• A corporation should be a community "built on trust and respect for the workers—not just a profit machine."
• management by objectives (MBOs)
  • At many companies, goals were centrally planned and sluggishly trickled down the hierarchy.
  • At others, they became stagnant for lack of frequent updating;
  • or trapped and obscured in silos;
  • or reduced to key performance indicators (KPIs), numbers without soul or context.
• Most deadly of all, MBOs were commonly tied to salaries and bonuses.

• Andy Grove's quantum leap was to apply manufacturing production principles to the "soft professions", the administrative, professional, and managerial ranks.
• He sought to
  • "create an environment that values and emphasizes output"
  • avoid what Drucker termed the "activity trap": "[S]tressing output is the key to increasing productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite."
• Grove wrestled with two riddles:
  • How can we define and measure output by knowledge workers?
  • And what can be done to increase it?
• At Intel,
  • Andy recruited "aggressive introverts" in his own image, people who solved problems quickly, objectively, systematically, and permanently.
  • Following his lead, they were skilled at confronting a problem without attacking the person.
  • They set politics aside to make faster, sounder, more collective decisions.

• In nearly every respect, the new method (OKRs) negated the old (MBOs):

  MBOs	Intel OKRs
  "What"	"What" and "How"
  Annual	Quarterly or Monthly
  Private and Siloed	Public and Transparent
  Top-down	Bottom-up or Sideways (~50%)
  Tied to Compensation	Mostly Divorced from Compensation
  Risk Averse	Aggressive and Aspirational

• I'd never worked at a place where you wrote down your goals, much less where you could see everybody else's, on up to the CEO.
  • I found it illuminating, a beacon of focus.
  • And it was liberating, too.
    • When people came to me mid-quarter with requests to draft new data sheets, I felt I could say no without fear of repercussion.
    • My OKRs backed me.
    • They spelled out my priorities for all to see.
• Through the Andy Grove era, OKRs were Intel’s lifeblood.
  • They stood front and center at weekly one-on-ones, biweekly staff meetings, monthly and quarterly divisional reviews.
  • That was how Intel managed tens of thousands of people to etch a million lines of silicon or copper to within a millionth of a meter in accuracy.

• The essence of a healthy OKR culture:
  • ruthless intellectual honesty
  • a disregard for self-interest
  • deep allegiance to the team
• Lessons learned
  • Less is more (4 Superpower #1: Focus and Commit to Priorities)
  • Set goals from the bottom up (7 Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork)
  • No dictating (7 Superpower #2: Align and Connect for Teamwork)
  • Stay flexible (10 Superpower #3: Track for Accountability)
  • Dare to fail (12 Superpower #4: Stretch for Amazing)
  • A tool, not a weapon (15 Continuous Performance Management: OKRs and CFRs)
  • Be patient; be resolute
    • 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.

• I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people walk out of meetings saying, “I’m going to conquer the world” . . . and three months later, nothing has happened.
• You get people whipped up with enthusiasm, but they don’t know what to do with it.
• In a crisis, you need a system that can drive transformation—quickly.
• That’s what the key result system did for Intel.
• It gave management a tool for rapid implementation.
  • And when people reported on what they’d gotten done, we had black-and-white criteria for assessment.
• Crush was a thoroughly cascaded set of OKRs, heavily driven from the top, but with input from below.
  • 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.”

• Culture counts
  • Andy always wanted people to bring problems to management’s attention.
  • A field engineer tells his general manager, “You turkeys don’t understand what’s happening in the market,” and within two weeks, the whole company is realigned, top to bottom.
• Crisis and different companies
  • Bad companies are destroyed by crisis
  • Good companies survive them
  • Great companies are improved by them

• For organization-level OKRs, the buck stops with senior leadership. They must personally commit to the process.
• The most powerful and energizing OKRs often originate with frontline contributors.

• Regardless of how leaders choose a company's top-line goals, they also need goals of their own.

  "When you're the CEO or the founder of a company ... you've got to say 'This is what we're doing,' and then you have to model it. Because if you don't model it, no one's going to do it."

• For sound decision making, esprit de corps, and superior performance, top-line goals must be clearly understood throughout the organization.
• Yet by their own admission, two of three companies fail to communicate these goals consistently.
  • In a survey of eleven thousand senior executives and managers, a majority couldn’t name their company’s top priorities.
  • Only half could name even one.
• 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.

• And the process can't stop with unveiling top-line OKRs at a quarterly all-hands meeting.

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

• Objectives and key results are the yin and yang of goal setting—principle and practice, vision and execution.
  • Objectives are the stuff of inspiration and far horizons.
  • 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
    • To make reliable progress, a manager must be able to measure performance and results against the goal
• If an objective is well framed, three to five KRs will usually be adequate to reach it
  • Too many (KRs) can dilute focus and obscure progress
• Besides, each key result should be a challenge in its own right
  • if you're certain you're going to nail it, you're probably not pushing hard enough

• Since OKRs are a shock to the established order, it may make sense to ease into them
• The best practice may be a parallel, dual cadence, with short-horizon OKRs (for the here and now) supporting annual OKRs and longer-term strategies
• Keep in mind, though, that it’s the shorter-term goals that drive the actual work.
• Clear-cut time frames intensify our focus and commitment;
  • nothing moves us forward like a deadline.
• To win in the global marketplace, organizations need to be more nimble than ever before
  • In my experience, a quarterly OKR cadence is best suited to keep pace with today’s fast-changing markets.
  • A three-month horizon curbs procrastination and leads to real performance gains.

  • High Output Management

    For the feedback to be effective, it must be received very soon after the activity it is measuring occurs. Accordingly, an [OKR] system should set objectives for a relatively short period. For example, if we plan on a yearly basis, the corresponding [OKR] time should be at least as often as quarterly or perhaps even monthly.

• The best OKR cadence is the one that fits the context and culture of your business.

• Ford's Example

  The specific, challenging goals were met (speed to market, fuel
  efficiency, and cost) at the expense of other important features that
  were not specified (safety, ethical behavior, and company reputation)
  

• 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"

Don't allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.

• Remember that an OKR can be modified or even scrapped at any point in its cycle.
• Sometimes the "right" key results surface weeks or months after a goal is put into play.
• A few goal-setting ground rules:
  1. Key results should be succinct, specific, and measurable
  2. A mix of outputs and inputs is helpful
  3. Completion of all key results must result in attainment of the objective. If not, it's not an OKR

Innovation means saying no to one thousand things

• In most cases, the ideal number of quarterly OKRs will range between three and five.
  • Too many objectives can blur our focus on what counts, or distract us into chasing the next shiny thing.
• For individuals, selective goal setting is the first line of defense against getting overextended.
  • How does the new goal stack up against my existing ones?
  • Should something be dropped to make room for the new commitment?
  • What matters most?
• We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.

• Above all, top-line objectives must be significant

  The art of management, 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.

  Winning organizations need to "put more wood behind fewer arrows."

• According to the Harvard Business Review, companies with highly aligned employees are more than twice as likely to be top performers.
• Studies suggest that only 7 percent of employees "fully understand their company's business strategies and what's expected of them in order to help achieve the common goals."
  • Everything seems important; everything seems urgent. But what really needs to get done?
• As a species, we crave connection.
  • In the workplace, we're naturally curious about what our leaders are doing and how our work weaves into theirs.
  • OKRs are the vehicle of choice for vertical alignment.

• Cascaded goals corral lower-level employees and guarantee that they're working on the company's chief concerns
• Follow along as we cascade a set of OKRs from top to bottom

• With our top-level OKRs set, we work our way down the organization.

  • Objective (WHAT): Make $ for (football club) owner
  • Key results (HOW)
    • Win Super Bowl
    • Fill home stands to 90%+

  • As general manager, I cascade my goal down to the next level of management,
  • My key results become their objectives.
• In moderation, cascading makes an operation more coherent.
• But when all objectives are cascaded, the process can degrade into a mechanical, color-by-numbers exercise, with four adverse effects:
  1. A loss of agility
     • Even medium-size companies can have six or seven reporting levels.
     • As everyone waits for the waterfall to trickle down from above, and meetings and reviews sprout like weeds, each goal cycle can take weeks or even months to administer.
     • Tightly cascading organizations tend to resist fast and frequent goal setting.
     • Implementation is so cumbersome that quarterly OKRs may prove impractical.
  2. A lack of flexibility
     • Since it takes so much effort to formulate cascaded goals, people are reluctant to revise them mid-cycle.
     • Even minor updates can burden those downstream, who are scrambling to keep their goals aligned.
     • Over time, the system grows onerous to maintain.
  3. Marginalized contributors
     • Rigidly cascaded systems tend to shut out input from frontline employees.
     • In a top-down ecosystem, contributors will hesitate to share goal-related concerns or promising ideas.
  4. One-dimensional linkages
     • While cascading locks in vertical alignment, it's less effective in connecting peers horizontally, across departmental lines.

• Precisely because OKRs are transparent, they can be shared without cascading them in lockstep.
  • an objective might jump from the CEO straight to a manager, or from a director to an individual contributor.
  • Or the company's leadership might present its OKRs to everyone at once and trust people to say, “Okay, now I see where we're going, and I'll adapt my goals to that.”
• To avoid compulsive, soul-killing overalignment, healthy organizations encourage some goals to emerge from the bottom up.
  • Innovation tends to dwell less at the center of an organization than at its edges.

  • The most powerful OKRs typically stem from insights outside the C-suite.

    • People in the trenches are usually in touch with impending changes early.
      • Salespeople understand shifting customer demands before management does;
      • financial analysts are the earliest to know when the fundamentals of a business change

• Micromanagement is mismanagement
  • A healthy OKR environment strikes a balance between
    • alignment and autonomy,
    • common purpose and creative latitude.
  • An optimal OKR system frees contributors to set at least
    • some of their own objectives
    • most or all of their key results
  • When our how is defined by others, the goal won't engage us to the same degree.
    • People who choose their destination will own a deeper awareness of what it takes to get there.
  • In business, I have found, there is rarely a single right answer.
    • By loosening the reins and backing people to find their right answers, we help everybody win.
• High-functioning teams thrive on a creative tension between top-down and bottom-up goal setting, a mix of aligned and unaligned OKRs.
  • In times of operational urgency, when simple doing takes precedence, organizations may choose to be more directive.
  • But when the numbers are strong and a company has grown too cautious and buttoned-up, a lighter touch may be just right.
  • When leaders are attuned to the fluctuating needs of both the business and their employees, the mix of top-down and bottom-up goals generally settles at around half-and-half.

• Even as modern goal setting successfully transcends the org chart, unacknowledged dependencies remain the number one cause of project slippage.
  • The cure is lateral, cross-functional connectivity, peer-to-peer and team-to-team.
  • For innovation and advanced problem solving, isolated individuals cannot match a connected group.
• Connected companies are quicker companies.
  • To grab a competitive advantage, both leaders and contributors need to link up horizontally, breaking through barriers.

  • When goals are public and visible to all, a "team of teams" can attack trouble spots wherever they surface.

    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.

• Alignment is about helping people understand what you want them to do.
• Without buy-in from the engineers, the OKR was doomed before it started
• Each quarter our department heads presented their goals and identified dependencies. No one left the room until we'd answered some basic questions:
  1. Are we meeting everyone's needs for buy-in?
  2. Is a team overstretched?
  3. If so, how can we make their objectives more realistic?
• Alignment doesn't mean redundancy
  • At MyFitnessPal, every OKR has a single owner, with other teams linking up as needed.
    • co-ownership weakens accountability
    • If an OKR fails, I don’t want two people blaming each other.
    • Even when two or more teams have parallel objectives, their key results should be distinct.
• Each time we went through the OKR process, we did a little better.
  • Our objectives got more precise,
  • our key results more measurable,
  • our achievement rate higher.

• There were unacknowledged dependencies wherever we looked.
  • Nor could anyone see how their targets might align with our own growth objectives, much less the bigger company picture.
• “If we take this one off the road map this quarter, what happens? Would it really affect the user experience?”
  • More often than not, the feature in question wouldn’t make a big difference.
  • These calls are not subjective; we have metrics to measure impact.
• Focus and alignment are binary stars.
  • It couldn’t happen until we openly admitted, “Look, we can’t get all of these things done. We have to choose.”

• The larger the organization, the more value the system offers.
• alignment contains a deeper meaning.
  • Beyond making objectives more consistent within a company,
  • It’s about keeping your goals true to your North Star values.
  • Every decision we make needs to square with our vision.
    • When we face a trade-off between our customers and a business goal, we align with the customer.
    • When an objective seems out of line with our mantra, it gets extra scrutiny. Before moving forward, we make sure it lines up with our North Star.

• OKRs can be deployed to even greater effect in the cloud era.
  • At a desktop software company, leaders look at operations through a twentieth-century retail lens.
    • They postmortem sales reports and channel flow.
    • While they do their best to predict where the business might be headed, their line of sight is largely limited to the rearview mirror.
  • By contrast, a cloud-based business wants to know what is happening now.

• It's a dynamic system.
  • You're always adjusting the altitude.
  • "Yes, I want us to focus on that one right now as a top-level objective. When it no longer needs the extra attention, we'll let it drift back down into a KR."
• Studies have told us forever that frontline employees thrive when they can see how their work aligns to the company's overall goals.
  • Thanks to structured, visible goal setting, our boundaries have melted away.

• the best idea should win, not the biggest title,
• OKRs have opened our department horizontally, across teams.
  • Now, with horizontally transparent OKRs, our engineers intentionally connect as they link to each other's objectives.
  • We're trending away from senior committee mandates and toward real autonomy.
    • Our EBS leaders still set the context, ask the big questions, and furnish relevant data.
    • But it's our interconnected groups whose insights are propelling us forward—together.

• If you share a goal that nobody sees, is the system truly transparent?
• Without frequent status updates, goals slide into irrelevance;
  • the gap between plan and reality widens by the day.
  • At quarter's end (or worse, year's end), we're left with zombie OKRs, on-paper what s and how s devoid of life or meaning.
• Contributors are most engaged when they can actually see how their work contributes to the company's success.
• OKRs speak to something more powerful, the intrinsic value of the work itself.
• As the bar for structured goal setting rises, more organizations are adopting robust, dedicated, cloud-based OKR management software.
  • The best-in-class platforms feature mobile apps, automatic updating, analytics reporting tools, real-time alerts, and integration with Salesforce, JIRA, and Zendesk.
  • These platforms deliver transformative OKR values:
    • They make everyone's goals more visible.
    • They drive engagement.
      • When you know you're working on the right things, it's easier to stay motivated.
    • They promote internal networking.
    • They save time, money, and frustration.
      • In conventional goal setting, hours are wasted digging for documentation in meeting notes, emails, Word documents, and PowerPoint slides.
      • With an OKR management platform, all relevant information is ready when you are.
  • The upshot, Pence says, was radical transparency, real-time connection, and a company that coordinated operations as a matter of course.

• For an OKR system to function effectively, the team deploying it must adopt it universally
• A best practice is to designate one or more OKR shepherds

• Research suggests that making measured headway can be more incentivizing than public recognition, monetary inducements, or even achieving the goal itself.
  • The single greatest motivator is "making progress in one's work"
  • The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged
• Most goal management platforms use visual aids to show progress toward objectives and key results.

• OKRs don't require daily tracking. But regular check-ins—preferably weekly—are essential to prevent slippage.

  Without an action plan, the executive becomes a prisoner of
  events. And without check-ins to reexamine the plan as events unfold,
  the executive has no way of knowing which events really matter and
  which are only noise
  

• the simple act of writing down a goal increases your chances of reaching it.
  • Your odds are better still if you monitor progress while sharing the goal with colleagues
  • In one California study, people who recorded their goals and sent weekly progress reports to a friend attained 43 percent more of their objectives than those who merely thought about goals without sharing them.
• As we track and audit our OKRs, we have four options at any point in the cycle:

  Continue

  If a green zone ("on track") goal isn't broken, don't fix it.

  Update

  Modify a yellow zone ("needs attention") key result or objective to respond to changes in the workflow or external environment. What could be done differently to get the goal on track? Does it need a revised time line? Do we back-burner other initiatives to free up resources for this one?

  Start

  Launch a new OKR mid-cycle, whenever the need arises.

  Stop

  When a red zone ("at risk") goal has outlived its usefulness, the best solution may be to drop it

• The point of a real-time dashboard is to
  1. quantify progress against a target
  2. flag what needs attention

     • While OKRs are primarily a positive force for more, they also stop us from persisting in the wrong direction.

       If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster

     • Late-in-game surprises are less likely when you track your OKRs for continuous feedback.
     • Whenever a key result or objective becomes obsolete or impractical, feel free to end it midstream.
     • One proviso:
       • When an objective gets dropped before the end of the OKR interval, it's important to notify everyone depending on it.
       • Then comes reflection:
         • What did I learn that I didn't foresee at the beginning of the quarter?
         • How will I apply this lesson in the future?
• For best results, OKRs are scrutinized several times per quarter by contributors and their managers.
  • Progress is reported,
  • obstacles identified,
  • key results refined.
• Whenever a committed OKR is failing, a rescue plan is devised.

• OKRs do not expire with completion of the work.
• As in any data-driven system, tremendous value can be gained from post hoc evaluation and analysis.
• In both one-on-ones and team meetings, these wrap-ups consist of three parts:
  1. objective scoring
     • In scoring our OKRs, we mark what we've achieved and address how we might do it differently next time.
     • A low score forces reassessment:
       • Is the objective still worth pursuing?
       • If so, what can we change to achieve it?
     • The simplest, cleanest way to score an objective is by averaging the percentage completion rates of its associated key results.
     • Google uses a scale of 0 to 1.0:

       0.7 to 1.0 = green.

       We delivered.

       0.4 to 0.6 = yellow.

       We made progress, but fell short of completion.

       0.0 to 0.3 = red.

       We failed to make real progress.

  2. subjective self-assessment
     • By itself, the data doesn't afford us much insight.
     • Googlers are encouraged to use their OKRs in self-assessments—as guides, not as grades.
     • The point of objectives and key results, after all, is to get everyone working on the right things.
     • In the end, the numbers are probably less important than contextual feedback and a broader discussion within the team.
     • There are no judgments, only learnings.
  3. reflection
     • OKRs are inherently action oriented.
     • In my view, the key to satisfaction is to
       1. set aggressive goals,
       2. achieve most of them,
       3. pause to reflect on the achievement,
       4. and then repeat the cycle.
     • Learning from direct experience can be more effective if coupled with reflection
       • reflection: the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience
       • We do not learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience. - John Dewey
     • 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?
     • OKR wrap-ups are retrospective and forward-looking at the same time.
       • An unfinished objective might be rolled over to the next quarter, with a fresh set of key results
       • or perhaps its moment has passed, and it is appropriately dropped.
       • Either way, sound management judgment comes first.
     • Throw a party with the team to celebrate your growing OKR superpowers. You've earned it.

• When a goal is too aspirational, it's bad for credibility.
• I see people confusing objectives with missions all the time.
  • A mission is directional.
  • An objective has a set of concrete steps that you're intentionally engaged in and actually trying to go for.
• Having a good mission is not enough.
  • You need a concrete objective,
  • and you need to know how you're going to get there.
• OKRs allowed us to be ambitious and disciplined at the same time.

• Google divides its OKRs into two categories,
  1. committed goals
     • tied to Google's metrics:
       • product releases,
       • bookings,
       • hiring,
       • customers.
     • Management sets them at the company level, employees at the departmental level.
     • In general, these committed objectives are to be achieved in full (100 percent) within a set time frame.
  2. aspirational (or “stretch”) goals.
     • reflect bigger-picture, higher-risk, more future-tilting ideas.
     • They originate from any tier and aim to mobilize the entire organization.
     • By definition, they are challenging to achieve.
• The relative weighting of these two baskets is a cultural question.
  • It will vary from one organization to the next, and from quarter to quarter.
  • Leaders must ask themselves:
    • What type of company do we need to be in the coming year?
      • Agile and daring, to crack a new market
      • or more conservative and operational, to firm up our existing position
    • Are we in survival mode, or is there cash on hand to bet big for a big reward?
    • What does our business require, right now?

• Hierarchy of needs
  • some people, with no prompting, were consistently driven to “try to test the outer limits of their abilities” and achieve their “personal best.” These employees were a manager’s dream; they were never self-satisfied.
  • not everyone was a natural-born achiever.
    • “stretched” goals could elicit maximum output:
    • “Such goal-setting is extremely important if you want peak performance from yourself and your subordinates.”

• Most people, Larry Page observes, “tend to assume that things are impossible, rather than starting from real-world physics and figuring out what’s actually possible.”
• a ten percent improvement means that you’re doing the same thing as everybody else.
  • You probably won’t fail spectacularly,
  • but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly.
• Thousand percent improvement requires rethinking problems, exploring what’s technically possible and having fun in the process.
• At the start of the period, not a single goal may look possible. And so the Googlers are pushed to ask harder questions:
  • What radical, high-risk action needs to be considered?
  • What do they need to stop doing?
  • Where can they move resources or find new partners?

• In pursuing high-effort, high-risk goals, employee commitment is essential
• Leaders must convey two things:
  1. The importance of the outcome
  2. The belief that it's attainable
• The greater the margin for error, the more a company can extend itself.
• If you seek to achieve greatness, stretching for amazing is a great place to start.
  • How can your team create maximum value?
  • What would amazing look like?

• But by no means, is it the place to stop

  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.

• Google Toolbar

• By 2006, we were beginning to rethink the browser as a computing platform, almost like an operating system, so that people could write applications on the web itself. That fundamental insight gave birth to Chrome.
• If Chrome wasn't going to be dramatically different and better and faster than the traditional browsers already on the market, there was no point in moving ahead.
  • a top-level annual objective that would have an enduring influence on Google's future: to "develop the next-generation client platform for web applications."
  • The main key result: "Chrome reaches 20 million seven-day active users."

• Larry was always good about upping the goals for the company OKRs.
  • "uncomfortably excited."
  • "a healthy disregard for the impossible."
• As a leader, you must try to challenge the team without making them feel the goal is unachievable.
  • Our stretch OKR gave the team direction and a barometer to measure our progress.

• Sometimes a stretch goal is not as wildly aspirational as it may seem.
• Stretch OKRs are an intense exercise in problem solving.
• They (OKRs) give us clear, quantitative targets on the road to those qualitative leaps.
  • when you set a measurable objective for the year and chunk the problem, quarter by quarter, moonshots become more doable.

• OKRs are the way we think about everything at Google, the way we've always done it.

• At Google, from very early on, I internalized the need to constantly imagine the next frontier—from Toolbar to Chrome, for example.
• You can never stop stretching.

• Engineers struggle with goal setting in two big ways.
  1. They hate crossing off anything they think is a good idea,
  2. they habitually underestimate how long it takes to get things done.
• It took discipline for people to narrow their lists to three or four objectives for their team, but it made a huge difference.
  • Our OKRs became more rigorous.
  • Everybody knew what counted most.

• a metaphor called (to bring focus to the whole company)

  Say you have some rocks, and a bunch of pebbles, and some sand, and your goal is to fit as much of everything as you can into a wide-mouth, one-gallon jar. If you start with the sand, and then the pebbles, the jar will run out of room for all the rocks. But when you start with the rocks, add the pebbles, and save the sand for last, the sand fills the spaces between the rocks—everything fits.

  • In other words, the most important things need to get done first or they won't get done at all.

The true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention (In a world where computing power is nearly limitless)

• YouTube needed a new core metric.
• It's a virtuous circle: More satisfied viewership (watch time) begets more advertising, which incentivizes more content creators, which draws more viewership.
• Our true currency wasn't views or clicks—it was watch time.

• YouTube's mission was fundamentally divergent (from Google Search's).
• Our job was to keep people engaged and hanging out with us.

• OBJECTIVE: Reach 1 billion hours of watch time per day [by 2016], with growth driven by:
• KEY RESULTS
  • Search team + Main App (+XX%), Living Room (+XX%).
  • Grow kids’ engagement and gaming watch time (X watch hours per day).
  • Launch YouTube VR experience and grow VR catalog from X to Y videos.

• Stretch goals can be crushing if people don't believe they're achievable

• The art of framing (There was another thing out there way bigger than us, and we were trying to scale up to it.)

  While one billion daily hours sounded like an awful lot, it
  represented less than 20 percent of the world’s total television watch
  time.
  

• In pursuing our mission over the next four years, we weren't 10x absolutists.
  • cut down on click bait,
  • reflected our principle of growing responsibly.
• Once the billion-hour BHAG was set, however, we never did anything without measuring impact on watch time.

• Maybe the best thing about OKRs is how they track your progress to a target, especially when you're behind schedule.
  • The updates were opportunities to gather the leadership team and say, “Okay, I want each of you to name five projects you can implement to bring us closer to our goal.”

• Stretch OKRs tend to set powerful forces into motion, and you can never be sure where they’ll lead.

• Everybody started thinking bigger (under a stretch OKR)
• People need a benchmark to know how they're performing against it. The catch is to find the right one.

• We're at the point where nearly every HR custom needs to be reimagined.

• Annual Performance Management Versus Continuous Performance Management

  Annual Performance Management	Continuous Performance Management
  Annual feedback	Continuous feedback
  Tied to compensation	Decoupled from compensation
  Directing/autocratic	Coaching/democratic
  Outcome focused	Process focused
  Weakness based	Strength based
  Prone to bias	Fact driven

1. one-on-one conversations
   • Monthly
   • between employees and their managers
   • about how things are going.
2. review of progress against our OKRs.
   • Quarterly
   • What did you set out to accomplish this quarter?
   • What were you able to do—and what weren't you able to do?
   • Why or why not?
   • What can we change?
3. professional development conversation.
   • semiannual
   • Employees talk about their career trajectory
     • where they've been,
     • where they are,
     • where they want to go.
   • how their managers and the organization can support their new direction.
4. self-driven insight.
   • Ongoing

   • We're constantly surrounded by positive reinforcement and feedback, but many of us haven't been trained to seek it out.

     Thank you. What one thing did you like about it?
     

   • The idea is to capture more specific feedback in real time.

• Divorce compensation (both raises and bonuses) from OKRs.
  1. Compensation
     • a backward-looking assessment
     • typically held at year’s end.
  2. OKRs
     • a forward-looking dialogue
     • ongoing
     • between leaders and contributors
     • It centers on five questions
       1. What are you working on?
       2. How are you doing; how are your OKRs coming along?
       3. Is there anything impeding your work?
       4. What do you need from me to be (more) successful?
       5. How do you need to grow to achieve your career goals?
• But when goals are used and abused to set compensation, employees can be counted on to sandbag. And the organization suffers most of all.
  • They start playing defense;
  • They stop stretching for amazing.
  • They get bored for lack of challenge.
• The formula has yet to be invented for complex human behavior, because that’s where human judgment comes in.

• Regular one-on-one meetings between managers and their direct reports
  • The point of the meeting, he (Andy Grove) wrote
    1. mutual teaching
    2. exchange of information
  • A key point about a one-on-one: It should be regarded as the subordinate's meeting,
    • with its agenda and tone set by him
    • the supervisor is there to learn and coach
  • The supervisor should also encourage the discussion of heart-to-heart issues during one-on-ones
    • Is he satisfied with his own performance?
    • Does some frustration or obstacle gnaw at him?
    • Does he have doubts about where he is going?
• Five critical areas

  Goal setting and reflection

  the employee's OKR plan is set for the coming cycle. The discussion focuses on how best to align individual objectives and key results with organizational priorities.

  Ongoing progress updates

  the brief and data-driven check-ins on the employee’s real-time progress, with problem solving as needed.

  Two-way coaching

  to help contributors reach their potential and managers do a better job.

  Career growth

  to develop skills, identify growth opportunities, and expand employees’ vision of their future at the company.

  Lightweight performance reviews

  a feedback mechanism to gather inputs and summarize what the employee has accomplished since the last meeting, in the context of the organization’s needs.

• 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?
• Feedback can be highly constructive—but only if it is specific.
• Feedback is ad hoc, real-time, and multidirectional, an open dialogue between people anywhere in the organization.
• By fostering connections among teams, peer feedback is especially valuable in cross-functional initiatives.
  • When horizontal communication blows open, interdepartmental teamwork becomes the new normal.
  • As OKRs are combined with 360-degree feedback, the silo will soon be a relic of the past.

• Modern recognition is performance-based and horizontal.
• Here are some ways to implement it:
  • Institute peer-to-peer recognition
    • When employee achievements are consistently recognized by peers, a culture of gratitude is born.
  • Establish clear criteria
    • Recognize people for actions and results:
      • completion of special projects
      • achievement of company goals
      • demonstrations of company values
    • Replace “Employee of the Month” with “Achievement of the Month.”
  • Share recognition stories
    • Newsletters or company blogs can supply the narrative behind the accomplishment, giving recognition more meaning.
  • Make recognition frequent and attainable
    • Hail smaller accomplishments, too:
      • that extra effort to meet a deadline,
      • that special polish on a proposal,
    • the little things a manager might take for granted.
  • Tie recognition to company goals and strategies
• OKR platforms are custom-built for peer-to-peer recognition
• Once teams and departments start connecting in this fashion, more and more people get on board, and a recognition engine revs up an entire company.
• Every cheer is a step toward operating excellence, the crowning purpose of OKRs and CFRs.

• 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.

• OKRs are a superb training tool for executives and managers.
  • They teach you how to manage your business within existing limits.
• OKRs can't be effective unless the people at the top are unconditionally committed—like a religious calling.
  • And proselytizing is hard and thankless work.
  • Your people may not like you very much through the adoption curve, which can take up to a year. But it's worth it.

• If we're talking about the intrinsic value of OKRs, what comes before anything is the discipline that they instill in us as co-CEOs.
  • be thoughtful about what we can actually achieve
  • install the same outlook in our executive team and their teams
• Individual contributors -> Managers
  • 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.
      1. Close your eyes to really see what's in front of you,
      2. 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.
  • Most start-ups aren’t too eager to plunge into structured goal setting: We don’t need that. We go super-fast. We just figure stuff out.
    • But I think they’re missing an opportunity to teach people how to be executives before the company scales.
    • If those habits aren’t ingrained early on, one of two things happens:
      1. Unsuccessful companies scale beyond the leadership team’s capacity, and they die.
      2. Successful companies scale beyond the team’s abilities and the team gets replaced.
    • The better way is to train people to think like leaders from the start, when their departments have a staff of one.
• When we implemented OKRs at Zume, the immediate benefit was the process itself.
  • The simple act of forcing people to think about the business —thoughtfully, transparently, interdependently—was a huge accelerant to their performance.

• The OKR framework gives equal voice and weight to each department.
  • No one needs to suffer in silence
    • Truthfully, no one has that option (to be silent)
    • Your objectives will get their turn up on the screen, like everyone else’s, for comment and support.
  • a really good company values different opinions.
    • It mines for dissent, and it finds a way to bring it up to the surface and mine it out.
    • That’s how we foster a meritocracy.
• Before rolling OKRs out to our individual contributors, we put in two full quarters at the exec level. We had to establish the culture first.
• What we’ve found, oddly enough, is that our most active participants are the ones who were initially most skeptical.
  • It felt like bookkeeping, one more administrative exercise.
  • But OKRs had an effect on me I didn’t expect.
    • When I did my biweekly check-ins, it gave me a couple minutes to think about
      1. what I was doing,
      2. how my goals rolled up to what the company needed for the quarter.
    • those OKR meditations helped me reset my compass: How do I contribute to the scheme of things?
      • Then it’s not just another report or campaign or field event.
      • It connects to something bigger and more meaningful.

• From the beginning, the process forced us to clarify who's in charge of what.
  • When something isn't clearly delineated, it shows up right away.
  • You can't miss it.
• When a fly ball is hit between two outfielders, somebody's got to call for it
  • or else the ball drops in,
  • or both people dive for it and crash into each other.

• We used OKRs as a teaching tool to impart a culture of consideration.
  • They make you start thinking reflexively about
    • how the work you're doing affects those around you,
    • how you're dependent on them
• OKRs were our Esperanto, our shared vocabulary.
• When you say instead, “My KR is at risk,” it's less charged and more constructive.
  • In another life, Mike might have called out the manufacturing lead: “What the hell, can you hurry up and get this done? I've been waiting forever!”
  • Since our company has total alignment, the entire team has already agreed to the key result and the dependency it entails.
  • There's no judgment, just a problem to be solved.
  • And guess what else happens? The two leads will advocate for each other to get more resources from Alex and me.
• My deadline's built into a key result.
  • I can see the bigger picture more clearly.
• It's definitely a team-building process.
  • It reminds you that you're a part of this little, weird community.
  • It's easy to get caught up in your own issues, especially when you're working in the kitchen.
  • But OKRs get people to think, Oh yeah, we're working together on this, we're working together on everything.

• Every two weeks, each person at Zume has a one-hour, one-on-one conversation with whomever they report to.
  • You cannot be late;
  • You cannot cancel.
  • You don't talk about work.
    • The agenda is you, the individual,
      1. what you are trying to accomplish personally over the next two to three years,
      2. how you're breaking that into a two-week plan.
    • I like to start with three questions:
      1. What makes you very happy?
      2. What saps your energy?
      3. How would you describe your dream job?

    • Then I say,

      “Look, I want to tell you what my expectations
      are. Number one, always tell the truth. Number two, always do
      the right thing. If you meet those expectations, we'll
      unconditionally back you, one hundred percent of the time. And I
      will personally guarantee you that you're going to achieve your
      next set of personal and professional goals over the next three
      years.”
      

      1. Always tell the truth
      2. Always do the right thing
• People might see this as altruism, but it's actually a powerful way to get people connected to the business—and to keep them from churning out.
  • It gives them insights around obstacles.
    • "This goal seems very important to you, but you didn't make a lot of progress on it the last two weeks. Why is that?"
  • It may seem paradoxical, but these nonwork, touchpoint one-on-ones are a forum for ongoing performance feedback.
  • In talking about people's pursuit of personal goals, you end up learning a lot about what moves them forward—or holds them back—in their careers.
• When you're having regular, deeper conversations, you get a sense of when you need to turn the dial and give people a chance to charge their batteries.
  • After the organization has completed an all-out sprint, you might dial up contributors' time for personal development goals—say, from 5 percent to 15 or 20 percent—the next quarter.
  • It might sound like a huge tax, but it will set up the company's two or three quarters of execution.

• Culture is the common language that allows for individuals in an organization to be sure they're all talking about the same thing—and that what they're talking about has meaning.
• Beyond that, culture establishes a common framework for decision making.
• In its absence, people are at a loss for how to make key functions replicable and scalable.

• Then there's the more aspirational layer of culture: the values conversation.

  • Who do we want to be as an organization?
  • How do we want people to feel about their work, and about our product?
  • What's the impact we want to make on the world?

  OBJECTIVE: Delight customers.
  
  DETAIL:
  Feeding people is a sacred trust. To maintain that trust, we have to
  deliver the very best customer service and the very best food
  quality. To succeed as a business, we must ensure that our customers
  are so happy with our service and product that they have no choice but
  to order more pizza and to rave about the experience with their
  friends.
  
  KEY RESULTS:
  1. Net Promoter Score of 42 or better.
  2. Order Rating of 4.6/5.0 or better.
  3. 75% of customers prefer Zume to competitor in blind taste test.
  

• Every new employee goes through mission and values training as part of their onboarding.

• They were all very different, but one thing they (great leaders) had in common was this cold, sober focus
  • If you sat down with them for twenty minutes, they were completely uncluttered in their thinking.
  • They could drill down very clearly on what needed to be done.
• It can feel a little frenetic at times. But when you know your company objectives like you know your last name, it's very calming.
• OKRs help me to be that focused, clear-headed leader.
  • No matter how crazy things get, I can always default back to what matters.

• People watch what you do more than what you say.
• At each and every culture meeting, we told our employees: “You have the right—no, the obligation—to hold your executive team accountable for what we’re saying our culture should be. If we’re not following through, make an appointment or send an email. Or just walk up to us in the hallway and tell us we are not getting it done.”
• “Why would anybody want to work in an environment with a fear of holding each other accountable?”
• But culture change can be very personal.
  • It took one conversation at a time to convince our employees that collaboration, shared accountability, and transparency would be rewarded.
  • And to show they had nothing to fear from the new Lumeris.
• HR can be a potent vehicle for operating excellence.
  • At the end of the day, culture is about the people you recruit and the values they bring to bear.
• Time is the enemy of transformation
  • That’s typically a three-year process, from start to steady state.
  • When it’s complete, your new culture is assured.

OBJECTIVE
Institute a culture that attracts and retains A players.

KEY RESULTS

1. Focus on hiring A player managers/leaders.
2. Optimize recruitment function to attract A player talent.
3. Scrub all job descriptions.
4. Retrain everyone engaged in the interviewing process.
5. Ensure ongoing mentoring/coaching opportunities.
6. Create a culture of learning for development of new and existing employees.

• Winning our troops over to OKRs wasn’t easy or instantaneous, far from it.
  • Transparency is scary.
  • Admitting your failures—visibly, publicly—can be terrifying.
  • We had to rewire people from how they’d been raised since kindergarten.
• Once you start having honest, vulnerable, two-way conversations with your direct reports,
  • you begin to see what makes them tick.
  • You feel their yearning to connect to things bigger than themselves.
  • You hear their need for recognition that what they’re doing matters.
• Through the open window of objectives and key results,
  • each of you gets to know the other’s weaknesses with no worry of getting caught out.
  • For managers, one particular benefit of OKRs is to lead them to hires who can compensate for their own limitations.
  • They began to realize there was no shame in trying your hardest and failing, not when OKRs help you fail smart and fail fast.

• brutal transparency without judgment
  • In Q3, as OKRs were rolled out to all 800 Lumeris employees, we created our own coaches’ training program.
• Goal setting is more art than science.
  • We weren’t just teaching people how to refine an objective or a measurable key result.
  • We had a cultural agenda, as well
    • Why is transparency important?
      • Why would you want people across other departments to know your goals?
      • And why does what we’re doing matter?
    • What is true accountability?
      • What’s the difference between accountability with respect (for others’ failings) and accountability with vulnerability (for our own)?
    • How can OKRs help managers “get work done through others”?
      • (That’s a big factor for scalability in a growing company.)
      • How do we engage other teams to adopt our objective as a priority and help assure that we reach it?
    • When is it time to stretch a team’s workload—or to ease off on the throttle?
      • When do you shift an objective to a different team member, or rewrite a goal to make it clearer, or remove it completely?
      • In building contributors’ confidence, timing is everything.
  • There is no handbook to address these questions. The wisdom resides in leaders with personal connections to their teams, to managers who can show what success looks like and know when to declare victory. (My advice: Not too soon.)

• “selling your reds” is a unique use of OKRs, and one well worth emulating.
  1. The team votes on the most important at-risk OKRs for the company as a whole,
  2. then brainstorms together as long as it takes to get the objectives back on track
• “OKRs make you focus on working on the business, instead of just working in the business,”

  • Moving from hero culture to team culture

    In the past, Smith said, “You’d hear things like, ‘I’m in delivery,
    you’re in sales, just do your damn job.’ Now it’s more like calling in
    a wide receiver to run a play: ‘I’m here, let me help you.’ That was a
    result of the OKR process I never expected.”
    

• Once people experienced the new company under the surface, they couldn’t resist the temptation to keep diving back into it.

• First you needed to be able to describe it. Then you could climb it.

• We had so many brilliant, gifted people, but our problem was way too many goals
• If you don't have clear sign-offs to your goals, you get overlap and dissonance. People get confused about their jobs.
• We never thought small. The stretch was always there
  • OKRs forced us to think clearly and agree on what we could achieve with the resources we had.
  • They gave us a frame to hang our passion on.
    • And you need that framework because, without it, your brain is just too abstract.
  • The OKR traffic lights, the color coding—they transformed our board meetings.
    • They sharpened our strategy, our execution, our results.
    • They made us a more effective weapon in the fight against extreme poverty.

• Be careful if you think you know what we (the client) want.
  • Because we know what we want.
  • You're not African, and this messiah complex hasn't always turned out so well.

• Nobody has ever before measured activists' passion. It sounds odd, but it's totally OKR. So you're passionate—how passionate? What actions does your passion lead you to do?

• Is there a downside to OKRs?
• if you read them incorrectly, I suppose you could get too organized.
• "If everything's at green, you failed."
  • We needed more big ambitions because that's what we're good at.
  • We're less good at the incremental stuff.
• The OKR framework cultivates the madness, the chemistry contained inside it.
  • It gives us an environment for risk, for trust, where failing 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.

• Poorly done/managed OKRs are a waste of time, an empty management gesture.
• Well done OKRs are a motivational management tool that helps make it clear to teams:
  • what's important,
  • what to optimize,
  • what tradeoffs to make during their day-to-day work.
• Simple rules:
  • Objectives are the "Whats." They:
    • express goals and intents;
    • are aggressive yet realistic;
    • must be tangible, objective, and unambiguous; should be obvious to a rational observer whether an objective has been achieved.
    • The successful achievement of an objective must provide clear value for Google.
  • Key Results are the "Hows." They:
    • express measurable milestones which, if achieved, will advance objective(s) in a useful manner to their constituents;
    • must describe outcomes, not activities.
      • If your KRs include words like "consult," "help," "analyze," or "participate," they describe activities.
      • Instead, describe the end-user impact of these activities: "publish average and tail latency measurements from six Colossus cells by March 7," rather than "assess Colossus latency";
    • must include evidence of completion.
      • This evidence must be available, credible, and easily discoverable.
      • Examples of evidence include change lists, links to docs, notes, and published metrics reports.

• Cross-team OKRs should include all the groups who must materially participate in the OKR, and OKRs committing to each group's contribution should appear explicitly in each such group's OKRs
• For example, if Ads Development and Ads SRE and Network Deployment must deliver to support a new ads service, then all three teams should have OKRs describing their commitment to deliver their part of the project.

Committed OKRs

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

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

• The expected score is 0.7, with high variance

1. Failing to differentiate between committed and aspirational OKRs.
   • Marking a committed OKR as aspirational
     • increases the chance of failure.
     • Teams may not take it seriously and may not change their other priorities to focus on delivering the OKR.
   • Marking an aspirational OKR as committed
     • creates defensiveness in teams who cannot find a way to deliver the OKR
     • invites priority inversion as committed OKRs are de-staffed to focus on the aspirational OKR.
2. Business-as-usual OKRs.
   • OKRs are often written principally based on what the team believes it can achieve without changing anything they're currently doing,
   • as opposed to what the team or its customers really want.
3. Timid aspirational OKRs
   • Aspirational OKRs very often start from the current state and effectively ask, "What could we do if we had extra staff and got a bit lucky?"
     • An alternative and better approach is to start with, "What could my [or my customers'] world look like in several years if we were freed from most constraints?"
     • By definition, you're not going to know how to achieve this state when the OKR is first formulated—that is why it is an aspirational OKR.
     • But without understanding and articulating the desired end state, you guarantee that you are not going to be able to achieve it.

   • The litmus test for timid aspirational OKRs:

     If you ask your customers what they really want, does your aspirational objective meet or exceed their request?

4. Sandbagging
   • A team's committed OKRs should credibly consume most but not all of their available resources.
   • Their committed + aspirational OKRs should credibly consume somewhat more than their available resources. (Otherwise they're effectively commits.)
   • Teams who can meet all of their OKRs without needing all of their team's headcount/capital . . . are assumed to either be hoarding resources or not pushing their teams, or both. This is a cue for senior management to reassign headcount and other resources to groups who will make more effective use of them.
5. Low Value Objectives (aka the "Who cares" OKR)
   • OKRs must promise clear business value—otherwise, there's no reason to expend resources doing them.

   • Low Value Objectives (LVOs) are those for which, even if the Objective is completed with a 1.0, no one will notice or care.

     LVO: Increase task CPU utilization by 3 percent.
     
     Better: Decrease quantity of cores required to serve peak queries by 3
     percent with no change to quality/latency/ . . . and return resulting
     excess cores to the free pool
     

   • The litmus test for LVO:

     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.

       LVO: Launch X
       
       Better: Double fleet-wide Y by launching X to 90+ percent of borg
       cells
       

6. Insufficient KRs for committed Os
   • OKRs are divided into

     the objective

     The desired outcome

     the key results

     The measurable steps required to achieve that outcome

   • It is critical that KRs are written such that scoring 1.0 on all key results generates a 1.0 score for the objective
   • A common error is writing key results that are necessary but not sufficient to collectively complete the objective
     • The error is tempting because it allows a team to avoid the difficult (resource/priority/risk) commitments needed to deliver "hard" key results.
   • This trap is particularly pernicious because it delays both the discovery of the resource requirements for the objective, and the discovery that the objective will not be completed on schedule.

   • The litmus test for Insufficient KRs:

     Is it reasonably possible to score 1.0 on all the key results but still not achieve the intent of the objective?

     • If so, add or rework the key results until their successful completion guarantees that the objective is also successfully completed.

• For committed OKRs
  1. Teams are expected to rearrange their other priorities to ensure an on-schedule 1.0 delivery.
  2. Teams who cannot credibly promise to deliver a 1.0 on a committed OKR must escalate promptly.
     • Escalating in this (common) situation is not only OK, it is required.
     • It allows the team's management to develop options and resolve conflicts.
     • The corollary is that every new OKR is likely to involve some amount of escalation,
       • since it requires a change to existing priorities and commitments.
       • An OKR that requires no changes to any group's activities is a business-as-usual OKR
  3. A committed OKR that fails to achieve a 1.0 by its due date requires a postmortem.
     • This is not intended to punish teams.
     • It is intended to understand what occurred in the planning and/or execution of the OKR, so that teams may improve their ability to reliably hit 1.0 on committed OKRs.
  4. Examples
     1. ensuring that a service meets its SLA (service level agreement) for the quarter;
     2. delivering a defined feature or improvement to an infrastructure system by a set date;
     3. manufacturing and delivering a quantity of servers at a cost point.
• For aspirational OKRs
  • The OKRs' priority should inform team members' decisions on where to spend the remaining time they have after the group's commitments are met.
    • In general, higher priority OKRs should be completed before lower priority OKRs.
  • Aspirational OKRs and their associated priorities should remain on a team's OKR list until they are completed, carrying them forward from quarter to quarter as necessary
    • Dropping them from the OKR list because of lack of progress is a mistake, as it disguises persistent problems of prioritization, resource availability, or a lack of understanding of the problem/solution.
    • Corollary: It is good to move an aspirational OKR to a different team's list if that team has both the expertise and bandwidth to accomplish the OKR more effectively than the current OKR owner.
  • Team managers are expected to assess the resources required to accomplish their aspirational OKRs and ask for them each quarter, fulfilling their duty to express known demand to the business.
    • Managers should not expect to receive all the required resources, however, unless their aspirational OKRs are the highest priority goals in the company after the committed OKRs.

• If you wrote them down in five minutes, they probably aren't good. Think.
• If your objective doesn't fit on one line, it probably isn't crisp enough.
• If your KRs are expressed in team-internal terms ("Launch Foo 4.1"), they probably aren't good.
  • What matters isn't the launch, but its impact.
    • Why is Foo 4.1 important?
  • Better: "Launch Foo 4.1 to improve sign-ups by 25 percent."
  • Or simply: "Improve sign-ups by 25 percent."
• Use real dates.
  • If every key result happens on the last day of the quarter, you likely don't have a real plan.
• Make sure your key results are measurable: It must be possible to objectively assign a grade at the end of the quarter.
  • "Improve sign-ups" isn't a good key result.
  • Better: "Improve daily sign-ups by 25 percent by May 1."
• Make sure the metrics are unambiguous.
  • If you say "1 million users," is that all-time users or seven-day actives?
• If there are important activities on your team (or a significant fraction of its effort) that aren't covered by OKRs, add more.
• For larger groups, make OKRs hierarchical—have high-level ones for the entire team, more detailed ones for subteams. Make sure that the "horizontal" OKRs (projects that need multiple teams to contribute) have supporting key results in each subteam.