Review

The second edition of Radical Focus is one of the better books on implementing OKRs. OKRs are really powerful in the right context. It’s refreshing for a proponent of OKRs to come out and say they’re not useful everywhere. Christina doesn’t recommend their use in operations teams and proposes subtle adaptations of them for exploratory or long-lead-time work. There are many good OKR explainer books, but I feel this one does a great job of describing some of the rough edges and challenges.

Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value:

• A system for getting things done →
  • Pick a goal that is important and inspiring
  • Clarify that goal so it is measurable and well understood
  • Repeat it regularly so everyone continues to pursue the goal
  • Be clear about how you’re working toward the goal each week
  • Dedicate your time to accomplishing it
  • Hold each other accountable
  • Measure progress along the way
  • Adapt if plans if they aren’t working
  • Be ready for failure, ready to learn, and ready to try again

What are OKRs?

• OKRs are a way of setting focused goals that are inspiring and measurable. Combined with a system to keep them top-of-mind they can be used to create focus around a bold goal and achieve it.
• OKRs stands for Objective and Key Results.
  • The objective is what you want to do → e.g. launch a killer game!
  • The key results are how you know if you’ve achieved them → e.g. downloads of 25K/day, revenue 50K EUR/day
• The Objective is a goal for a set period of time. An objective should be:
  • framed in a single sentence
  • qualitative
  • inspirational (get you out of bed in the morning)
  • time bound (usually a quarter)
  • actionable by the team independently (no dependencies)
  • is hard but not impossible in the time frame
• The Key Results are how you know if you’ve achieved your objective at the end. Key results should be:
  • Quantitative
  • Roughly 3 per objective (min 1, max 5)
  • Balancing measures (e.g. user growth, conversion)
  • Difficult not impossible (5/10 confidence, a 50/50 shot of achieving it)
• How do you generate KRs?
  • Look for words in the objective sentence that could be quantified
  • Try ‘free listing’ (group, rearrange, de-duplicate) and stack ranking by trustworthiness, ease of measuring, available baselines?
  • Think through implications and list anti-goals
  • Use a reference baseline if you can
  • Don’t make the mistake of using a project or task
    • We use KRs because they allow you to change approach and tactics if they don’t work
• How to convert tasks into KRs:
  • Why this project? Why is it important?
  • What will it accomplish / change?
  • How do you know if it’s successful?
  • What numbers will move if it works?
  • How does that tie into the company’s objective?
• Using OKRs helps you move the team from output thinking to outcome thinking
• You’re time-constraining things that are important but not urgent, thus making them urgent
• OKRs are great for bringing about change, don’t use them for business as usual work. Many service departments evolve rather than innovate. Operations teams like these don’t need OKRs. Instead they should use Health Metrics protect what you’ve already accomplished.

• OKRs should help you work out what to do each week
  • Make commitments to each other at the start of the week.
  • Celebrate what you’ve achieved at the end of the week.
• If what you’re doing doesn’t move forward any of your OKRs it’s a waste of time
• OKRs should give you permission to say no and push back on low impact work
  • The enemy of timely execution is distraction
• You’ll need to use weekly check-ins to keep the OKRs real
  • Listing OKRs keeps them top of mind
    • Start the Q with a 50% chance of hitting each KR. Check your confidence as a team each week. Have a conversation about how you’re tracking and why the change?
  • Listing your weekly intentions, the 5 or so things you’re doing to help OKR progress helps you focus on the right things
  • Listing health metrics stops you gaming the system (sacrificing something important just to hit your OKRs)
  • Listing a 4 week forecast of the most important activities that need to happen, helps you and others coordinate a plan of action
  • Here’s a template:

OKRs	Intentions for the week
Objective: 1 KR 1 · Confidence % KR 2 · Confidence % KR 3 · Confidence % Objective: 2 KR 1 · Confidence % KR 2 · Confidence % KR 3 · Confidence %	P1: Task 1 P1: Task 2 P2: Task 3 P2: Task 4 P3: Task 5
Health Metrics	Next 4 weeks Forecast / Heads up
H.Metric 1 H.Metric 2 H.Metric 3	Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Item 4

• Prerequisites to implementing OKRs
  • Executives need to trust the team
  • You need a simple and memorable mission
  • You need a strategy
  • You need product metrics to be instrumented
  • You need psychological safety

Pipelines over roadmaps?

• The author suggests pipelines are a better format than roadmaps to store potential initiatives. Roadmaps have dates, Pipelines support the flexibility of OKRs and use impact / effort / confidence for prioritization.

Check-ins and status updates

• The cadence of check-ins is the magic behind OKRs. You end up repeating your goals and adapting what you do to hit them a lot!
• Use the check-ins and check-in document as a conversation starter and treat the conversation as a chance to iterate and get feedback.
• Have the check-ins on Monday, have a Friday session to celebrate work done
• You can improve weekly status emails with OKRs
  • Lead with your team’s OKRs, and how much confidence you have that you are going to hit them this quarter
  • List last week’s prioritized tasks and if they were achieved
  • List next week’s priorities (only three P1s, and a couple of P2s)
  • List any risks or blockers
  • List any notes (anything that doesn’t fit into the above)

• Do the hard work to decide on a single company objective
  • Why only one? Complexity increases rapidly with each objective. If you have 5 OKRs, and 5 KRs, everyone has to remember 20 priorities
  • Having a single objective helps everyone remember it and act on it
• Avoid having too many OKRs. You can’t focus on company, team, department and personal OKRs all at once.
  • Have a single company OKR. Have product team OKRs, and nothing else.
  • Focus OKRs on the product team level. Any ‘functional OKRs (like responsive responsive design) should be replicated and included in Product Team OKRs
  • Cascading OKRs doesn’t scale. It only makes sense in small organizations with flat hierarchies
  • Trust your teams to set their own OKRs based on company strategy.
  • If you have a mission, a strategy and an annual OKR they won’t go far wrong

• Be careful when first introducing OKR cycles. Don’t implement OKRs across the entire company at once, your first OKR cycle is likely to fail, which can cause disillusionment
  • Instead, consider one of these different approaches:
    1. Choose a single high-performing team to go first → then trumpet their success
    2. Start with a single OKR for the entire company.
    3. Start by applying OKRs to projects, to seed the Objective-Result mindset. Ask:
       • What is the Objective for this project?
       • How will we know if we’ve succeeded?

OKR setting meeting format

• In advance:
  • Allow employees not in your 10 to submit the objectives they think the company should focus on (send the mission, strategy and existing OKR as inspiration)
  • Ask Attendees to come with their own thoughts too
• In the session:
  • Part 1: Select the objective
    • Stick the best and most popular suggestions on the wall
    • Ask those in the room to stick their suggestions up
    • Group and deduplicate
    • Stack rank and narrow down to three options
    • Discuss, debate, stack rank
    • Then pick just 1
  • Part 2: Select the key results
    • Get those in the room to freelist as many metrics as they can think of
    • Affinity map them (group)
    • Stack rank and pick three types of metrics
    • Write the KRs without values first (e.g. X DAU)
    • Calibrate to 50% confidence
  • Part 3: Discuss as a set
    • Are they aspirational and inspirational?
    • Do the KRs make sense are they hard? Can you live
    • Tweak them if needed
• This meeting format was for executives to set the single OKR, but can be adapted for use at team level too.

• What the entire 2 week process for setting OKRs across the company can look like
  • Grade OKRs 2 weeks before the end of the cycle
  • Give employees 24hrs to submit candidate company objectives
  • Exec team discusses the objectives proposed. They choose one at an offsite.
    • Get CEO approval (1 hour walk through, and a day for teams to iterate on feedback)
    • Execs introduce the OKR to direct reports… and ask them to set team OKRs
  • CEO-led all hands meeting to discusses why the OKR is what it is for that quarter, and calls out a few good OKR examples set this time round
    • Speaks to last quarter’s OKRs, pointing out a few key wins
    • Keep the tone positive and determined
  • Product teams decide on OKRs using the same meeting format as above
    • Do the same with sub-teams
    • Publish 1 week before the end
  • Have a short revision and review period

Approaches to managing and scoring OKRs

• Is it worth scoring your OKRs?
  • Yes. Numbers have a way of bringing reality to the forefront.
  • Scoring numerically with improve the quality of you KRs over time. You’ll get better at making sure they’re measurable and unambiguous. The key to which is to ask are we able to measure this at the end of the quarter?
• Aim to use results scoring, confidence scoring can be a good entry point and milestone scoring can be useful for longer time to value projects
  • OKRs are powerful because execution is driven by outcomes, not by plans or initiatives
  • Being anchored on actual results helps teams become more innovative, pivot, and experiment.
  • Once we reckon with reality, we can decide how to proceed
    • What needs to change to make more progress?
    • Was this not accomplished because it was not that important?
    • Does it need more attention?

Practices	Results Scoring	Confidence Scoring	Milestones Scoring
What	Update of the results seen so far	Is the team on track to deliver the results?	How much of the initiative has been completed?
Pros	Clear & transparent Incentivizes metric driven KRs Incentivizes checking & getting results before EOQ	Can show progress before results are realized	Can show progress before results are realized
Cons	Can be demoralizing as score doesn’t reflect effort put in	Risks delivering the initiative without the results Risks become a project management process	Risks delivering the initiative without the results Risks become a project management process

• Results Scoring
  • Agree exact thresholds for each grade when setting the KR… to force a calibration conversation between the team and the reviewer

Score	How to think about it
1.0	Complete success 🚀
0.7 to 1.0	Achieved. Amazing. 🟢
0.3 to 0.7	Partial achievement and progress made 🟡 0.6+ is still really good!
0.0 to 0.3	Failure 🔴

• How to assess the score at the end of the quarter
  • Scoring throughout the quarter is more important than obtaining the final score.
  • But It’s still critical to do a final score: to reflect, gather learnings, and incorporate learnings into the next cycle.
• 🚧 Avoid setting and forgetting! Put in check-ins throughout the Q. Share progress openly, raise awareness.
• OKRs are graded and shared publicly
  • Admit if you miss
  • Celebrate what you’ve learnt
  • Celebrate if you get 80 percent
• A low score isn’t always bad news:
  • The initiatives could have failed but provided valuable learnings
  • A KR could have been deprioritized, for something more important
  • You could realize you’re tracking the wrong metric
• Score OKRs numerically at the end, and mid-quarter too. Have a moment of reckoning, then identify what to focus on and what to drop for the coming six weeks.
• If you’re distinguishing between stretch and committed OKRs only a score of 1.0 represents achievement for a committed OKR.
• Confidence Ratings:
  • Calibrate your OKR so you have a 50% confidence of achieving it
  • Report your % confidence weekly as it changes
  • Expect the confidence rating to swing widely from week to week
  • Call the OKRs two weeks from the end of the Q (call them at 10 or 0 and start planning for the next Q) → double down on ones you might be able to hit
  • Advantages: Keeps them top of mind and prompts conversation about risks and issues

Different flavors of OKRs

Exploratory OKRs	· For early stage exploratory work and R&D teams · Define your end state in a quantitiative way to hold yourself accountable · KRs to help you understand if you have something or not · Leaves room for experimentation Example: · Objective: Market can’t live without our tool for drawing pictures in email · KR: Preorders at X · KR: 3 B2B deals signed · KR: X beta users
Hypothesis OKRs	· For gathering data you need to prove your on the right track · For validating your strategy · The objective is a success state, the KRs prove if it’s true · If you achieve the KRs you can prove you have product-market fit · The objective is your value proposition and should include your target market · Failing your OKRs tells you enables you to move on and pivot Example: · Context: a brand has pivoted from B2C to B2B · Objective: Customers embrace our product · KR: X units sold · KR: X returns · KR: X number of positive reviews
Milestone OKRs	· For big initiatives you need milestone OKRs along the way · Outcomes you hit to know if your efforts are pointed in the right direction · Reduces risk for multi-quarter projects · Creates room for iteration, you can shift your strategy if something isn’t working. · The objective is open around shipping the thing, so the KRs are what’s important · What would happen if we did this well? What signs would we see?

• If you want your work to have impact, don’t make a to-do-list. Decide what impact you want to have and work toward that, measuring the entire way.

• OKRs aid organizational learning through reflection
• The short Friday status email/slack update helps builds cross-team learning. They make it easy to stay up to date, and they highlight work that’s worth having further conversations about

After the numbers come the narrative

• The scoring is just a guide, not the final assessment.
• At EOQ reflect on the OKRs scores, the business-as-usual and KPIs, team events, new challenges, and opportunities of the past quarter.
  • Keep a running document of
    • Highlights: great results on projects and business-as-usual
    • Groundwork: areas where we made progress, put in a lot of effort, but have not seen results yet
    • Lowlights: areas where we didn’t make progress or new challenges that emerged
• The score informs the narrative and our understanding but no one remembers scores

Tooling

• Buying a tool is the last step you want to take, not the first
• The right way to adopt OKRs is to adopt them in a lightweight fashion first, then experiment with different approaches first.
• The first quarter you feel you have truly mastered OKRs, then go shopping.