Good OKRs | Customers, Etc.
Planning and executing OKRs can be hard, but it's fun and rewarding if you do them well.
Here’s a story about when I first joined FullStory in the fall of 2016 when there were only about thirty employees.
As the third Hugger and the first “Hugger in Support”, my job was to build out the customer support team. There was so much to do! Hire the team, build out documentation, keep all-hands support afloat, escalate bugs to engineers, etc. etc. The list felt endless, as it does at any startup, but that’s a good thing. If you’re doing your job right, there’s always something to improve, and those improvements create space and make everyone’s jobs a little easier.
Every eight weeks or so, without fail, one on my fellow Huggers would ask me, “So, Ben, how are your OKRs going?” Crap. I wasn’t even thinking about my OKRs (short for Objectives and Key Results). Yes of course, some of the work I was doing every day was OKR related, but I wasn’t actively checking the spreadsheet each week, and certainly not every day.
Those objectives and their scores had been a big deal a month ago, but now, in the midst of the crazy busyness of a startup, were they still important?
OKRs
Let me get this out of the way: I love OKRs, which is why I’m surprised I haven’t written a dedicated post on OKRs since I started this newsletter in early 2020. Perhaps it’s because I wrote about OKRs at Trello on my personal blog all the way back in 2017, so maybe my brain thought the box was checked.
When I re-read that 2017 post, I had to jog my memory when I saw the reference to Radical Focus. I had zero memory of reading that book, but sure enough, it’s still in my Kindle library and apparently I highlighted it a lot. (I would still recommend Radical Focus as a quick primer on OKRs.)
Okay, so why am I revisiting OKRs in today’s post?
I understand that OKRs have a mixed reception depending on one’s experience. A common theme that I’ve heard is “OKRs work over there [for this size company, this type of team, etc.], but won’t work over here [because we’re different].” This always perplexes me because my experience with OKRs, for the most part, has been positive. Not perfect, but positive. And I can’t help but think that if I’ve had success with OKRs leading customer support teams at multiple organizations, there must be something about my experience that’s worth sharing.
This post is going to highlight a few themes from my experience based on OKRs. Hopefully it will help steer you in the direction of “Good OKRs” for your team.
Get the wording right
The post on OKRs at Trello still resonates and has simple, practical advice about how to approach OKRs, much of it influenced by Radical Focus. Perhaps my favorite section to re-read is the example objective where the wording is just, “Slay outages”. That’s it. That’s the objective. If you work for a software as a service (SaaS) company, you know exactly what that means: if the software goes down and is unavailable to customers, you want good processes in place for communicating with customers and getting everything back on line as quickly as possible.
“But Ben, do you have to say slay? Like what you would do to a dragon?” Yes, exactly like what you would do to a dragon. Gear up and go fight this beast. That’s the type of language that should be in an objective.
This is sort of OKRs 101, but it’s worth revisiting:
Your Objectives should be big, bold, visionary statements that inspire people to action.
Your Key Results should be measurable outcomes.
I think when I wrote that post in 2017, I was less confident about the “big, bold, visionary statement” part. I had only been doing OKRs for a year and thought that maybe you can get away with a passably worded objective that is actually a key result in disguise. No! Don’t settle. Good OKRs requires that you spend the time to get creative and write down what you really mean1.
What you’ll do differently
OKRs are about what you’re going to do differently from what you’re already doing. If you already know what you’re doing to do and have a plan where you can effectively do it, you may not need OKRs.
This is where the story from the beginning of this post comes from. If you’ve worked at a start-up, you know that feeling of knowing what needs to get done and not having all the resources to do it. It’s part of why working at a startup can be so fun. You’re always busy, and at least in the early stages, everything you’re building is valuable because it needs to be there.
The problem is that every team within the company is experiencing the same exact thing. You all have stuff you “have to get done” to reach the next level of maturity. Marketing has to set up a demand gen stack. Support has to build out a help center. Engineering has to refactor a big chunk of code to use the latest javascript framework2.
OKRs provide a way to align around big shared company goals that keep disparate teams aligned even as they’re otherwise engaged in entirely different work streams. It’s a way to force you to come up for air from the everyday work and make sure make sure you’re still going in the right direction.
Even though OKRs are about what you’re going to do differently now, successful outcomes often pave a path toward a future, better status quo. In the example of “Slay outages”, you may take one cycle to work together and really level up how you respond to outages. You’re going to do different things to make the process better. And then when it’s better, you’ll just follow the process. Maybe you’ll make iterative improvements that don’t need the OKR treatment. But the new process will be the new normal.
Create space for OKRs
One of the biggest mistakes teams can make when planning OKRs is to try to do everything else at the same time as OKRs. Here’s a question: if OKRs are about what you’re going to do differently, and you can’t make space to plan for what you’re going to do differently in the midst of everything else going on, how on earth are you going to find time to execute what you’re going to do differently in the midst of everything else going on? You must set aside the space and time to plan.
Drafting OKRs is hard work. We would take an entire week3 at the beginning of the cycle to plan our work. I’m not talking about what the leadership team did—they had prepared objectives in the weeks leading up to OKR planning week—but what the entire company did. We would be given the objectives at the beginning of the week and then we would have the rest of the week to meet with other teams, debate about what was important, and aggressively wrestle with the English language to get the final wording of the OKRs exactly right.
All project work would be paused during planning week. Sure, we still had to take sales calls and respond to customer support requests, but we didn’t work on big projects or ship new features during planning week. Planning week was set aside for the actual work of planning. And it was real work, which is why we needed an entire week.
Insist on high standards for OKRs
I swear, if I see another sales team post that their team’s objective is to “hit revenue goals”, I’m going to… I don’t know what I’ll do. I was going to say “get mad”, but I’ll probably just bury my criticism in a footnote4.
At the end of OKR planning week, when we would read out our OKRs before actually beginning the work, we would offer constructive criticism to each other to make sure the OKRs were high quality. Here are some things you might have heard:
“That’s not an objective. That’s a key result. Take the numbers out.”
“Okay, but how are you actually going to measure that?”
“If you get a 1.0 on all those key results, are you sure you’ve met the objective as you’ve described it? It feels like something’s missing.”
“The wording in your objective is about as motivating as this water bottle.”
“That looks like a project task list—KRs are about measurable outcomes. What are the outcomes that would be achieved if you did all the work in your project list? Those are your KRs.”
“Yes, you’re right. You do have to do that project task list before you’re able to measure literally anything. I’ll back off. Thanks for hearing me out.”
Perhaps it goes without saying, but I’ll say it: your team needs to have a high level of psychological safety5 to feel comfortable giving and receiving criticism in this way, especially after you’ve spent a week doing the hard and emotionally draining work of OKR planning.
A note for founders at small-but-growing startups: it’s your job to maintain high standards for OKRs at your company. This is especially true at key moments in your company’s maturity when you’re bringing in new senior leadership to shepherd you through the next phase of growth. If you have a new senior leader reporting to you, don’t wait until the end of OKR planning week to have them reveal their OKRs for the first time. Remain close to them throughout the process and ensure they’re on the same page when it comes to OKR quality. If you allow some senior leaders to get away with poor quality OKRs just because they had success at another company that didn’t use OKRs, you should expect a drift to low performance when it comes to setting OKRs at your company. If that happens, you risk losing the benefits of OKRs.
OKRs can be fun, I promise
Yes, OKRs can be stressful, whether it’s the beginning of the cycle as you struggle through planning week, or at the end of the cycle when you’re forced to give yourself a 0.6 because of how strictly you worded a KR at the beginning.
But when everything clicks, the payoff is worth it. In the moment halfway through an OKR cycle where you don’t know how you’re going to hit your KR, you’re forced to dig deep. You asks for resources—perhaps you didn’t even know you could ask for resources—and you get creative about how you’re going to accomplish the goal. Maybe you don’t need to do that entire project to get the outcome you had said was important. That’s excellent! As long as the KR was clearly defined and is a true reflection of the intent of the objective, doing less is better than doing more.
When you align as a team on work that you realize now is clearly important—when just two months ago the work wasn’t even on your radar—it makes up for the struggles along the way. OKRs provide a way to accomplish, as a whole company team, something that you wouldn’t have accomplished on your own.
The absolute queen at wordsmithing OKRs, in my humble opinion, is Chandra Robrock. It didn’t matter whether she was writing OKRs for just herself or multiple teams, her OKRs were always expertly worded, clear, creative, and quite often, funny.
I haven’t checked recently—are we still doing that?
If I recall correctly, I think we originally called it “dead week”, which was a reference to the last week of the undergraduate semester at Georgia Tech where professors wouldn’t assign any new homework to give students time to study and prepare for exams. I may be remembering that wrong.
A poorly worded objective, like one that promises to “hit revenue goals”, fails most obviously because it’s including the key result in the objective, but it also doesn’t say what the team is going to do differently than before. If you’re the sales team and this is your objective, come on! You’re the sales team! You’re the owner of the most visible reinforcing feedback loop in the entire company. Of course you’re going to “do sales”. Your objective needs to tell us what you’re going to do differently.
“Okay, Ben, but what is the sales team going to put as their objective?”
Let’s say the company is seeing revenue increase but is spending lots of energy onboarding a particular type of customer. The customer experience team is getting overworked with support requests, the product team is being asked to implement features that only come from this particular customer segment, and this type of customer also sees unusually high churn. In short, they’re a bad fit.
This example might seem obvious, but often it takes time for clarity to emerge. That’s when the company might set a company level objective about focusing on their core customer segment. Now when the sales team writes their objective, they can be big, bold, and visionary about what they’re going to do differently.
Instead of…
Objective: Close $4MM of new business in Q3.
You can go with…
Objective: The best fit long-term customers for our product learn about why they should choose [COMPANY] and are extremely eager to part with their $$$ to become a customer. (And the $4MM gets moved to a Key Result, along with other KRs that, when taken together, make the objective true, when met).
Great post Ben! Perhaps it is a training thing and people are not getting enough guidance to do this correctly. I loved all the practical examples. Thanks for writing and sharing!