Product Practice #313

How to Go from Vision to OKRs

READ ON

HERBIG.CO

PUBLISHED

Mar 15, 2024

READING TIME

3 min & 16 sec

Dear Reader,

Our Vision is for our hometown to be a sporting heritage that creates excitement among fans and business opportunities through our club’s brand.

Our North Star Metric is the Number of Attractive Football Seasons Completed. An attractive Football Season requires:

the win of at least one international title
a player in the top 3 goal-getter ranking of our local league
an average filled stadium capacity of 90% for home matches.

Our Strategy is to drive the Input Metric of winning international titles by winning the Champions League through domination of opponents with an overwhelmingly effective offense.

This Strategy will help us say no to off-Strategy opportunities like defense players approaching our club, the prioritization of players for starting line-ups in domestic league games, and how to approach the training regime.

We know this strategy has worked out if we have won the Champions League title with at least 30% more scored goals than the next best team.

The most significant gap in this strategy is the width of world-class strikers. This makes our Discovery priority to answer the question, “What experienced and proven strikers can join us in time before the start of the CL season that sits within the established budget?” This will lead to activities around scouting, negotiation, and medical checks. This will also require striker-specific coaches and training formats, as well as new tactical considerations.

To measure our progress towards the strategic success criteria along the way, we set the following OKRs:

O: Our offense steamrolls opponents

KR1: Average time to first goal attempt per game is 5 minutes

KR2: We score 3 more goals than we receive per game on average

KR3: We have equally as many strikers in the opponent's penalty area as they have defenders in 70% of our offense plays

KR4: 75% realization of in-game scoring opportunities

O: Our team is physically and mentally enduring

KR1: 5% required exchange rate of starting line-up players

KR2: Average full health of team members per game of 90%

KR3: 100% of the starting line-up receives three recovery treatments within 72h of a game

I hope you enjoyed this little abstract illustration from Vision to Tactical OKRs. Many teams ask me for simple examples to explain these concepts, and this is a version I came up with during a Strategy workshop I ran this week. For my American readers: The Champions League is the NFL season and Super Bowl of European Football.

HOW TO PUT THIS THEORY INTO PRACTICE

Your Vision needs to answer the question, "How does the future state we want to create for our audiences through our product look like?"
Your North Star Metric needs to answer the question, "How can we measure our continued delivery of value to our audience?"
Your Strategy needs to answer the question, "What choices about moving closer to our Vision will enable us to intentionally say yes or no to opportunities over the next 6 to 18 months?"
Your Discovery needs to answer the question, "What evidence do we have that we have reduced the uncertainty around our biggest strategic gaps?"
Your Proxy Metric needs to answer the question, "What metric tells us that we have achieved our Strategy?"
Your Tactical OKRs need to answer the question, "How do we know our actions help us make progress toward our Strategic Goal?"

Did you enjoy this one or have feedback? Do reply. It's motivating. I'm not a robot; I read and respond to every subscriber email I get (just ask around). If these emails aren't for you anymore, you can unsubscribe here.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

Tim

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