Writing OKRs should be a collaborative team activity. Our step-by-step guide outlined below will empower you and your team with the knowledge of how to write effective OKRs to ensure clarity and success. The 5 steps of writing effective OKRs include talking to your team, drafting goals, brainstorming key results, debating key results, and aligning the goals of various teams through a bottom-up process.
Step 1: Have the goal conversation, first
The first step of OKR writing involves sitting down with your team and asking them, “What are the three most important things for us to accomplish in the next three months?” Drill down on why these are important — and do so again and again.
By asking why continuously, leaders prompt their teams to share meaningful details regarding what specific objective they're trying to accomplish. If your team collectively understands the “why” on a deeper level, you're likely to end up with better active statements when you write OKRs, gaining greater commitment.
For example, perhaps one objective is “We're going to ship an iOS App.” Fantastic. That’s a great objective — but it's not inspiring.
So we ask the question, “Why does that matter?”
The more profound answer is, “It matters because there’s been a drop-off in customer engagement and customer satisfaction, and our customers prefer mobile” Or, “it matters because to stay viable in the market, we need to have a mobile presence and a native app to meet our customers where they expect us to be.”
So a new objective might be, “We're going to win back our customers by shipping an amazing iOS app.”
Step 2: Prepare draft goals and share them with the team
Once you're done writing OKRs, publish a draft of objectives ahead of time and then ask your team for feedback to get the conversation going. Sometimes, staring at a blank piece of paper is much harder than reviewing work in progress.
During this sharing exercise, instead of asking, “Do you have any questions or comments?” consider asking your team to “please suggest one or more variations that would improve this objective.” Give your team the freedom to contribute and incorporate their perspective into the OKRs.
Step 3: Conduct a team brainstorm to set key results
When it comes to setting key results, it's a good idea to get the team involved. Conducting an OKR brainstorming session as part of your OKR writing process gives your team a level of ownership, drives accountability, and inspires them to care about the OKRs they set.
Step 4: Debate key result ideas collectively
When writing key results for each objective, get the sticky notes or the virtual whiteboard. Have each team member jot down suggestions and take turns sharing and debating their metrics until you find the right level of difficulty to push the team.
Step 5: Don’t “cascade” OKRs down the org chart
It's tempting to cascade OKRs down through the organization. But if all your goals fit together into a pretty parent/child tree, teams aren’t thinking creatively, taking risks, or showing initiative. Plus, it hinders alignment and collective buy-in across the organization.
Instead, consider aligning OKR development through a bottom-up process. Invite teams at every level to define their OKRs before bringing the organization together to understand and challenge their alignment with your overarching vision. Not all OKRs within the organization will align with the company level, and that's okay.
Ultimately, you want to create an OKR writing process where teams feel empowered to create their OKRs and then challenge teams across the business to ensure they’re focused on the right priorities at the right time. This process encourages creative thinking and informed risk-taking, pushing your business forward.
Some final goal setting advice
Remember that it's crucial to celebrate wins and learn from failures. Celebrate when you win by providing public recognition to team leads and supporting players. Use the opportunity to connect the win to the bigger picture of why it matters, and be sure to have retrospectives with what went well, what didn't, and how you can improve the goal-setting process the next time.
How to Run an OKR Pilot
Introduction
It’s official — OKRs have hit the mainstream. No longer confined to tech giants like Twitter and Adobe, OKRs are being adopted en masse by large organizations across all industries like John Deere, The Washington Post, and Dish.
If you’re reading this, you already know how OKRs can create transparency, improve focus, and drive alignment for your organization. And you probably hope implementing OKRs will help you better define your goals, understand the process of achieving them, and track your progress along the way.
The question is no longer “What are OKRs?”
Today the question is, “How do we adopt OKRs?”
But let’s be honest, to do anything at scale is complex — especially OKRs. That’s where pilot projects come in. For medium-to-large organizations, starting with an OKR pilot is a great first step.
This article will help you design and run a successful OKR pilot within your organization.
What is an OKR pilot?
An OKR pilot is a mini version of an OKRs project that tests the viability before launching the program across an entire organization. An OKR pilot generally begins with several people or a small team managing the whole project.
And since pilot projects can be expensive, they generally make more sense for medium to large enterprises because they’re a relatively cheap alternative to full-scale deployment.
In the case of smaller organizations (up to 300 employees), pilots tend to be expensive, have artificial boundaries, and may create more problems than they solve.
What does an OKR pilot test?
Seeing if OKRs work for your organization takes more than simply plug-and-playing the methodology. Your organization is unique in its challenges, so your pilot be tailored to this. In our experience, it’s best to organize pilots in stages to test one aspect:
- Conceptual fit: Do OKRs fit in the culture and way of work of your organization?
- Leadership engagement: Is there leadership buy-in with OKRs?
- Broad engagement: Are non-leadership employees and individual contributors involved with the methodology?
- Technology fit: Does your technology enable people to focus on their objectives? Does it work for distributed teams and hybrid work?
- Scale: Are the process, logistics, and technology able to support OKRs at scale?
How your OKR pilot duration differs from an implementation
While the scale of an OKR pilot is smaller than an organization-wide implementation, that’s not the only important difference. The length of your OKR pilot is neither endless nor one-size-fits-all — the duration of the pilot is highly dependent on your chosen objective.
A meaningful pilot project has a test group of between 50 and 500 people.
With this 50-500 range in mind, you should also try to include people from various levels and departments in the organization. We’ll discuss the rationale for this in our Deciding the Pilot Test Group section.
For example, if you only want to test if people can create sensible OKRs, a two-week period may be more than enough. However, a real-world pilot project usually aspires beyond the simple comprehension of OKR methodology.
For a smaller organization (up to 500 people), the rule of thumb is pilots should last between three and six months, with real results visible after the sixth month.
For larger organizations, because of the scale and complexity, the pilot project should last one year. The caveat with an enterprise pilot project is that it should be progressive — with every quarter, the scale of the project should be increased to the point of organization-wide OKR implementation.
Why OKRs over other methodologies
Objectives and key results (OKRs) are one of the most straightforward management methodologies.
- You set qualitative objectives, which describe your intent and aspiration
- You define three to five quantitative key results per objective, which you use to define and measure success
In a way, it is this simplicity that made them so popular and widespread. But OKRs are not without their own complexities. OKRs holistically replace the strategy planning for your entire organization, presenting unique roadblocks and friction points from mental, strategic, and operational standpoints.
The advantage of OKRs
If you're at this stage of consideration for an OKR pilot, you probably already know why you want to implement OKRs. However, we can’t stress enough the importance of revisiting the true purpose of your OKR pilot program. This reflection enhances the clarity of your objectives in the long term.
While the reasoning will change from company to company, there are three essential benefits OKRs bring to all organizations:
- Transparency: know what is happening
- Focus: work on what is most important
- Alignment: work with others toward what is important
These benefits may be what you’re looking for from OKRs. However, the ultimate promise of OKRs can be simplified into one outcome — achieving better results.
OKRs aren’t a plug-in, they’re a transformation.
Building on the broad promises of OKRs and contextualizing them to your organization will make it easier to shape your process, measure the outcomes, and create the change you wish to see.
The challenge of OKRs
OKRs present a standard set of challenges regardless of your company’s size.
Challenge 1: outcome mentality
The first challenge of OKRs is about changing the mindset of your organization from output to outcomes — shifting the focus from completing tasks to achieving results.
Professionally, most people define success as completing tasks, and asking your team to think in terms of results is not easy.
While this is a key benefit of OKRs, changing habits is an immense mental load.
Challenge 2: process
Second, OKRs are a process change. They initially represent the idea of just another new thing to do.
So, not only are you asking your organization to change the way it thinks, but you are also asking people to understand something fundamentally new.
Without the right preparation of processes, tools, and training, your employees may react to the introduction of OKRs with emotions ranging from mild annoyance to openly displayed contempt.
Challenge 3: change management
Finally, the relative simplicity of OKRs intentionally leaves much to interpretation.
Best case, you have the freedom to shape the process to your unique needs. Worst case, you complicate your strategy with dozens of subjective, ad hoc, hard-to-manage OKR interpretations.
Every organization that adopts OKRs faces these challenges, and at scale (thousands of people) they become harder and more complex. The solution to these challenges begins with a comprehensive approach to change management.
Change management crash course
Change management, especially in enterprises, is nothing new. While many approaches can apply to OKRs, the Model for Managing Complex Change is particularly useful.
The model represents any change as a matrix of five components:
- Vision: why are you doing this? (In this case, implementing OKRs)
- Skills: do you have the necessary skills to implement the change?
- Incentives: what is in it for people you expect to participate?
- Resources: do you have the necessary tools, budget, time, etc.?
- Action plan: do you have the program to execute?
It’s imperative to answer these questions any time you’re looking to implement complex changes within your organization. To successfully introduce change, all five components must be present. However, if one component is missing, different types of failures can occur.
An OKR pilot is designed to bring each component of change management to the forefront. Being experimental by nature, it’s natural to have more challenging components of the OKR pilot depending on your organization.
Based on this change management model, if you can accurately identify your ongoing challenges (purple boxes), you can shift focus to which component of change is missing in your OKR pilot.
Planning your OKR pilot
The primary reason OKR pilots fail is because companies fail to define the pilot itself. Before you start your pilot program, there are three foundational questions you need to ask and answer to help you be successful:
- Why are you running the pilot project?
- Which risk are you trying to minimize?
- What is your pilot objective?
Why are you running the pilot project?
While there are many reasons why an organization may run a pilot project, they all boil down to minimizing risk. Within an OKR pilot program, the type of risk you’re trying to minimize relates to one of four circumstances:
- Prove OKRs can deliver one of the core promises
- Prove OKRs can work in your organization
- Prove OKRs can work at scale
- Prove an OKR platform/software can work
Prove OKRs can deliver one of the core promises
Perhaps you’re a skeptic of the OKR methodology. You want to see either better alignment, increased transparency, or enhanced focus in execution for yourself. Wasting time on a methodology that may not work is a significant risk.
Prove OKRs can work in your organization
Perhaps you’re an OKR believer already, but you’re unsure if they are the right fit for your organization’s culture or workflow. Regardless of the outcomes, if your teams can’t understand OKRs at their core, this is an intolerable risk.
Prove OKRs can work at scale
Perhaps you’ve seen OKRs work for smaller teams, but you’re worried about the complexities and challenges of large-scale implementation. If OKRs only work in certain circumstances, risking your approach to strategy execution must be calculated.
Prove an OKR platform/software can work
Perhaps you’re already convinced OKRs are right for your organization and they will work, but you want to test OKR solutions before beginning the process. Vetting, purchasing, and integrating software is a resource risk.
