Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs in short, can be used in different areas. They were invented at Intel and John Doerr brought it then to Google. That's how it finally became famous. Now a broad range of organizations use OKRs, e.g. Amazon, Zalando, Dropbox, Facebook, LinkedIn. Just to name a few. But OKRs can also be applied for your private live or for your freelancer business. Using OKRs will give you three things:

1. Focus
2. Alignment
3. Accountability

Focus

A usual OKR cycle lasts 90 days and I personally would also recommend to to stick with that time frame. It is still short enough to keep the overview but long enough to get something meaningful done.

Define your yearly, company wide, Objectives and Key Results a few weeks before you start planning your first 90 day OKR cycle. Define the most important goals for your organization for the next year and start writing them down. A sheet of paper is just fine. Think about the most important stuff. The things which will be a leap forward for your business. That will be the focus for you and your organization for the next year. We will cover a bit later how to write effective OKRs. A clear focus is set, when there are 3 to 5 company objectives for the next year. There should not be more; only the most import things should be on the list.

Alignment

Organiztations with multiple teams will achieve a higher level of alignment as each team is focusing on the same company wide goals. The whole organization should validate what each team can do to achieve the company objectives. This, by nature, already fosters team communication and thus alignment. Monthly team and weekly contributor - manager check ins should take place. This keeps the focus and it makes it easy to fail fast if problems occur and a curse correction is needed.

Accountability

Teams get clear goals describing what needs to be accomplished and the freedom to choose how to reach those goals. When teams define by themselves how to reach the goals, they will become accountable for those goals.

OKRs consist of two parts. First the objective, which describes what should be accomplished and the key results, which describe the steps needed to accomplish the objective.

Objectives

An objective describes what you want to accomplish within the next 90 days. The focus should be on big things. Goals, when accomplished, which make a huge difference for your organization. A good start is to take a piece of paper and a pen and start writing by trying to answer the question: What is the most important thing we - as an organization - need to accomplish or change in the next 90 days and why. Select the 3 to 5 most important items from that list.

At that moment the list will most probably be high level and needs maybe some fine-tuning. To get really meaningfull, actionable and inspiring objective, ask the following questions:

• Is it clear why we are doing this and does it really make sense?
• Is the description of that objective as simple as possible, how can it be described simpler
• Is the objective fully actionable?
• Will it be easily understood by a new hire?
• Does it clearly describe a desired target state?

Those questions help to refine your OKRs. Another good practice, from my experience is, to follow a specific pattern, when writing OKRs. A recommended pattern for writing objectives is the following:

Some examples of company Objectives are

• We will demonstrate that our product is superior to the ones from our competition
• We will improve our sign up process
• We will double our SaaS product subscriptions

Some examples of quarterly team Objectives

• We will make our website fully accessible for people with disabilities
• We will increase our brand awareness by 10%
• We will reduce the cycle time for our product development while keeping our quality standards

There are two kinds of objectives.

They can either be aspirational, which describes the moonshots, the inspiring goals, which requires your teams to stretch and which will push your company forward. But the objectives can also be committed. Which implies a fullfillment rate of 100%. These are the goals which have to be met, no matter what. Try to have only a very few of them.

One important thing to note is, that it is fully feasible to use learning OKRs, for R&D teams. The result of these learning OKRs can be new findings or a presentation about some new technology which got reviewed.

Key results

Key results are time bound and measureable results. Each key result has to be very specific, clearly measureable, easily verifyable and also a little bit aggressive, though still realistic.

The most important thing to remember, when writing your key results is: Each key result should get you one step closer to your objective, when accomplished.

If an objective can be reached without finishing one of the key results, than this key result is most probably not the right one. Also, if an objective can't be reached, even though all key results are reached, that the key results are also most probably not the right ones.

Questions, which help to improve key results are:

• How can I write this Key Result even more specific?
• When will it be done?
• Is it a home run, or do I really need to stretch to accomplish it?
• Can we measure the improvement?
• How can we verify we’ve met the key result?

Different Ways to Write Key Results

There are three ways to write key results. The different types are:

1. input
2. output
3. outcome

Let's considure the following objective: We will make our website fully accessible for people with disabilities, as measured by...

The following Examples show the difference between the three key result types.

Input driven key results

Input driven key results are the ones which can be defined and written very easily as they describe actions which a person or an organization can fully control. However, neither the output nor the outcome can be controlled fully. These kind of key results are very useful if you want to try out hypothesis and run experiments. But they can also be defined as the de facto standard for an organization. E.g. Amazon is using input driven key results a lot.

Key results:

1. all forms can be accessed and navigated through by just using the keyboard
2. most popular screen readers can interpret our site flawlessly
3. conducting 3 user tests by end of October
4. rolling out a high contrast version of our website by End of [month]

Output driven key results

Ouput driven key results are more specific than the input driven key results, as they already describe the result which an input driven key result should achieve. Creating output driven key results requires more insight and/or research for a topic to make sure the right metrics for a particular key result are defined.

Key results:

1. increasing successful submissions of keyboard based filled in forms by 50%
2. increasing visit time of screenreader users on our website by 30%
3. achieving 100% acceptance rate from 3 user tests
4. achieving a lighthouse accessibility score of 100

Outcome driven key results

Outcome driven key results clearly describes the result a company wants to see when an objective is implemented. This kind of key results leaves also the most freedom to the teams working on an objective as they know exactly which outcome is required to meet and it also provides the most flexibility to change route in an agile way if required. Still the actions can be defined by the team during the implementation of the key results. It makes most sense to use outcome driven key results on company OKR level and also for teams which are certain to find the right path during the implementation.

Key results:

1. increasing form based product orders for keyboard users by 20%
2. increasing conversion rate for screen reader users by 30%
3. increasing NPS by 5 points

Knowing those three types of key results is essential to understand the potential impact a key result can have.

Setting goals and having a lightweight framework to define measureable steps towards those goals make a huge difference for organisations.

Company objectives are the starting point for an agile journey and they should and will be your north start, your focus point. If there is too much in sight, you know which parts can turn blurry and which should be in clear focus.

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