Creating Team OKRs That Inspire and Drive Value

Welcome, Housekeeping, and Productside Overview

Roger Snyder | 00:00:00–00:04:32
Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening from wherever you are in the world. Thank you for joining Productside today for our next edition of our Product Management Leadership Series. Today we are talking about creating team OKRs that inspire and drive value.

My name is Roger Snyder. I’m the Vice President of Products and Services at Productside, and I’ll be hosting this webinar today. I’m very pleased to introduce Todd Blaquiere, Principal Consultant and Trainer at Productside. Thanks for joining us this morning, Todd.

One of the key things that’s important in the career of product management is to have a lot of resources available and to be able to talk with others in your profession in order to stay on top of what are the latest trends and be able to get questions answered. So if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you join our LinkedIn group on Product Management Leadership. We’ll paste the link into the chat for you there, and that’s a great place for you to just kind of hear what’s going on, share leadership practices, and be able to network with your peers.

A couple of admin things I want to take care of before we dive into the meat of our presentation. During the webinar, we want to make this an interactive webinar, so I really would appreciate it if you throw your questions into the Q&A box. You’ll see that we’ve highlighted that one. You can go to the Q&A box. I’ll be monitoring those and ask folks to be able to even unmute and share their questions with us live so we can make this more of a conversation rather than just us presenting slides to you. We really want to be interactive.

Now, one of the most frequently asked questions is, “Hey, how can I see this webinar later?” We are recording this webinar and all attendees will receive a link to the recording so that you can refer back to this webinar as often as you would like. A second question that we often get is, “Hey, can I get a copy of these slides?” Unfortunately, we use copyrighted materials in these slides, so we don’t share the slides themselves. But with that recording link, you will be able to go back and watch your favorite pieces over and over again if there’s a resource that you find particularly helpful.

So with that, let me just tell you a little bit about the Productside, in case you’re not familiar with us. We have been around for over 20 years, and our mission is to empower product professionals with the tools and techniques, the knowledge, the skills to build products that matter. Products that matter to your customers, products that matter to the success of your business, and products that matter to you as a product manager. So keep all of those things in mind.

We accomplish this mission by providing the most comprehensive set of resources, tools, free resources, training, and consulting in order to make individuals and teams more effective in their product management exercises and all of the things that they do in this exciting but challenging discipline of product management. Learn more at Productside. Again, we’ll put a link in the chat for you to follow up and learn more.

But now I want to kick us off right into a poll, and I’m going to turn it over to you, Todd. Take it away.

Audience Poll – Current OKR Experience

Todd Blaquiere | 00:04:32–00:06:39
Yeah, thank you. Appreciate that, Roger.

We’re going to be talking about Objectives and Key Results today, so I thought it’d be nice to start off just getting a baseline for where we’re all at. So take a look at this poll question here. Click on the one that applies best to you.

Do you create and track OKRs? Are you creating them but you don’t track progress? Maybe you’ve used them in the past, but you don’t use them anymore. If you use OKRs but you’re not involved in them, if you’re not involved in creating them and you need to learn how to, that’d be great to know. Maybe you have no experience with OKRs, so please let us know where you sit today.

We’ll leave this poll open for a couple more seconds because we’re getting a good response. This is awesome.

All right, seems like we’ve settled on the number of people with a response. Okay, great. So you can see the results, but I’ll read out a couple of things here.

All right, this audience needs help with OKRs. Thirty-nine percent say they have no experience with OKRs. That’s really good for us to know. That’s great. And then twenty-one percent say, “I create and track them regularly.” That’s awesome. So we’ve got some experts here as well. Hopefully, maybe we’ve got a couple of tips for them to up their game. I’m excited for that opportunity.

Roger Snyder | 00:06:39–00:07:14
Excellent. And I’ve created OKRs but don’t track progress. Interesting. Well, we’ll certainly talk about that one as well.

Anything else that leaps to mind for you, Todd?

Todd Blaquiere | 00:07:14–00:07:24
No, it’s a great list. I think we have something for everyone. Obviously, we’ll go through some basics, but like you said, we have some advanced techniques and tips that hopefully apply to those that are even using them today.

Jim Carrey’s 10 Million Dollar Check – The Power of Ambitious Objectives

Roger Snyder | 00:07:24–00:10:08
So I’m going to kick off with a story, and of course you expected, we’re going to talk about product management and OKRs, so of course we’re going to talk about Jim Carrey.

Obviously, Jim Carrey, if you’re not familiar, is a comedian and actor. But he grew up poor. At times he even lived in a car. When he was living in Los Angeles trying to become a comedian, he was struggling. He was having a challenge getting any work. In fact, even some of his comedy gigs weren’t going well.

So he would go up to Elysian Park there in Los Angeles, and he visualized himself getting acting jobs. He would just sit up there and visualize his future. Then one day in 1985, Jim Carrey wrote himself a check for ten million dollars, which is rather audacious. Ten million dollars. But he said, he gave himself a ten million dollar check “for acting services rendered,” and he dated it for ten years later in November.

Jim Carrey was thinking, you know, his thought when he shared this story was, “If I can’t do it by then, then I shouldn’t be in this business.” And so that was the mark he put for himself: I’m going to get a ten million dollar check.

Well, just before Thanksgiving 1995, he had already had gigs, he’d already been working, his career had been going well, but he received a check for ten million dollars for “Dumb and Dumber.” So he ended up being paid, reaching that objective he set. Wow.

It’s crazy, right? I mean, Roger, I’ve never done that. I haven’t sat down to write myself a ten million dollar check yet.

Nope, me neither. 280 pays me well, just not quite ten million dollars yet.

Todd Blaquiere | 00:10:08–00:10:43
Yeah, me neither. But wow, what an amazing story, right? That’s pretty awesome.

So he kind of set an objective, didn’t he?

Roger Snyder | 00:10:43–00:11:19
He did, and it’s audacious, and I love that. I love it. And that’s what can be powerful about this, right?

Defining Objectives – Where Do We Need to Go?

Todd Blaquiere | 00:11:19–00:14:24
Objectives and Key Results answer two different questions. You see here: objectives — “Where do we need to go? What are we trying to get to?” Key results — “How do we know whether we’re getting there?”

As we go through these details about how to create these, you can reflect back on Jim Carrey’s story. It actually applies pretty well, because he set an objective: ten million dollars “for acting services rendered.” He knew he’d get there if he made that much money from acting.

So here are some tips on how we know we’re creating a good objective. First off, we want to connect to the north star. We want to connect to where we’re headed. We want to create something that’s ambitious and inspiring.

I always say this: when I have a good leader — and I like what Roger, by the way, does as someone I admire — someone who can put a goal out there in the future that’s exciting, I’ll march up that hill. I’ll march up a hill for someone that says, “We’re going to do something great.” So you want something like that. You want something that’s simple and memorable, almost something that can become a chant. Something that you just know; it sticks with you.

One that comes to mind is Martin Luther King Jr. Think about his speech. I don’t have the quote memorized, but I have it here: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Now that is an inspiring objective. Absolutely memorable. It’s inspiring.

You also want something that represents a new state — a “we will be” kind of state. And importantly, you want something that can stay stable over a quarter or a year. We’ll talk in a minute about how your team’s objectives should align to your company-level north star.

Roger Snyder | 00:14:24–00:15:30
Right. And one of the things when we’re working on these, especially even at our company, when we’re focusing the team on that north star, is to connect that to our overall company objectives. If we are about, say, increasing the number of learning methods available to our students because we’re seeing the need with all the changes over the last couple of years, that as a company objective then drives some of our product OKRs as well.

Objectives vs. SMART Goals – Why We Also Need Key Results

Todd Blaquiere | 00:15:30–00:17:32
Absolutely, yes. And I was going to say on that: you want something that’s fairly stable quarter or yearly. To your point there, Roger, we know what the company’s trying to accomplish, and then we’re going to create some quarterly goals that help us get there along the way — some quarterly objectives.

One thing you’ll note here, though, and Roger, I know you and I have had this conversation before: I’m a big fan of SMART goals, but an objective is not a SMART goal. So for those SMART-goal fanatics out there who are looking at this and going, “Wait, where are all the details? The time-bound? The measurable?” — that’s why we need key results. Key results help us make them become SMART goals. It’s the combination of the two.

Roger Snyder | 00:17:32–00:18:29
That’s right. The objective needs to be inspiring and directional, and then the key results are really where we say, “Okay, now how are we going to declare victory? How do we know we got there?” And that’s where then the key results come in.

Example Objectives Across Different Domains

Todd Blaquiere | 00:18:29–00:21:37
Here are some examples from my career. I say they’re good examples because they’re from my career, so they must be good.

You’ve got my background there: I’ve worked in media, pharma, and nonprofit as well. So for a news publication, their objective might be, “Be the go-to destination for local political coverage.” You can see that represents a new state as well: we’re not just covering politics; we’re the go-to destination.

I won’t read all of these; you can read them. I want to point out a couple of things, especially with the pharma technology one, because I’m going to use it as an example throughout today.

In pharma technology, that’s when we’re helping pharmaceutical companies develop drugs and bring them to market — so technology that supports that process. This objective here: “Enable clients to find more qualified patients faster.” That’s something that I worked on a lot in my career.

You can see that this objective is inspiring and ambitious: we’re going to find more qualified patients, and we’re going to do it faster. And it’s something that we can measure. We can’t directly measure the phrase itself, but we can create measurements for it. So this is the first part: getting clear on the “where do we need to go?”

Audience Q&A – Objectives vs. Vision

Audience (Kevin) | 00:21:37–00:22:46
Hey guys. So as you’re reading out these objectives, they sure look like what a company would define as a vision. How do objectives align to a vision? Do they complement? Are they the same thing? Do they replace it? Help me understand the correlation there.

Todd Blaquiere | 00:22:46–00:24:27
That’s a great question. And you know, Kevin, a little bit later I’ll actually show you a slide on how this objective relates to the vision, and they should be closely tied.

They don’t replace the vision. And oftentimes I’m using really high-level ones here because it’s just easier to understand. But if, Kevin, you and I were working together and we were on a team at a company where, as a whole, the company was trying to tackle this objective, we might create some more detailed team-level objectives beneath that.

In this pharma example, I can tell you that for the company that created this technology, this objective here is just one of many objectives of that company and the products that they have.

Roger Snyder | 00:24:27–00:25:28
Yeah, as I was looking at this one — and it was your company, so I’ll ask you to clarify — it felt to me like this was more of a specific, maybe divisional objective. The vision that we’re talking about would have been even higher-level.

Here, “Enable clients to find more qualified patients faster,” maybe it’s for trials or maybe it was for sales, I’m not sure which. But the higher-level vision for that pharma company is probably something more aspirational, like “Increase people’s health,” or if it was in the cancer division, “Increase quality of life, increase number of years of life.” Those would be the higher-level visions that this objective would be feeding into.

Todd Blaquiere | 00:25:28–00:26:41
Absolutely right. And on that chain of things to get to improving health for the patient, there are things like bringing the product to market faster, bringing a study to completion faster, finding patients faster and better. There are lots of different parts of that chain to get to the overall vision.

So objectives here are really the concrete, actionable pieces that help you make measurable progress toward that bigger vision.

Introducing Key Results – Measuring What Matters

Todd Blaquiere | 00:26:41–00:29:26
Now let’s talk about key results. We need to measure what matters.

Key results answer the question, “How do we know whether we’re getting there?” I like to keep it to two or three per objective. You don’t want to have ten key results for one objective. You want a couple of things that clearly tell you, “We are on our way.”

These are not just outputs or tasks. They can be tasks sometimes, but they rarely are. They’re usually measurements of progress. They tell you that you’ve reached a milestone.

I’m a big basketball nerd. I love playing basketball and looking at stats. Let’s say in my league — now it would be the over-40 league — my objective is to become a top three-point shooter. The objective: “Become a top three-point shooter in my basketball league.”

An example of a bad key result is: “Shoot fifty three-pointers every day.” That’s not really a result. It might help you become a good three-point shooter, but what if you’re shooting fifty three-pointers a day and you’re missing all of them? It doesn’t tell you that you’re on your way.

A better key result would be: “Able to make thirty of one hundred three-pointers in practice.” That tells you, “I’ve upleveled now,” and once I achieve that, I can raise that number. Now I’m going to go for thirty-five percent.

Roger Snyder | 00:29:26–00:30:08
Right. And it can even be a percentage change. If you’re going from thirty percent to, say, forty-five percent, then you would say, “I want to increase my shooting percentage by fifty percent.” Those are the kinds of things that are measurable along the way. I like that.

Vanity Metrics, KR Examples, and Stretch Goals

Todd Blaquiere | 00:30:08–00:33:05
Absolutely. And now think about vanity metrics. We talk a lot about vanity metrics in product.

A vanity metric is something that makes you feel good or look good, but doesn’t actually show true business progress. One of my favorites from my career was Facebook page likes. “We have so many Facebook page likes.” But they weren’t turning into business. They weren’t turning into audience.

So remember, try to avoid those things that just make you feel good or look good but don’t actually create progress.

Here are some examples of key results using that pharma objective: “Enable clients to find more qualified patients faster.”

A key result might be: “Coordinators can review one thousand records in an hour.” Another might be: “Decrease time to first patient from twenty hours to seven hours.” Another: “Increase qualification rate from ten percent to forty percent.”

The exact terminology, like “coordinators” and “records,” is industry-specific. Don’t worry about that. The real point is that the key results are concrete, measurable indicators that we’re improving how quickly and how well we can find qualified patients.

One thing this implies: we need data. Creating good OKRs requires data. You have to know things like how fast coordinators review records today and how many records they can review in a given period. That was actually the hardest part of this OKR for me as a product manager — finding that base-line number.

Roger Snyder | 00:33:05–00:34:27
I’ll bet. And as a product manager, we’re kind of diving a little bit deeper here, but it’s crucial that you’re able to add to your requirements the ability to measure the indicators — what we like to call key performance indicators — so that you are gathering the right data in the first place.

You may set these goals and then realize, “Oh, in order to do that, I’m actually going to have to rev my product.” So there’s an even deeper sub-goal of, “Be able to measure how many records in an hour a coordinator is able to review.”

So early on, especially, you’re doing a lot of foundational work — not just building features, but building measurement into your product.

Stretch vs. Achievable – How Ambitious Should KRs Be?

Audience (Mark) | 00:34:27–00:35:10
Yeah, my question was, you know, you have these goals. You said for those coordinators to do a thousand records in an hour, you had to have some sense as to what they actually can do. So what percentage is your result based on what’s actually achievable? How much of it is a stretch goal typically when you create your key measurements?

Todd Blaquiere | 00:35:10–00:36:22
That’s a great question. I’m so glad you brought that up.

One thing Google says — and Google uses OKRs a lot — is that you should shoot for about sixty to seventy percent. You should be achieving about sixty to seventy percent of a goal. If you’re always achieving one hundred percent, that’s a sign that you’re not setting OKRs the right way. You’re setting things that are too easy to accomplish.

So pretending that this was our reality and we’ve sat together and put this number in, we actually consider it something challenging to reach. We don’t expect to reach one hundred percent, but we put that out there as something that stretches us and pulls us.

Roger Snyder | 00:36:22–00:37:25
Yeah, that is a great point. In our company we say eighty percent, so maybe we’re not even being aggressive enough. But that is what we do when we’re trying to set our OKRs: we aim for about eighty percent.

A quick related question: what’s the difference between a KR and a KPI? I love that question, and we’re going to get into that in just a couple of slides, so let’s hold that thought for a moment.

Right-Sizing OKRs – From Empire Goals to Team-Level Ownership

Todd Blaquiere | 00:37:25–00:39:39
Let’s talk about right-sizing your OKRs. This is one of my favorite ways to describe it — using “Star Wars.”

Darth Vader leads the Empire. These are all the teams. This would be like our organization. Their objective is, “Rule the galaxy.” That is possibly within reach for them. It’s a stretch goal for them, but not for one small team.

For one legion of stormtroopers, their objective might be, “Crush rebel scum on Tatooine.” Where you see the connection is if you look at KR3 on the Empire side: “Rebel incursions stamped out at least ninety percent of the time.”

The stormtroopers look at that and say, “You know what? We’re going to stamp out the rebel incursion on Tatooine, and we’re going to take that key result and make it our objective.” And that’s what they’ve done here. They’ve made that their objective.

For those “Star Wars” nerds like myself out there, KR2 is my favorite one. I had a “first legion” slide — if only, and thankfully, they didn’t achieve that goal.

The point is: key results at one level can become objectives at the next level down. Things cascade, but you have to right-size them for the team’s sphere of influence.

KPIs vs. OKRs – How Do They Relate?

Todd Blaquiere | 00:39:39–00:42:05
Now let’s dive into that question about OKRs versus KPIs.

Key Performance Indicators — KPIs — are metrics that indicate how something is performing. We asked in the poll whether you track KPIs like sales, revenue, user engagement. A lot of you said you track both sales and user engagement, which is great.

So what’s the relationship between KPIs and OKRs?

OKRs are about where we want to go and how we know we’re getting there. Think about driving a car. You’re looking at the point you’re trying to reach — that’s your objective. Your GPS is showing you your route and how you’re progressing — that’s like your KRs.

KPIs tend to be standalone numbers, like attendance, revenue, donations, user satisfaction. They’re not always tightly tied to a specific objective. They tell you how the business or product is performing overall.

The important distinction is this: some KRs are KPIs, but not all KPIs are KRs. KRs are the subset of KPIs that we’ve chosen to represent success for a particular objective.

Even if a KPI isn’t in an OKR, we still need to track it. Going back to the car analogy, if I’m just staring at my GPS, that doesn’t guarantee I’ll reach my destination. I could run out of fuel. So I also need to track my gas gauge. In product terms, I might be hitting my OKRs, but my user satisfaction KPI could be plummeting. I need to see both.

Roger Snyder | 00:42:05–00:43:14
Right. So you need KPIs in order to be able to track progress on your OKRs, but not every KPI necessarily is going to lead directly to an OKR. In terms of a Venn diagram, the KPIs are the bigger set, and the KRs are a subset of those KPIs.

And those KPIs are only there if you’ve done the right code work or process work to be able to track that data in the first place. So again, it comes back to instrumenting your product and your processes so that the data is even available.

Connecting True North, OKRs, and the Roadmap

Todd Blaquiere | 00:43:14–00:46:18
Let’s talk about north stars, true north, and how they connect to your roadmap.

Say our true north is: “Be the fastest resource for finding qualified patients.” That’s the end-state we want to create. From there, we create an objective like the one we’ve been using: “Enable clients to find more qualified patients faster.”

We then define key results: “Coordinators can review one thousand records per hour,” “Decrease time to first patient from twenty hours to seven,” “Increase qualification rate from ten to forty percent.”

Now, how does this connect to the roadmap?

We take one of these key results and ask: “What can enable us to accomplish this?” This is a team activity. We look at our data, talk to our engineers, talk to our users, and they might say, “If we want coordinators to review a thousand records an hour, we should auto-ingest the trial criteria so it’s not manual.” Great. That becomes a roadmap item.

Another idea might be, “We need powerful searchable filters to narrow the patient set more quickly.” Great. That becomes another roadmap item.

When I write these on the roadmap, I don’t just put the feature name. I like to write them as outcomes. Something like: “If we create searchable filters, then our persona will be able to narrow the patient set faster. We’ll know this is true when coordinators can review one thousand records an hour.”

Now I’m talking about a specific outcome and how I’m measuring it, right on the roadmap — and that ties directly back to the key result and to the objective and to the true north.

This does two important things. It keeps the roadmap outcome-oriented rather than feature-oriented, and it connects the development team to the business objectives. Developers can see, “Oh, that’s why we’re building these filters. The story I’m working on this sprint is actually helping us reach this key result.”

OKR Anti-Patterns – What to Avoid

Todd Blaquiere | 00:46:18–00:48:39
Sometimes we go the wrong way with OKRs. I’ve never been wrong in my career, of course — okay, I’ve been wrong many times.

Let’s talk about some anti-patterns to avoid.

One big one: using OKRs as employee evaluation metrics. For leaders out there, I know it’s tempting to do that because you feel like, “If I tie people’s bonuses to OKRs, I’m connecting performance to outcomes.” It sounds logical, but it backfires.

We’re all really good at finding the shortest path to success. If you tell me my bonus is based on hitting my OKRs, I’m going to set that bar low. I’m going to make it easy to accomplish because I want my bonus. Then OKRs lose their power to stretch and inspire.

We want OKRs to stretch us. We want them to be audacious. If you tie them directly to compensation, you’ll almost always get sandbagging.

Another anti-pattern: letting OKRs overwhelm your roadmap. They should guide your roadmap, not completely take it over. I’ve seen people try to cram everything, including tech debt, into OKRs. That doesn’t make sense.

Sometimes there are items on the roadmap — like a data model refactor — that we just have to do. It’s maintenance. It’s not directly tied to a big aspirational objective. That’s okay. Your roadmap is broader than your OKRs. It includes running the business, handling tech debt, and supporting other functions like customer support.

Roger Snyder | 00:48:39–00:49:53
Yeah, it’s a really good point. You don’t want OKRs that are a little too low on the horizon either. “Let’s just keep continuing to do what we’re doing.” Continuing to do things shouldn’t be an OKR. It should be part of doing your daily job.

Our expectations will continue to rise. Once you accomplish an OKR, what’s next? It’s time to go, “Okay, this is awesome,” and you should celebrate that moment — but then ask, “Where are we going to go next to get even better?”

Scoring OKRs – Grading Progress the Right Way

Todd Blaquiere | 00:49:53–00:52:40
Now let’s talk about grading OKRs. At the end of each period, we should know how we did.

There are two common ways to score. One is the simple yes/no method. Look at each key result and ask, “Did we get a thousand records an hour? Yes or no?”

The other is a little more sophisticated: scoring on a scale from zero to one. This is what Google does. They’re looking for that ideal score between 0.6 and 0.7 for an objective. One hundred percent would indicate it was too easy.

So for each key result, we estimate how far we got. For example, KR1: “Coordinators review a thousand records per hour.” Maybe, in reality, they reached nine hundred. So we’d give that a 0.9.

KR2: “Decrease time to first patient from twenty hours to seven.” Maybe we got to ten hours. That might be 0.7.

KR3: “Increase qualification rate from ten percent to forty percent.” Maybe we got to twenty percent. That might be 0.5.

Then we take those three numbers — 0.9, 0.7, and 0.5 — sum them and divide by three. In this example, that gives us 0.7 for the overall objective. That tells us we delivered well. We should be happy about that — and there’s still room to stretch.

This is a way to score systematically and see where we can continue to progress. It can also inspire new key results or even new objectives.

Roger Snyder | 00:52:40–00:54:03
To your point earlier, in the Google system this seventy percent is like a celebration. We want to celebrate that. Sometimes people go, “Seventy percent is a C.” But we’re not using grade-school report cards here. We’re using a standard that a major industry player like Google says is a great target.

Use benchmarks that are appropriate for your industry to measure your progress and see how well you’re doing.

I also like what you showed with that KR3. Okay, on that one we got to twenty percent and maybe forty was a little too ambitious. So maybe we set it to thirty next quarter. And one more thing: don’t ever set a key result without knowing what you’re going to do differently to get there.

If you’re not going to change anything, there’s no reason to believe you’re going to reach a different outcome.

Culture, Failure, and Team Alignment Around OKRs

Todd Blaquiere | 00:54:03–00:56:33
Exactly. It relates back perfectly to that chart with the true north, because in the end we have those roadmap items. Without those items, we’re not doing anything.

I’ll go back to the 100 percent thing again. If you’re getting 100 percent every time — and as a consultant, when I see a company where every presentation is “We did it again, 100 percent” — that’s indicative of a culture problem. There’s probably a fear of failure. There’s likely sandbagging. And there’s definitely not enough stretch.

We have to be comfortable with failing as product managers. I teased earlier that I hadn’t failed, but I fail all the time. We have to be comfortable with failure as long as we’re learning from it. We have to be comfortable being wrong, as long as we know why we were wrong and we learn from it.

OKRs are the same. When you first make OKRs, you’re going to make mistakes. I’ve set OKRs that were too aggressive and de-motivated the team. I’ve set OKRs that were too simple and realized I didn’t really stretch us. I’ve set OKRs to try to make other people happy instead of focusing on what’s best for the team.

The key is: don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Sit down, make an OKR, see how it works, and then adjust. Three months later you might say, “Yeah, I didn’t write that quite right,” and that’s okay. Learn and improve.

Roger Snyder | 00:56:33–00:58:01
Absolutely. And to build on that, I want to highlight something else John Doerr talks about. John Doerr, who helped popularize OKRs, said the crucial qualities of a healthy OKR culture are: ruthless intellectual honesty, a disregard for self-interest, and a deep allegiance to the team.

That ruthless intellectual honesty is about what Todd just said. You have to be honest about what’s achievable. I’ve made the mistake as a leader of setting goals for my team that were probably just too ambitious. In doing so, I de-motivated the team. That was a mistake.

So that intellectual honesty also has to reflect on how you’re going to get there. Can we set a goal that is a stretch, but where, if we get seventy percent of the way there, that will be an awesome moment we can celebrate?

Who Sets OKRs and When? Practical Cadence Tips

Audience (Anonymous) | 00:58:01–00:58:38
For teams who have never set OKRs, where do you start? It seems like starting with “set an objective” can invite chaos. Is there a way to organize your thoughts?

Todd Blaquiere | 00:58:38–01:00:13
I love this question. The first thing that helps me in doing this — and I’ve been in this position — is to simplify. I like simplifying things down to the heart of the product: why does this product exist?

Start with that. What is the simplest, clearest thing we are trying to accomplish for the customer and the business? Once I get that, I usually use something like that as my first objective.

And then I shop it around. I talk to stakeholders: “This is what I believe is the key goal we’re trying to reach. Does that resonate?” That creates conversations that are much more important than, “Make the button blue.” Now you’re talking about, “I heard you want to reduce churn by five percent. Because you mentioned that, I think this objective for our product will help us get there.”

So step one: start with the “why.” Step two: validate it with stakeholders. Step three: define a couple of key results that you can realistically measure, even if the first ones are very simple.

Roger Snyder | 01:00:13–01:01:53
Yeah, and at one company where OKRs weren’t prevalent, what I did was listen to what the CEO was talking about at our town hall meetings.

It’s easier when the CEO says, “Okay, this coming year we really need to achieve X.” Then you turn to your product team and say, “All right, here’s the north star that our CEO has set. What’s my product objective that will help the company move forward to that north star?”

Suppose the CEO doesn’t say it that clearly. The other thing I’ve done is look at what’s important in a town hall: what data are they sharing, what competitive threats do they talk about? Listen to those things. Even if they’re not stated as goals, you learn a lot by listening to what they repeatedly highlight.

Based on the value your product delivers and what you heard, you can say, “Okay, here’s something that my product can do that supports what leadership clearly cares about.”

And then, as Todd said, have that conversation. Talk to your manager or your division leader and make sure before you get going that this is valuable to the company. That way, you’re not just guessing in isolation.

How Many OKRs Is Too Many? Focus and “Number One” Priorities

Audience (Anonymous) | 01:01:53–01:02:23
My company seems to suffer from too many number-one priorities. How many OKRs should a team really have?

Todd Blaquiere | 01:02:23–01:03:17
That’s a great question. I’ve worked at that company too.

If you’re right-sizing for your team, you’re usually in the range of around two to three objectives. Some people say three to five. In my experience, I can keep my team truly focused on about three or less. When I get more than three, I tend to lose focus.

So my rule of thumb: two to three objectives per team per period.

Roger Snyder | 01:03:17–01:04:07
I think that’s a good rule of thumb. We say three to four, so it’s all in that same range. I like the focus aspect.

And remember, these are OKRs. There are also “running the business” KPIs that you’re expected to continue to deliver on. When you get eight OKRs, you have to ask, “Is that really reflecting the fact that I also have to continue to run my business?” Probably not.

What If We Don’t Have the Data?

Audience (Anonymous) | 01:04:07–01:04:32
What should we do if we don’t have the data to track the OKR?

Todd Blaquiere | 01:04:32–01:06:03
That’s a great question. We’ve been talking about OKRs as if the data is just there, but often it’s not.

The toughest challenge I had in my career was finding out how quickly a study coordinator could find a patient. That was the number we needed to track, and it was hard to find.

Ultimately, there are two things you can do. First, instrument the product. Add logging, analytics, whatever you need, so you can measure the behavior directly. That might mean adding new events, new fields, new dashboards.

Second, set up research to learn it. That could be surveying users, but even better, observation. Go watch them work. With our study coordinators, we had to do lots of interviews and observations to suss out what a baseline speed looked like.

The important thing is: you can’t ignore it just because it’s hard. If it’s the data you need to know whether you’re making progress, you have to find a way to get it.

Roger Snyder | 01:06:03–01:06:45
Yeah, and I want to re-emphasize the point about observation, because on this one in particular the coordinators might over- or under-estimate if you just survey them.

Observation gives you a more objective measure of where they’re at. And it has the fringe benefit of showing you where some of the inefficiencies are and how you might better enable them with a more powerful product.

So observation is a very powerful technique. And I also like the phrase “tiny acts of discovery.” Cut these questions down into small, focused experiments and see what you can do to learn more.

Training Opportunities and Closing Remarks

Roger Snyder | 01:06:45–01:09:02
All right, well Todd, thank you so much for a great conversation about OKRs and how to set them. I’m hoping that we gave people a lot of good tips and they know now where to start to get going on this.

If you need help transforming your team with some private custom training or optimizations and assessments, or our Strategic Advice services, please check us out at Productside.com. Use the “Contact Us” link there, and we can lean in and help you improve the product management discipline at your company.

Thanks again, Todd. Have a great day. Thanks to all of you for your time and attendance. I hope you find the recording helpful, and have a great day.

Todd Blaquiere | 01:09:02–01:09:18
Thanks, all of you, for your time and attendance. I hope you find the recording helpful and have a great day.

Roger Snyder | 01:09:18–01:09:26
Thank you, everyone.