The OKR Parallel
Universe Syndrome

​Dear Reader,​

Welcome back! I for sure started to miss writing these weekly essays about halfway through my summer break. Between speaking appearances and nudging my book closer to completion, I also enjoyed some time off. I hope you had (or still have) a fantastic summer full of nourishing experiences and some time to recharge. And now, onto this week's essay.

Here's an interesting cycle: Company Strategy is written (and maybe communicated). Company OKRs are written based on KPIs and some strategic topics. Teams model their OKRs after the company OKRs. The company insists that other things are "also important." So when teams share their roadmap items connected to the OKRs, but get pushback on where the work on these "other important things" is happening.

I call this the OKR Parallel Universe Syndrome. You may not have heard of it, but I'm sure you've experienced it.

When failing to address the hard questions that make OKRs effective, your Key Results may represent what the company wishes to work on. Still, they undermine making progress on those priorities by communicating an additional range of priorities that are deemed more important.

It's tempting to keep a backdoor of priorities open next to your OKRs, to have more wiggle room and be less committed to what you defined at the beginning of the quarter. But that's a lose-lose situation.

The company stays stuck with incremental KPI improvements instead of strategic progress.

Nobody works on these actual priorities because they're not measurable.

The value, and therefore the buy-in, for measuring progress through a method like OKRs gets undermined, further reducing the team's commitment.

To circumvent that, I recommend creating a shared understanding around these fundamental principles before writing your OKRs:

• ​OKRs don't have to cover everything.
• Use OKRs to measure what you want to do differently, not business as usual.
• OKRs are the primary way to communicate and measure priorities.

No facilitation technique can save your OKR drafting if there's no agreement on the aspects above. However, when these are in place, you can encourage people to move beyond vanity metrics, such as Key Results (KRs), and start using actionable metrics to communicate priorities.

There's always a good reason to adjust priorities. But to ensure teams act on them, use the possibility to change the OKRs, instead of adding another PowerPoint slide to the next all-hands.

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Thank you for Practicing Product,

​Tim​

PS.: Coffee Kintsugi spotted at elbgold Hamburg.

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Content I found Practical This Week

Establishing Usage-based, but Results-driven Pricing An excellent example of how to measure the success of your customers and align your business model to it. Steven Tey @steventey Really love @intercom's pricing model for their AI chatbot – Fin. It's usage-based, but results-driven. You don't pay unless Fin does its job – resolving the customer's issue. Amazing work @eoghan & team 👏 4:0 PM • Dec 29, 2023 43 Retweets 611 Likes Read 29 replies ​ Read it here

Who is Tim Herbig?

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

I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.