“9 Ways to Improve your OKRs”

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve gotten a lot of questions about OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), including one yesterday whilst writing this post… honestly if this was published I could have just sent them the link.

So let’s avoid another call. In this post I want to equip you with the different hallmarks I look for in effective OKRs so you can self-diagnose and hopefully escape OKR theatre!

Let’s get into them

I don’t like using the term “empowered” because it’s ambiguous.

Empowered to do what?

• Are you empowered to expand your product internationally

• Empowered to build a whole new business within your current org?

• Build a new brand under a parent company?

Of course, empowerment doesn’t mean “do whatever you like” but therein lies the question:

What exactly are you empowered to do?

Your OKRs don’t live in a vacuum.

Yet this is exactly how I see many organizations treat their OKRs.

They jump on the bandwagon and create OKRs void of any context.

Here’s what I see all the time…

A common pattern I see in many of the product teams and companies I coach is that they’re doing a lot of incremental work but little-to-no iterations.

They have this big idea (often framed as an initiative) and become solely focused on breaking it down. The initiative becomes a series of epics, and that epic becomes a series of user stories, and so forth.

KPIs = measures of health. OKRs = things we want to change.

When you start to scale and have multiple products and/or teams, alignment becomes paramount. The general trap is to try and control things to stop misalignment from happening by adding many layers of bureaucracy. This stifles creativity, does very little to keep your people motivated and usually degrades team velocity.