And six signs that your team is ready to go ahead with them

Objectives and Key Results, long for, OKRs. The management team doesn’t leave a chance to implement them every year. Everyone gets to set targets for the year and then some more, labeled as “stretched” targets. OKRs setting and chasing can be fun for some people but can also cause a feeling of dreadfulness in some.

OKRs, at their best, are ambitious yet largely uncomfortable targets designed by Google. They were designed to be measurable and are made public by every team. Unlike what most companies believe, OKRs are supposed to be only 60–70% achieved, yet they won’t get labeled as a failed attempt. Lastly, OKRs shouldn’t get treated as a to-do list or benchmarks 🎯 used against employees during performance evaluations.

When your team is dreading setting up OKRs

Short Sumary: When OKRs are setup the wrong way and become the daily driver of your team’s performance then they start to drain your team’s energy. It becomes a tool that drives yearly performance discussions and kills collaboration rather than fostering it.

Performance management

OKRs should never be tied to yearly performance management. It’s a rookie mistake in my experience. Instead, performance management measures the level at which a designer or product manager is performing — are they asking the right questions, building the right things, detail orientation, stakeholder sync, and collaborating with fellow team members. Unfortunately, some managers feel that OKR completion means that an employee is performing or else they are not. Hence, they assign individual OKRs and not team-level OKRs.

Playing it safe

OKRs should be communicated and built in a way that these things shouldn’t be happening:

• People are afraid to fail or make a mistake.
• Because they are so scared to fail, they only play it safe.
• Since failure is not an option, people dig deep holes around targets, making it too hard to pivot when things aren’t working out.

Less collab

Teams perform well when they are collaborating and building with each other. Nothing good comes out when making in a silo. Yet, when OKRs become the deciding factor of one’s performance or promotion at year-end, you’ll see less collaboration happen because it would mean a person didn’t work on a goal entirely 😭. With less collab comes the following:

• OKRs and people tacked onto projects.
• Teams don’t find it fulfilling to work together.
• Units are time-boxed to commit to OKRs and commit without making calculations. Follow the leader and do what they say.

Checkbox approach

Once an OKR becomes simply a checkbox to be ticked during the year, teams will start losing focus and the drive to move forward with product iterations and improvements. OKRs will:

• Stop holding any meaning in the long run.
• OKRs will become a checkbox of sorts to be ticked as quick as possible
• Teams will mold reality and find hacks to get the box ✅.
• Ultimately, that is a performance theatre 🎭 of Gladiators trying to move and complete targets as quickly as possible. Only to get more 🍪 points.

Process-driven

If the OKRs are process-driven, then they:

• First, start working for us, the people, instead of working for us.
• Follow a linear or broken process even though it doesn’t need to be followed in every instance.
• Lastly, people try to quantify and measure everything. Because it is not a goal or an OKR if it’s not measurable, right?

When OKRs compliments your team’s strengths

Short Sumary: When OKRs are setup the right way people who the answer to the 5-Whys, they know what a good solutions looks like and how much they need to stretch. Good team culture is fostered and OKRs become the key to unlock focus, clarity and problem solving among some of the many key qualities that the teams display.

Focus

When done right, OKRs drive focus, and people know their problem, who they are solving for, and when it looks like it is solved. Teams are motivated to complete and focus on a few key goals, not everything under the sky.

Clarity

Clearer thinking and brevity are a gift when teams know what they are driving towards. You’ll see the members following a disciplined approach and proactively involving others in the process.

• With clarity, goal setting gets easier with practice.
• Teams become more realistic about the impact and, most importantly, where to make it to make the needle move (even if a little).
• Since goals are team-based and teams can commit to what and when they are comfortable, forecasting and alignment become simple parts of the whole process and not an additional burden.

Problem formulation

Product leaders do not just set OKRs; they are set for the entire team by everyone in the group (that understands the topic). Hence, you’ll see that you can question team members using the five-whys framework, and the answers are easy. In addition, since the problem statements and reasoning are imbibed in the teams, it is much easier to get the big picture across.

Early resolution

• Misunderstandings were resolved earlier since team building and collaboration are vital traits that were encouraged from Day ZERO.
• Conflicts happen more diminutive, and teams are not competing or even among the team members.

Flexible problem solving

• Problem-solving comes easy, and teams have more leeway regarding how they want to solve problems. As a result, everything is not solution-driven; it is problem-driven.

“It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

— Steve Jobs

• Since the problem statement and who you are solving for getting established, teams won’t get driven to solve for everyone and do everything available. They are not trying to build all the features in the competition rooster and overwhelm the users.
• The overall decision-making process doesn’t look too top-down-driven. Micromanagement is not encouraged nor celebrated. Instead, management takes care of people and business issues while teams focus on solving critical problems.
• Squads and Tribes behave and move forward like a mini startup. Since they act less like delivery-centric teams, cross collab between gangs happens more often, and people are encouraged to give each other a hand in case someone falls behind. It gets achieved when goals are not individually based.

Worry-free roadmaps

Lastly, roadmaps are integral to goal setting, NCTs and OKRs. But if done well, teams worry less about every little item on the roadmap. Instead, the obsession is more significant with the item-based movement and more with the overall progress the team is moving. After all, who cares if all goals get completed when some of the critical ones get done with the utmost efficiency, and you have a long list of happy customers and investors ready to assist you to the next stage of the product?

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