🛠️ How Product Leaders Can Guide Their Team's OKRs


How Product Leaders Can
Guide Their Team's OKRs

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HERBIG.CO

PUBLISHED

Jun 21, 2024

READING TIME

3 min & 51 sec

This is the second-to-last newsletter before my annual summer writing break. I will return on August 16th after next week's issue. ☀️

For the scope of this essay, I will define Product Leaders as members of a Product Management function with people management responsibilities (e.g., Director of Product, Head of Product, VP of Product, etc.).

Product leaders and individual contributors must understand their responsibilities during OKR drafting to avoid getting in each other’s way.

Suggested tactics for what Product Leaders are supposed to do during (but not limited to) the definition of Product Team OKRs often read like this:

“Product Leaders have to provide the Objective.”

“Product Leaders have to tell a team what problem to solve.”

“Product Leaders must ensure the team cannot reach 100% of their goals.”

In my experience, it’s none of the above. At least not in such a narrowly defined way. Instead, if you strip away the tactics, it comes down to one responsibility:

All Product Leaders have to do during OKR drafting is to limit a Team’s Playing Field for the next goal cycle by providing Strategic Context.”

This can come in many shapes or forms.

Aide the Translation of Higher Level Strategy and OKRs

Whoever is in charge of the strategy and OKRs defined at a company or business unit level must take the stage before a team’s drafting. If these aren't clear, you cannot expect a team to articulate their contribution to higher-level priorities. Having the chance to clarify the goals from the level “above” through a live conversation is crucial. And that’s a responsibility product leaders have to own.

Sharing Context from Other Teams

Ensuring just enough overlap among teams is a tricky aspect for all larger companies. Instead of having all teams talk to each other individually, product leaders, as an overarching institution, can aid this by conversing with their peers. They should bring this context to a team’s OKR drafting, so they know what areas to focus on and where teams have to collaborate.

Challenging the Choice of Key Results

Instead of focusing on the values of a Key Result, the bigger benefit product leaders can provide is to challenge the nature of Key Results. It’s all too easy to get lost in the tactical metrics in front of you. Having someone help you see truly holistic measures of success is more valuable.

HOW TO PUT THIS THEORY INTO PRACTICE

  • Design the responsibilities of each role. Establish an OKR system that makes things explicit.
  • Reflect together. Invite product leaders to your OKR retrospectives to incorporate their perspectives.
  • Ensure high-quality inputs. I keep saying that 50% of an OKRs quality depends on the quality of the inputs. Product leaders must understand that requirement when they think about it and work on setting the strategic context for a team.

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 this newsletter isn't for you anymore, you can unsubscribe here.

Thank you for Practicing Product,

Tim

PS.: Three friends of mine released their books in the past weeks, and I believe you should check them out (non-paid, non-affiliate - just a fan of good work):

  1. Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden published Who does what by How Much - A Practical Guide to Customer-Centric OKRs (well-suited for the fundamental and company-level practice of OKRs).
  2. Erin Weigel published Design for Impact - Your Guide to Designing Effective Product Experiments (a fun guide to testing like you're wrong but designing like you're right).

How to Dive Deeper into Product OKRs

Learn the strategies and tactics you need to use OKRs in a way that helps product teams prioritize work based on user problems and business goals—instead of replicating existing feature backlogs.

My Outcome OKRs for Product Teams Course enables product teams to use OKRs as a tool for decision-making in the context of Product Strategy, Product Discovery, and Scrum. Without the fluff, but with a focus on practicality in everyday work.

Content I found Practical This Week

Using Temporal Landmarks for Effective OKRs Adoption

Temporal landmarks act as psychological reset buttons. They signal a new beginning, making it easier for teams to leave past failures or complacency behind and move forward with renewed energy. This is crucial because OKRs are not just about continuing business as usual; they are about striving for strategic breakthroughs. When you align the start of an OKR cycle with a temporal landmark, you tap into a natural human inclination to start afresh with more vigor and determination.

The "Definitive" Lise of Things Startups Did that didn't Scale

Our Half-Baked Adoption of OKRs

A symptom of a half-baked OKR adoption is creating key results but continuing to focus more on roadmaps with deadlines. Adopting OKRs requires adopting uncertainty into company culture. But uncertainty is often unacceptable to company leaders. To avoid uncertainty, companies usually keep their existing processes and layer OKRs on top. Unfortunately, roadmaps with deadlines and achieving key results are not compatible. Leaders will still spend most of their time monitoring progress to launch (output) instead of progress to the key result (outcome).

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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.

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