Practical OKR tips

Going full scale while making the first steps with a new tool like OKRs is like hosting a dinner party for 50 prominent guests without having cooked for your family a single time.

That’s why it makes sense to kick-off a Community of Practice (CoP) built of a dozen or so volunteers. Let this CoP experiement with ideas and exercise the application of OKRs. Meet on a regular basis, exchange experiences and build your set of good practices you want to share with the entire organization once you scale up like an OKR checklist.

Defining goals can be easy. Specifying measurements can be trickier. But the real challenge is to follow through, to run the measurements, to review them, and to keep the up to date.

That’s why it immensely helps to have someone taking care of nudging everybody to keep timelines and to keep track of measurements. I like to think of the first measurement as the first Initiative. The shepherd proactively approaches people to share their OKRs ideas, provides feedback how to improve OKRs (e.g. to balance quantitative with qualitative Key Results), and if necessary sanctions laggards.

Chances are, your first OKRs are overly ambitious. Two reasons for this are:

Another common trap is to define tasks as Key Results. Sure, a completed task looks like you have achieved a milestone and you have made progress. But typically if you would stop there, there would be no outcome and no value without completing at least one additional task. Tasks are Initiatives and don’t work as Key Results (see section "What Everyone Gets Wrong About Key Results" in How to write great OKRs).

That’s why it makes sense to create a checklist and apply it to your OKRs, gradually adapting the checklist to your needs. My organization’s OKR checklist might provide a starting point.

Transparency trumps. If you want OKRs to be discussed by most organization members at least on a weakly basis they need to be easily accessible. And simple to manage. Even though the simplest possible solution to keep track of OKRs is a central spreadsheet, invite the CoP to evaluate different OKR tools.

Our tool evaluation criteria were mostly usability: Does the tool provide a good overview of all OKRs and make it simple to link them? How easy is it to enter and update OKRs? Can you import Key Results measurements from a spreadsheat or update them by API calls?

Whenever someone makes significant progress this deserves public appreciation. That’s why it makes sense to test some ideas how to celebrate success before scaling OKRs to the entire organization.

You might even use the opportunity to turn the negative conotation of failure to the positive by celebrating learnings, changing the culture of your organization to embrace experiments, take risks, and continuously learn.