I gave a talk on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results, a goal-setting framework) after years of using them and looking into how to make them work better for me. I’ve written before about how useful I find writing this kind of talk:

The act of just getting a talk planned helps summarise and bring together exactly what you’ve learned or would recommend about a topic. Years ago, I summed up all my best advice about stakeholder management in a “how to disappoint people” talk, and looking back at that still helps me remember lots of lessons that I learned years ago but had forgotten about. I’ve got similar reflections on how to use estimation, Objectives and Key Results, and other topics – even if I never gave these talks in front of anyone, the reflection and pattern-spotting from writing them was such a useful activity.

— Neil Vass: A lightning talk on lightning talks

This will be a multi-part writeup.

I’ve been asked how I managed to pick just 10 things to talk about – I’ll be honest, scope creep was a constant struggle. Just on the morning of the talk I heard another thing nobody had ever told me: A few years ago an online thread about “what’s a startup conspiracy theory you believe?” suggested “OKRs were actually a psyop from Google to slow down potential early stage competitors”, and Sundar Pinchai – the CEO of Google – responded to say “Oops. Finally someone figured it out :)”.

He was joking, but just the fact that it’s funny tells you something about the trouble people across the tech industry have been having with putting OKRs into practice. They’re a helpful sounding idea, there are all kinds of troubles people get bogged down in. This series will cover the essence of what OKRs are good for, the ways to keep them simple and useful, and the pitfalls you can avoid if you know to watch out for them.

I’ll attempt to cover 10 different things you haven’t heard before – but if we manage only 7, that’ll still be a great outcome. Yes, that was an OKR joke.

Let’s get started.

When I first heard about OKRs, I could immediately see why they’d be useful for us: a short, clear description of the most important thing we’re working on right now, and some measures to show how we’re progressing towards it. Just that would help with all kinds of problems – it’s easy to jump between lots of different initiatives, or get distracted by new important-sounding ideas or info, or for stakeholders to expect all kinds of things from the team’s work that we just aren’t going to do.

“It’s these things, just these – if you think we should be doing something else you can clearly see we don’t know about it.”

From Christina Wodtke (Radical Focus book, The Art of the OKR and other blog posts) and John Cutler (Untangling OKRs and lots of other posts), I learned other straightforward approaches to keeping these goals and progress visible, helping team members share confidence on whether we were going to meet them (while there’s still time to do something about it), and checking whether anything else is going off the rails while we radically focus on these few important objectives. All of those might be useful to try if they sound like they’ll help with a problem you’re having – but just the short, clear statements of what we’re focusing on for now sound easy to pick up and useful for all kinds of situations. So, why does using OKRs so often turn out to be so very complicated?

Again and again, in teams I’ve worked with and other teams or companies I’ve heard about, OKRs feel hard to get right, often cause more confusion than clarity, and end up taking a lot of time and energy. In the following parts of this series, we’ll start filling in this collection of 10 “things” that’ll hopefully give some answers about how to avoid these difficulties.

Coming soon

I’m publishing as I write, so at first there was just this introductory post … 0 out of 10 things completed, but I was still confident of getting the complete set done by the end of the quarter.

Since then I’ve added:

• part 2, a look at OKRs’ origin story
• part 3, about some wider context
• part 4, with a few things it took me a while to realise.

That covers 6 of the 10 things, so progress is looking much healthier!