John Doerr Okr Quotes

Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

We don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do. —Steve Jobs

Bad companies,” Andy wrote, “are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.

When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission.

Then come the four OKR “superpowers”: focus, align, track, and stretch.

An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.

Here are some reflections for closing out an OKR cycle: Did I accomplish all of my objectives? If so, what contributed to my success? If not, what obstacles did I encounter? If I were to rewrite a goal achieved in full, what would I change? What have I learned that might alter my approach to the next cycle’s OKRs?

But exactly how do you build engagement? A two-year Deloitte study found that no single factor has more impact than “clearly defined goals that are written down and shared freely. . . . Goals create alignment, clarity, and job satisfaction.

As Jim Collins observes in Good to Great, first you need to get “the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.” Only then do you turn the wheel and step on the gas.

We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience.

There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.

It almost doesn’t matter what you know. It’s what you can do with whatever you know or can acquire and actually accomplish [that] tends to be valued here.” Hence the company’s slogan: “Intel delivers.

KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”)

Contributors are most engaged when they can actually see how their work contributes to the company’s success. Quarter to quarter, day to day, they look for tangible measures of their achievement. Extrinsic rewards—the year-end bonus check—merely validate what they already know. OKRs speak to something more powerful, the intrinsic value of the work itself.

Stretch goals can be crushing if people don’t believe they’re achievable.

If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.

There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little. —Andy Grove

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

OKRs are big, not incremental—we don’t expect to hit all of them. (If we do, we’re not setting them aggressively enough.) We grade them with a color scale to measure how well we did: 0.0–0.3 is red 0.4–0.6 is yellow 0.7–1.0 is green

If the heart doesn't find a perfect rhyme with the head, then your passion means nothing. The OKR framework cultivates the madness, the chemistry contained inside. It gives us an environment for risk, for trust, where falling is not a fireable offense- you know, a safe place to be yourself. And when you have that sort of structure and environment, and the right people, magic is around the corner.

He wanted people at Google to be “uncomfortably excited.” He wanted us to have “a healthy disregard for the impossible.

The best way to solve a management problem, he believed, was through “creative confrontation”—by facing people “bluntly, directly, and unapologetically.

(Wrong decisions can be corrected once results begin to roll in. Nondecisions—or hastily abandoned ones—teach us nothing.)

Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses.

Voltaire: Don’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.* Remember

So I’d come to a philosophy, my mantra: Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.

People are the most important thing that we do. We have to try to make them better.

Actions—and data—speak louder than words.

If an objective is well framed, three to five KRs will usually be adequate to reach it.

KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable.

Peak performance is the product of collaboration and accountability.

When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.

as Larry Page says, “If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.

KEY RESULTS (AS MEASURED BY . . .) Deliver five benchmarks. Develop a demo. Develop sales training materials for the field force. Call on three customers to prove the material works.

For a service business, nothing is more valuable than engaged employees who feel they can make a difference and want to stay with the organization. Turnover is costly. The best turnover is internal turnover, where people are growing their careers within your enterprise rather than moving someplace else. People aren’t wired to be nomads. They just need to find a place where they feel they can make a real impact.

Individuals want to drive their own success. They don’t want to wait till the end of the year to be graded. They want to know how they’re doing while they’re doing it, and also what they need to do differently.

What are you working on? How are you doing; how are your OKRs coming along? Is there anything impeding your work? What do you need from me to be (more) successful? How do you need to grow to achieve your career goals?

For each objective, settle on no more than five measurable, unambiguous, time-bound key results—how the objective will be attained. By definition, completion of all key results equates to the attainment of the objective.

The art of management,” Grove wrote, “lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.

What you should do is more counterintuitive: Stop for a moment and shut out the noise. Close your eyes to really see what’s in front of you, and then pick the best way forward for you and your team, relative to the organization’s needs.

many ExOs are adopting the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) method. Invented at Intel by CEO Andy Grove and brought to Google by venture capitalist John Doerr in 1999, OKR tracks individual, team and company goals and outcomes in an open and transparent way. In High Output Management, Grove’s highly regarded manual, he introduced OKRs as the answer to two simple questions: Where do I want to go? (Objectives) How will I know I’m getting there? (Key Results to ensure progress is made)

Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved. (And if it isn’t, the OKR was poorly designed in the first place.)

You can tell people to clean up a mess, but should you be telling them which broom to use? When top management was saying “We’ve got to crush Motorola!” somebody at the bottom might have said “Our benchmarks are lousy; I think I’ll write some better benchmarks.” That was how we worked.

We use OKRs to plan what people are going to produce, track their progress vs. plan, and coordinate priorities and milestones between people and teams. We also use OKRs to help people stay focused on the most important goals, and help them avoid being distracted by urgent but less important goals.

Encourage a healthy proportion of bottom-up OKRs—roughly half. Smash departmental silos by connecting teams with horizontally shared OKRs. Cross-functional operations enable quick and coordinated decisions, the basis for seizing a competitive advantage. Make all lateral, cross-functional dependencies explicit.

You’re not going to get the system just right the first time around. It’s not going to be perfect the second or third time, either. But don’t get discouraged. Persevere. You need to adapt it and make it your own.” Commitment feeds on itself. Stay the course with OKRs, as I know firsthand, and you will reap amazing benefits.

Bono, do you know the Senegalese proverb ‘If you want to cut a man’s hair, it is better if he is in the room’?” He said it in a loving way, but we didn’t miss the message: Be careful if you think you know what we want. Because we know what we want. You’re not African, and this messiah complex hasn’t always turned out so well.

You know, in our business we have to set ourselves uncomfortably tough objectives, and then we have to meet them. And then after ten milliseconds of celebration we have to set ourselves another [set of] highly difficult-to-reach objectives and we have to meet them. And the reward of having met one of these challenging goals is that you get to play again.

Learning “from direct experience,” a Harvard Business School study found, “can be more effective if coupled with reflection—that is, the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.” The philosopher and educator John Dewey went a step further: “We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience.

A management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization.” An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution

standout performance correlated to affirmative responses to these five questions: Structure and clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear? Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed? Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us? Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time? Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?

Divorce compensation (both raises and bonuses) from OKRs. These should be two distinct conversations, with their own cadences and calendars. The first is a backward-looking assessment, typically held at year’s end. The second is an ongoing, forward-looking dialogue between leaders and contributors. It centers on five questions: What are you working on? How are you doing; how are your OKRs coming along? Is there anything impeding your work? What do you need from me to be (more) successful? How do you need to grow to achieve your career goals?

OKRs have two variants, and it is important to differentiate between them: Commitments are OKRs that we agree will be achieved, and we will be willing to adjust schedules and resources to ensure that they are delivered. The expected score for a committed OKR is 1.0; a score of less than 1.0 requires explanation for the miss, as it shows errors in planning and/or execution. By contrast, aspirational OKRs express how we’d like the world to look, even though we have no clear idea how to get there and/or the resources necessary to deliver the OKR. Aspirational OKRs have an expected average score of 0.7, with high variance.

An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution. KEY RESULTS benchmark and monitor HOW we get to the objective. Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable. (As prize pupil Marissa Mayer would say, “It’s not a key result unless it has a number.”) You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt.

For the Chrome project, we created a sub-OKR to turbocharge JavaScript. The goal was to make applications on the web work as smoothly as downloads on a desktop. We set a moonshot goal of 10x improvement and named the project “V8,” after the high-performance car engine. We were fortunate to find a Danish programmer named Lars Bak, who’d built virtual machines for Sun Microsystems and held more than a dozen patents. Lars is one of the great artists in his field. He came to us and said, without an ounce of bravado, “I can do something that is much, much faster.” Within four months, he had JavaScript running ten times as fast as it ran on Firefox. Within two years, it was more than twenty times faster—incredible progress. (Sometimes a stretch goal is not as wildly aspirational as it may seem. As Lars later told Steven Levy in In the Plex, “We sort of underestimated what we could do.”)

How Google Works (Schmidt, Eric) - Your Highlight on Location 3124-3150 | Added on Sunday, April 5, 2015 10:35:40 AM In late 1999, John Doerr gave a presentation at Google that changed the company, because it created a simple tool that let the founders institutionalize their “think big” ethos. John sat on our board, and his firm, Kleiner Perkins, had recently invested in the company. The topic was a form of management by objectives called OKRs (to which we referred in the previous chapter), which John had learned from former Intel CEO Andy Grove.173 There are several characteristics that set OKRs apart from their typical underpromise-and-overdeliver corporate-objective brethren. First, a good OKR marries the big-picture objective with a highly measurable key result. It’s easy to set some amorphous strategic goal (make usability better … improve team morale … get in better shape) as an objective and then, at quarter end, declare victory. But when the strategic goal is measured against a concrete goal (increase usage of features by X percent … raise employee satisfaction scores by Y percent … run a half marathon in under two hours), then things get interesting. For example, one of our platform team’s recent OKRs was to have “new WW systems serving significant traffic for XX large services with latency < YY microseconds @ ZZ% on Jupiter.”174 (Jupiter is a code name, not the location of Google’s newest data center.) There is no ambiguity with this OKR; it is very easy to measure whether or not it is accomplished. Other OKRs will call for rolling out a product across a specific number of countries, or set objectives for usage (e.g., one of the Google+ team’s recent OKRs was about the daily number of messages users would post in hangouts) or performance (e.g., median watch latency on YouTube videos). Second—and here is where thinking big comes in—a good OKR should be a stretch to achieve, and hitting 100 percent on all OKRs should be practically unattainable. If your OKRs are all green, you aren’t setting them high enough. The best OKRs are aggressive, but realistic. Under this strange arithmetic, a score of 70 percent on a well-constructed OKR is often better than 100 percent on a lesser one. Third, most everyone does them. Remember, you need everyone thinking in your venture, regardless of their position. Fourth, they are scored, but this scoring isn’t used for anything and isn’t even tracked. This lets people judge their performance honestly. Fifth, OKRs are not comprehensive; they are reserved for areas that need special focus and objectives that won’t be reached without some extra oomph. Business-as-usual stuff doesn’t need OKRs. As your venture grows, the most important OKRs shift from individuals to teams. In a small company, an individual can achieve incredible things on her own, but as the company grows it becomes harder to accomplish stretch goals without teammates. This doesn’t mean that individuals should stop doing OKRs, but rather that team OKRs become the more important means to maintain focus on the big tasks. And there’s one final benefit of an OKR-driven culture: It helps keep people from chasing competitors. Competitors are everywhere in the Internet Century, and chasing them (as we noted earlier) is the fastest path to mediocrity. If employees are focused on a well-conceived set of OKRs, then this isn’t a problem. They know where they need to go and don’t have time to worry about the competition. ==========

Less is more. “A few extremely well-chosen objectives,” Grove wrote, “impart a clear message about what we say ‘yes’ to and what we say ‘no’ to.” A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most. In general, each objective should be tied to five or fewer key results. (See chapter 4, “Superpower #1: Focus and Commit to Priorities.”) Set goals from the bottom up. To promote engagement, teams and individuals should be encouraged to create roughly half of their own OKRs, in consultation with managers. When all goals are set top-down, motivation is corroded. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) No dictating. OKRs are a cooperative social contract to establish priorities and define how progress will be measured. Even after company objectives are closed to debate, their key results continue to be negotiated. Collective agreement is essential to maximum goal achievement. (See chapter 7, “Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork.”) Stay flexible. If the climate has changed and an objective no longer seems practical or relevant as written, key results can be modified or even discarded mid-cycle. (See chapter 10, “Superpower #3: Track for Accountability.”) Dare to fail. “Output will tend to be greater,” Grove wrote, “when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond [their] immediate grasp. . . . Such goal-setting is extremely important if what you want is peak performance from yourself and your subordinates.” While certain operational objectives must be met in full, aspirational OKRs should be uncomfortable and possibly unattainable. “Stretched goals,” as Grove called them, push organizations to new heights. (See chapter 12, “Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing.”) A tool, not a weapon. The OKR system, Grove wrote, “is meant to pace a person—to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance. It is not a legal document upon which to base a performance review.” To encourage risk taking and prevent sandbagging, OKRs and bonuses are best kept separate. (See chapter 15, “Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs.”) Be patient; be resolute. Every process requires trial and error. As Grove told his iOPEC students, Intel “stumbled a lot of times” after adopting OKRs: “We didn’t fully understand the principal purpose of it. And we are kind of doing better with it as time goes on.” An organization may need up to four or five quarterly cycles to fully embrace the system, and even more than that to build mature goal muscle.

We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience.

Studies have told us forever that frontline employees thrive when they can see how their work aligns to the company’s overall goals.

In God we trust; all others must bring data. —W. Edwards Deming

Transparency is crucial. Studies indicate that public goals have more probability of coming true than hidden goals. In an environment run by OKRs, those at the bottom of the organizational hierarchy can also see everyone's goals, even those of the CEO. This opens doors to clear assessment and correction as well. This improves the overall setting of an organization.

When you come down to it, alignment is about helping people understand what you want them to do. Most contributors will be motivated to ladder up to the top-line OKRs—assuming they know where to set the ladder. As our team got larger and more layered, we confronted new issues. One product manager was working on Premium, the enhanced subscription version of our app. Another focused on our API platform, to enable third parties like Fitbit to connect to MyFitnessPal and write data to it or applications on top of it. The third addressed our core login experience. All three had individual OKRs for what they hoped to accomplish—so far, so good. The problem was our shared engineering team, which got caught in the middle. The engineers weren’t aligned with the product managers’ objectives. They had their own infrastructure OKRs, to keep the plumbing going and the lights on. We assumed they could do it all—a big mistake. They got confused about what they should be working on, which could change without notice. (Sometimes it boiled down to which product manager yelled loudest.) As the engineers switched between projects from week to week, their efficiency dragged.

I felt super-frustrated. We’d hired all these talented people and were spending tons of money, but we weren’t going any faster. Things came to a head over a top-priority marketing OKR for personalized emails with targeted content. The objective was well constructed: We wanted to drive a certain minimum number of monthly active users to our blog. One important key result was to increase our click-through rate from emails. The catch was that no one in marketing had thought to inform engineering, which had already set its own priorities that quarter. Without buy-in from the engineers, the OKR was doomed before it started. Even worse, Albert and I didn’t find out it was doomed until our quarterly postmortem. (The project got done a quarter late.) That was our wake-up call, when we saw the need for more alignment between teams. Our OKRs were well crafted, but implementation fell short. When departments counted on one another for crucial support, we failed to make the dependency explicit. Coordination was hit-and-miss, with deadlines blown on a regular basis. We had no shortage of objectives, but our teams kept wandering away from one another. The following year, we tried to fix the problem with periodic integration meetings for the executive team. Each quarter our department heads presented their goals and identified dependencies. No one left the room until we’d answered some basic questions: Are we meeting everyone’s needs for buy-in? Is a team overstretched? If so, how can we make their objectives more realistic?

When an OKR rises to the top line, “all eyes in the company are on your team,” Rick says. “That’s a lot of eyes! We had no idea how we’d do it in three months, but we understood that owning a company-level OKR showed that our work took priority.

Unleash ambitious goal setting by divorcing forward-looking OKRs from backward-looking annual reviews. Equating goal attainment to bonus checks will invite sandbagging and risk-averse behavior.

No contratamos a personas inteligentes para decirles lo que tienen que hacer. Contratamos a personas inteligentes para que nos digan lo que hay que hacer.

En otras palabras: los resultados clave son las palancas de las que tiras, los hitos a los que hay que llegar para alcanzar el objetivo. Si un objetivo está bien estructurado, suelen bastar entre tres y cinco resultados clave para conseguirlo. Si hay demasiados, el foco de atención puede perderse y frenar el progreso. Por otro lado, cada resultado clave debería ser un desafío en sí mismo. Si estás seguro de que vas a conseguirlo, probablemente no estás esforzándote lo suficiente.

Key results are more earthbound and metric-driven. They typically include hard numbers for one or more gauges: revenue, growth, active users, quality, safety, market share, customer engagement.

«Tener ideas no es complicado. Lo importante es saber ponerlas en práctica».

OKR, siglas de Objectives and Key Results (Objetivos y Resultados Clave).

«Sin un plan de acción, el ejecutivo es prisionero de los acontecimientos.

When goals are public and visible to all, a “team of teams” can attack trouble spots wherever they surface. Adds Bock: “You can see immediately if somebody’s hitting the ball out of the park—you investigate. If somebody’s missing all the time, you investigate. Transparency creates very clear signals for everyone. You kick off virtuous cycles that reinforce your ability to actually get your work done. And the management tax is zero—it’s amazing.

Early on in your career, when you’re an individual contributor, you’re graded on the volume and quality of your work. Then one day, all of a sudden, you’re a manager. Let’s assume you do well and move up to manage more and more people. Now you’re no longer paid for the amount of work you do; you’re paid for the quality of decisions you make. But no one tells you the rules have changed. When you hit a wall, you think, I’ll just work harder—that’s what got me here. What you should do is more counterintuitive: Stop for a moment and shut out the noise. Close your eyes to really see what’s in front of you, and then pick the best way forward for you and your team, relative to the organization’s needs. What’s neat about OKRs is that they formalize reflection. At least once each quarter, they make contributors step back into a quiet place and consider how their decisions align with the company. People start thinking in the macro. They become more pointed and precise, because you can’t write a ninety-page OKR dissertation. You have to choose three to five things and exactly how they should be measured. Then when the day comes and someone says, “Okay, you’re a manager,” you’ve already learned how to think like one. And that’s huge.

Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others.” To reap the full benefits of OKRs, feedback must be integral to the process. If you don’t know how well you’re performing, how can you possibly get better? Today’s workers “want to be ‘empowered’ and ‘inspired,’ not told what to do. They want to provide feedback to their managers, not wait for a year to receive feedback from their managers. They want to discuss their goals on a regular basis, share them with others, and track progress from peers.” Public, transparent OKRs will trigger good questions from all directions: Are these the right things for me/you/us to be focused on? If I/you/we complete them, will it be seen as a huge success? Do you have any feedback on how I/we could stretch even more?

Coach” Bill Campbell’s wisdom is invoked more fleetingly. Here, then, is our opportunity to celebrate Bill, a man who gave so much to so many. From his gift for honest, open communication to his zeal for data-driven operating excellence, the Coach embodied the very spirit of OKRs. So it’s only fitting that he graces our close.

some significant percentage of people are working on the wrong things. The challenge is knowing which ones.

When you come down to it, alignment is about helping people understand what you want them to do.

In both one-on-ones and team meetings, these wrap-ups consist of three parts: objective scoring, subjective self-assessment, and reflection.

Superpower #3: Track for Accountability In God we trust; all others must bring data. —W. Edwards Deming

Цели приводят к единству, пониманию и удовлетворению работой»

«Искусство менеджмента, — писал Гроув, — основывается на способности выбирать из множества дел примерно одинаковой важности одно, два или три, которые принесут намного больше пользы, и сконцентрироваться на них»

OKRs surface your primary goals. They channel efforts and coordination. They link diverse operations, lending purpose and unity to the entire organization.

Sergey said, “Well, we need to have some organizing principle. We don’t have one, and this might as well be it.

If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. —Yogi Berra

hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.

If companies “don’t continue to innovate, they’re going to die—and I didn’t say iterate, I said innovate.

Says Astro Teller: “If you want your car to get fifty miles per gallon, fine. You can retool your car a little bit. But if I tell you it has to run on a gallon of gas for five hundred miles, you have to start over.

Engineers struggle with goal setting in two big ways. They hate crossing off anything they think is a good idea, and they habitually underestimate how long it takes to get things done.

To safeguard quality while pushing for quantitative deliverables, one solution is to pair key results—to measure “both effect and counter-effect,” as

[T]he harder the goal the higher the level of performance. . . . Although subjects with very hard goals reached their goals far less often than subjects with very easy goals, the former consistently performed at a higher level than the latter.

The more ambitious the OKR, the greater the risk of overlooking a vital criterion. To safeguard quality while pushing for quantitative deliverables, one solution is to pair key results, to measure both effect and counter effect, as Grove wrote in High Output Management. When key results focus on output, Grove noted, 'the paired counterparts should stress the quality of work, thus in Accounts Payable, the number of vouchers processed should be paired with the number of errors found either by auditing or by our suppliers. For another example, the number of square feet cleaned by a custodial group should be paired with by rating of the quality of work as assessed by a senior manager with an office in that building.' -- Let the quantity goal be three new features, the paired quality goal will be fewer than 5 bugs per feature in quality assurance testing. The result - developers will write cleaner code. If the quantity goal is 50 million dollars in Q1 sales, the quality goal can be 10 million dollars in maintenance contracts, because sustained retention by sales professionals will increase customer success and satisfaction.

Based on Better Work's experience with hundred's of enterprises, there have emerged 5 critical areas of conversation between manager and contributor 1- goal setting and reflection - where the employee's OKR plan are set for the upcoming cycle. The discussion focuses on how best to align individual objectives and key results with organizational priorities. 2- ongoing progress updates, which are brief, data-driven check-ins based on the employee's real-time progress with problem-solving as needed. Progress updates really entail two basic questions - what's going well and what's not working well 3 - two-way coaching to help contributors to reach their potential and managers do a better job 4- career growth to develop skills, identify growth opportunities and expand employee's vision of their future at the company 5- light-weight performance reviews. A feedback mechanism to gather input, and summarize what the employee has accomplished since the last meeting in the context of the organization's needs. And note this conversation is held apart from the employee's annual compensation performance review.

Each core value was mapped to a corresponding set of OKRs. ... An OKR for Students First Objective: is to extend Corsera's reach to new students as measured by 4 key results...

Aspirational OKRs very often start from the current state and effectively ask 'What could we do if we got extra staff and got a bit lucky.' An alternative and better approach would be to start with, 'What could my or my customer's world look like in several years if we were freed from most constraints.

Trap number five are low value objectives. Also know as 'who cares' OKRs. OKRs must promise clear business value, otherwise there's no value in expending resources doing them. Low value objectives, LVOs, are those for which if the objective is completed with 1.0, no one will notice or care. A classic and seductive LVO example is - increase task CPU usage by 3%. This objective by itself does not help users or Goggle directly, however, the presumably related goal 'decrease the quantity of cores requires to serve peak queries by 3% with no change to quality and latency and return the resulting excessing cores to the pool', has clear economic value. That's a superior objective.

Here's a litmus test: could the OKR get a 1.0 under reasonable circumstances without providing direct end user or economic benefit? If so, then reword the OKR to focus on the tangible benefit.

For balance and quality control, pair qualitative and quantitative key results. When a key result requires additional attention, elevate it into an objective for one or more objectives. The single most important element for OKR success is conviction and buy-in by the organization's leaders.

At the start of each cycle, distinguish between goals that must be achieved 100% - those are committed OKRs, and those that are stretching for a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (a BHAG - or aspirational OKR). And establish an environment where people are free to fail without judgement.

To stimulate problem solving and spur people to greater achievement, set ambious goals, even if it means some quarterly targets will be missed. But don't set the bar so high that an OKR is obviously unrealistic. Morale suffers when people know they can't succeed.