Do you really need OKRs?
Challenging the assumption that a successful business must implement OKRs
The history repeats itself many times, with different characters, names, locations, and plot.
I’ve been a witness of the evolution of “Agile”. How it became streamline and also a certification circus that end up spinning-off the creation of new frameworks with more certifications (vicious cycle alert). Today, according to this source, we can account for over 250 agile certifications.
Hopefully you can see what happened to agile, is also happening to other frameworks or tools, such as OKR.
I’m not going to get into the jargon of defining O(bjective) and K(ey)R(esults) and everything you can find on many articles. Just ask yourself this questions, “Do we really need OKRs?”
We know that OKRs bring alignment, focus, accountability, and outcome-orientation. But, what if you already have a way to drive all of them that is not through OKRs?
Today at Nexthink, the only team that craft their OKRs is the C-level thanks to the work our CPO did. I got confirmation from my boss that last Friday the C-level finishes the OKRs for Q4. Yes at the beginning of November. Is this wrong? Are we going to suspend the OKR exam certification for doing this? The answer is no.
In my team we know it’s a bit complicated, because at this point of the year you should be preparing the Q1’23 OKRs.
Things we are considering when introducing OKRs:
Timing: as everything in life, there are first, second, and third order effect. We must have a systemic view to understand where we are effects of introducing them “officially”. What are the dynamics we must change / introduce / remove / keep?
Cadence: one of the biggest differences between OKRs and MBO or OMTM is the ability to check continuously how your KRs are progressing, and embed that in the team and product area level. If you set up the KR at the beginning and you completely forget about it until the last day of the quarter, you’re not being accountable.
Preparation: it’s going to sound stupid, but I’ve seen so many times teams doing the OKR theatre the first day of the quarter. Since they haven’t done their homework, they spend an indecent amount of time coming up with something, that in most cases is not align with the vision and strategy, and they focus on short-term achievements that creates incremental wins instead of big bets that makes a difference.
Information: This is a continuation of the previous bullet-point. In order to be prepared you need to have and idea of what are you going to focus on the next quarter. May be you want to increase satisfaction in one part of the product. Do you wait until 1st of Jan to come up with a baseline or number to put on the KR? No, so there will be inputs you will have to collect before that. It takes time, and a deliberate exercise with your core team to know what you need for the next cycle.
Pro-tip: My team is not executing upon any OKR, but we have conversations within our core product team to know what we believe it’s important to improve. Therefore we have come up with a survey where CSM are involved to know the existing level of satisfaction of a specific feature. Guess what, when we have the result we will get the baseline, and from that you can start slowly to set up a target we would love to see in our feature, see if it’s something that resonates with the vision and strategy, communicate it, execute it, keep a pulse on it during the quarter, and then run a post-mortem to see how it went. Does it mean we’re doing OKR? I don’t know if we would be able to do the improvements and measure it again in one quarter, probably not, but you build the muscle when we decide to implement it.
Keep this in mind, while OKR are an immensely powerful, they are not the right tool for every team. So ask yourself, do we really need OKR?
Hit me to provide some resources I deem a MUST to succeed with OKRs.