22_okrs.md

Measure What Matters

Features of the System

• Focus

  • can't have too many objectives

• Accountability

  • measurable

• Transparency

  • Focus areas
  • Results

• Top-down + Bottoms-up

  • Planners don't have the knowledge. Top tell you what, bottom tells you how.

• Continuous Improvement

  • What can we learn from our 'failures'?

Steps

• What objectives does the company want to achieve by when?
• Key results we want (how)
• Get each manager to come up with how to achieve those results
  • Filters down the layers
• Allocate people
• Announce the goals, KRs, etc. to the company
• Track progress within the time period
• Objective scoring, subjective self-assessment, and reflection
• Announce at the end of the time period how we did + reflection

OKRs

• OKRs have two variants (Goog)

  • 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,
  • aspirational OKRs express how we’d like the world to look, even though we have no clear idea how

• Traps in OKR setting

  • TRAP #1: Failing to differentiate between committed and aspirational OKRs.
  • TRAP #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.
  • TRAP #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
  • TRAP #4: Sandbagging. A team’s committed OKRs should credibly consume most but not all of their available resources.
  • TRAP #5: Low Value Objectives (aka the “Who cares?” OKR). OKRs must promise clear business value
  • TRAP #6: Insufficient KRs for committed Os. OKRs are divided into the desired 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.

• The single most important element for OKR success is conviction and buy-in by the organization’s leaders.

Constituent portions

• Objectives

  • WHAT is to be achieved.
  • When communicating: Leaders must get across the why as well as the what.
  • should be significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational.
  • when setting objectives, ask why a lot
  • A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most.
  • The successful achievement of an objective must provide clear value for the company

• KRs

  • Effective KRs are specific and time-bound, aggressive yet realistic. Most of all, they are measurable and verifiable.
  • In general, each objective should be tied to five or fewer key results.
  • Stretch goals
  • Pair key results—to measure “both effect and counter-effect”
  • 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”
  • It is critical that KRs are written such that scoring 1.0 on all key results generates a 1.0 score for the objective.

Related Policies and Behavior

• Decouple OKR from Perf. Bonus

  • To avoid sandbagging and encourage risk taking

• Accountability: Every OKR has a single owner

• The guidance for OKRs at Google was often top-down, but with lots of discussion with experts on the team and significant give-and-take on key results: This is the direction we want to go, now tell us how you’re going to get there.

Benefits

• Focus

• By clearing a line of sight to everyone’s objectives, OKRs expose redundant efforts

• Benefits of ambition:

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

• But I think they’re missing an opportunity to teach people how to be executives before the company scales. So OKRs forge your people. They mint stronger executives and help them avoid rookie mistakes. They implant the rigor and rhythm of a very large company into the framework of a very small

• But OKRs get people to think, Oh yeah, we’re working together on this, we’re working together on everything.

Underlying Problems

• 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.

• He used a metaphor called the Big Rocks Theory, which was popularized by Stephen Covey. 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

Reference

Google OKR Playbook

CFRs

• Annual performance reviews are costly, exhausting, and mostly futile. On average, they swallow 7.5 hours of manager time for each direct report. Yet only 12 percent of HR leaders deem the process “highly effective” in driving business value. Only 6 percent think it’s worth the time it takes.

• Five critical areas have emerged of conversation between manager and contributor:

  • Goal setting and reflection, where the employee’s OKR plan is set for the coming cycle.

    • How are your OKRs coming along?
    • What critical capabilities do you need to be successful?
    • Is there anything stopping you from attaining your objectives?
    • What OKRs need to be adjusted—or added, or eliminated—in light of shifting 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.

    • What are you getting from me that you find helpful?
    • What are you getting from me that impedes your ability to be effective?
    • What could I do for you that would help you to be more
    • If the contributor is underperforming, how should he or she course-correct? If the contributor is performing well or exceeding expectations, what can I do to sustain a high level of performance without burnout? When is the contributor most engaged? When is the contributor least engaged?
    • What strengths does the contributor bring to the work? What types of learning experience might benefit this contributor?
    • Over the next six months, what should the contributor’s focus be? Meeting expectations in his or her current role? Maximizing contributions in the current role? Or preparing for the next opportunity—be it a new project, expanded responsibility, or new role?

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

    • To tease out a contributor’s career aspirations, a manager might ask:
      • What skills or capabilities would you like to develop to improve in your current role?
      • In what areas do you want to grow to achieve your career goals? What skills or capabilities would you like to develop for a future role?
      • From a learning, growth, and development standpoint, how can I and the company help you get there?
    • What part of your job most excites you? What (if any) aspect of your role would you like to change?
    • I like to start with three questions: What makes you very happy? What saps your energy? How would you describe your dream job?

  • Lightweight performance reviews

• Recognition:

  • Recognize people for actions and results: completion of special projects, achievement of company goals, demonstrations of company values.
  • Institute peer-to-peer recognition. When employee achievements are consistently recognized by peers, a culture of gratitude is born.
  • Anyone can cheer anyone else’s goal, irrespective of title or department. And mark this: Every cheer is a step toward operating excellence, the crowning purpose of OKRs and CFRs.

• In Project Aristotle, an internal Google study of 180 teams, 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
  • 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?

Misc. points

• Decision making:

  • "The best way to solve a management problem, he believed, was through “creative confrontation”—by facing people “bluntly, directly, and unapologetically."
  • “leave our stripes outside when we go into a meeting.” Every big decision, he believed, should begin with a “free discussion stage . . . an inherently egalitarian process.”

• "John, venture capital, that’s not a real job. It’s like being a real estate agent."

• Operation Crush:

  • Crush teams were dispatched to field offices around the globe. By the second quarter, Intel’s salespeople had fully deployed the new strategy. By the third quarter, they were on their way toward meeting one of the most daring objectives in the history of tech: two thousand “design wins,” the crucial agreements for clients to put the 8086 in their appliances and devices. By the end of that calendar year, they’d routed the enemy and won a resounding victory.
  • Not one Intel product was modified for Crush.
  • They stopped selling to programmers and started selling to CEOs.

• The single greatest motivator is ‘making progress in one’s work.

• John Dewey: “We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience.”

GS Concerns

• Objectives come from ~ nowhere:
  • The main key result: “Chrome reaches 20 million seven-day active users.”
  • Reach 1 billion hours of watch time per day [by 2016] ... While one billion daily hours sounded like an awful lot, it represented less than 20 percent of the world’s total television watch time.