Getting Started with OKRs

As discussed in the first blog (OKRs and their Super Powers), as our exec team learned more about OKRs, we felt increasingly confident that updating how we set, communicated, and tracked progress against our goals would drive more meaningful improvements for the company. But knowing what you want and knowing how to start aren’t exactly the same.

The ultimate intent was to have our 20 or so different departments creating and executing against OKRs each quarter and year. We’re happy to say that three years later, we’ve achieved that vision. If you were to hop into your DeLorean and visit our executive meetings in 2019 as we were planning on introducing the concept to the Company, you’d observe a team that recognized how a more deliberate but well executed rollout plan would serve us better than a rushed “quick and wrong” approach. To that end, we identified and executed on three elements that enabled our success:

Use OKRs as an improvement on our current planning cycle, not a new concept.
Build our OKR Muscles through a staged rollout
Train, train, train.

1. Writing Better Rocks

Prior to implementing OKRs, we used a term called “Rocks”, popularized in Verne Harnish’ valuable book Scaling Up, to define company-wide and department-specific quarterly goals. Rocks were typically represented as a single line milestone (“Transform Quarterly Business Reviews”) or a desired improvement in a KPI (“achieve X new enrollments”).

While we had the right intent of setting top down and bottoms up quarterly goals, ultimately we found that Rocks fell short of our needs on several fronts:

Specificity - We lacked standards defining a well written goal. As a result, many Rocks were too vague and failed to identify the department and team member activity required to achieve real change.
Ability to track progress - without requiring detail on the underlying steps needed to achieve the defined Rock, it was challenging for the executives, peers across the company, or even other members of the same department to have visibility on the headway made throughout the quarter.
Accountability - at the end of the period there was no follow up to track how the team performed relative to its defined goals. Without being able to easily assess success, the executives couldn’t proactively support those falling behind or coach teams to better set and achieve goals in the next quarter.

The executive team was aware, though, that new frameworks and their accompanying acronyms and buzzwords could be viewed skeptically. This change needed to offer clear benefits to our managers and team members, or it risked being viewed as additional busy work layered onto their already packed days. Therefore, we took deliberate steps to emphasize that we were retaining our quarterly goal setting cadence and were just creating better discipline around the output we expected. For example: we explained to our managers that replacing Rocks with OKRs would better distinguish the “What” (the Objective) from the “How” (the Key Results) when documenting their quarterly targets. This additional detail could then immediately be used within their department standups to identify the best next step required that week to advance towards the goals.

2. Build your OKR Muscles

My grade school basketball coach, at The Fenn School in Concord, Massachusetts, loved the teachings of the great coaches who came before him. In between teaching us the right way to put on two pairs of socks before practice like John Wooden and the art of the pick and roll from Red Auerbach, he regularly shared one of his favorites from Vince Lombardi: “practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.”

Taking the lessons I learned as a 14 year old to heart, I led the company through a gradual implementation of OKRs designed to model the correct practices from the top down, rather than rushing a sloppy introduction to the entire Company at once.

Phase 1:

In May 2019 we first introduced OKRs with a group of about a dozen department heads who served as our senior management team. We asked this group to review the source material directly (in our case, Measure What Matters), and spent the subsequent three months answering questions and aligning on a common understanding of the core principles that made OKRs useful.

As these managers drafted their Q3 goals, the executives intentionally did not require them to replace the Rock framework with which they were familiar with OKRs. Rather, we asked these managers to practice perfectly (or attempt to do so), a limited number of the most valuable principles of OKRS that were most consistently lacking in our Rocks at that time. We specifically highlighted the need for:

Setting specific and measurable goals; and
Coordinating up-front across different departments

While the Q3 Rocks wouldn’t be formally written as OKRs, this was our first step towards conditioning the team to apply what they had learned in a way that would yield better OKRs starting in Q4.

Phase 2:

After a quarter of broadening the understanding of OKRs throughout the organization’s managers, we flexed our new muscles to the entire Company during our Q4 Town Hall in September. In that meeting I conducted a brief training session on what OKRs were, why they mattered, and how we intended to use them. Following those slides, and without re-writing our 2019 annual goals, we presented our Q4 plans for all departments as OKRs for the first time.

Importantly, we acknowledged we weren’t going to be perfect with these OKRs. We intentionally started with Q4 2019 because it gave us a chance to practice writing, managing to, and measuring progress against OKRs before entering our 2020 planning process. We used our bi-weekly executive and monthly senior management meetings as project retrospectives (“retros”), during which we identified what we should keep and what we should change about the process from Q4 ahead of our full year planning. We then shared those lessons more broadly throughout the organization at our next Town Hall.

We try to minimize changes to our annual targets once written, so practicing OKRs through a dress rehearsal in Q4 2019 increased our chance of setting high quality and lasting company-wide and department OKRs for the following year that were specific, measurable and collaborative.

3. Train, Train, Train.

A clear understanding of the “why” around using OKRs would be crucial to a successful implementation, and importantly, couldn’t be concentrated among the executives or even senior management. While we asked our senior managers to review the source material themselves, I took a simplified, but more hands-on, approach to training the remaining employees.

As noted above, I introduced OKRs to all of our team members during our Q4 Town Hall presentation, specifically highlighting:

The different elements of the OKR (Objective, Key Results, Rationale (how it aligns to our Strategic Priorities) and Team (who needs to be involved)
Their “Super Powers” - i.e., why they work
How they represent “Rock upgrades”, and aren’t just a new tool
How new OKRs are identified each period

I then expanded this introductory presentation and recorded it as a 20-minutes on-demand training session that has become part of the onboarding for all of our new Team Members.

By providing a foundational understanding of the OKR framework, we allow new employees to engage with their teams immediately upon joining the company and better support progress towards our quarterly goals.

Finally, I, along with others on the executive team, work directly and continuously with department heads, team leads and other team members each quarter. When helping to revise the OKRs drafted during our two-week quarterly planning session, I refer as much as possible to source material (often to the specific chapter and page number level), and remain consistent with the best practices defined in the initial presentation. This feedback offers ongoing coaching to the managers who are most directly responsible for the success of our OKR implementation on a day-to-day basis, and most commonly revolves around the need to:

Create a clearly defined goal, where outcome and timing are unambiguous
Set a “why” that ties to a larger Company initiative
Build Key Results that will necessarily lead to a completed Objective, with an emphasis on specific milestone or KPI achievements
Align with required team members - particularly those outside the department - before finalizing the goals

Your Turn!

My suggestion to getting started with OKRs is just that: get started. The framework is simple enough to start practicing quickly. I recommend launching in phases, to establish your best practices and avoid the risk of rolling it out the wrong way to your whole group. A few suggestions you can implement immediately:

Define why you’re making the change. We were lucky - OKRs were an upgrade to our existing planning cadence, not a restart. But we still had to credibly explain those key benefits of the new tool to get the team aligned. I’d recommend beginning with whoever you include in your core leadership or decision making circle, and then expanding from there.
It’s hard to do everything right from day one, so focus on one or two best practices from OKRs to start. When I first got a smoker for my backyard, I didn’t dive right into a $100 brisket that would take 15 hours to cook. I’ve read enough Greek mythology to know that sort of hubris would result in a hunk of dried-out beef, a bunch of hungry houseguests, and a giant eagle pecking at my liver. So instead I started with chicken wings to learn how to get the right amount of smoke and hold the temperature steady. And after working on my technique during those first few trial runs, I’m now confident and eager to have friends and family over for some barbecue on the weekends. Similarly, don’t try to overdo it while teaching your team to write good OKRs. Instead, pick just a couple characteristics or Super Powers and encourage them to make sure their first OKRs reflect those at a minimum. In our case, it was most valuable to select a couple of our most common weaknesses as those first areas of emphasis.
Once you roll it out, roll it out completely, which means enough training so everyone knows the what, why and how about the use of OKRs at your business. When training, be mindful that not everyone is going to have time to read a book. The background required for your core leadership group may be overkill as a requirement for the entire department. Take the time to summarize the source material you’re relying on in a way that will be most useful to your team. And don’t forget about the new hires! As a distributed company, with new employees joining almost every week, we used a brief recorded presentation (about 20 minutes) that is required in the first week for all new team members to provide a base level of understanding.
If you’re supposed to be “practicing perfectly” then your last step is to be proactive about figuring out what hasn’t been going perfectly. Particularly in our early days of OKRs we used quarterly retro meetings at the department and company leadership level to discuss what went well and what we wanted to change, not just about our execution, but about the planning and OKR writing process itself. And then we shared these lessons as broadly as we could for everyone’s benefits.

The cliches around launching a big project are endless, and I’ve subjected my team members to most of them. Eat the elephant one bite at a time. Aim for the stars and you’ll at least reach the moon. But cliches become cliches because they are rooted in truth. Use these suggestions to find the initial toehold to introduce OKRs to your organization and then expand gradually and deliberately. Good luck, let me know how it’s going along the way and then meet me back here in a few weeks for some tips on how to source the best OKRs.