go through them and check if the attribute is met or not. Where they are met is your starting point for useful KRs.

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.

That's (almost) all, Reader. If you enjoyed today's issue, please do reply (it helps with deliverability). If you didn't, you can unsubscribe here.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

Tim

What did you think of this week's newsletter?

​👎​

​Bad​

​🤷‍♂️​

​Meh​

​👍​

​Great​

​Click here if you only want to see what's behind each option​

Content I found Practical This Week

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

Who is Tim Herbig?

As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the progress of their evidence-informed decisions.

I identify and share the patterns among better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.

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.

Product Practice Newsletter

Turn Product Theory into Pragmatic Application by Tim Herbig

1 tip & 3 resources per week to improve your Strategy, OKRs, and Discovery practices in less than 5 minutes. Explore my new book on realprogressbook.com

Read more from Product Practice Newsletter

Product Practice #432 Your Product Strategy Can Be Focused Without Covering Everything PUBLISHED Oct 29, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, If your Product Strategy prioritizes paid customers, what happens to everyone using your product for free? Aakash Gupta raised this question in our Product Growth podcast conversation. At Apollo, the strategic focus was on paid users. But he couldn’t ignore everyone else. It’s a useful tension. A strategy needs to concentrate your effort, while your team...

2 days ago • 3 min read

Product Practice #431 Linked Better Practices over Stacked Best Practices PUBLISHED Oct 23, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Last week, Julia and I taught our new The AI-Powered PM: From Hype to Agentic Application workshop, and I wanted to share my top three takeaways across our material and participants' takeaways: #1 Effortless Agentic Building Enables True Product Creativity Once everyone locked in on the fundamental agent components of user prompt, system prompt, context, and output,...

8 days ago • 2 min read

Product Practice #430 How to Think About Product Strategy in the Age of AI PUBLISHED Oct 16, 2026 READ ON HERBIG.CO Dear Reader, Two weeks ago, I had the incredible opportunity to be on Akash's Product Growth Podcast. Now that the episode is out, I can finally share it with you as well. I typically don't put podcast episodes front and center in this newsletter, but since this is more of a 1-hour AI Product Strategy Masterclass than an audio-only podcast, I think it's one of the best pieces of...

15 days ago • 1 min read