Meet Your OKR's Supporting Cast

We started dissecting the OKR in the last post (Anatomy of an OKR), discussing some practical guidance I have found useful when helping our teams define their Objectives and the Key Results. This week I want to introduce you to four other valuable parts of the team that we have learned to include to maximize the superpowers of our OKRs.

I get it. The Objectives and the Key Results are your premier players. They’re the early draft picks of your fantasy football team, connecting for touchdown after touchdown. Getting your stars in place lets you identify measurable goals and define clear roadmaps to reach them, and represents an important step towards setting your team and business up for success.

What we’ve learned, however, is that even your stars will benefit from a well built complement of teammates. If I can let the start of football season inspire me to clumsily continue this analogy, take the extra moment during your planning cycle and add the necessary pieces to shore up your offensive line, and add that critical pass blocking running back or the tight end who draws the safety’s attention while your Key Result streaks down the sideline for a winning touchdown pass. In this article I will share what we’ve learned through some trial and error about four other components that, when added to our OKRs each time, provided more precision and clarity about our intentions and increased the likelihood that we would be successful (feel free to click on each bullet to jump ahead to the section):

Aligns To
OKR Type
Target Dates
Team

For convenience, refresh yourself on the two example OKRs from our prior article by following the link at the top of this page.

Aligns To:

If the Objective defines the “what” and the Key Results the “how”, completing the “Aligns To” box in your OKR table provides the “why.” It creates an important quality check to distinguish those OKRs that will drive the change in your organization from those that are simply “business as usual” activities, dressed up for a night out.

Strategic Priorities

Our most common justification for pursuing a quarterly objective is to advance one of the company’s strategic priorities. Our software yields its greatest value when it is highly utilized across our customers’ extremely large and decentralized networks, and our customers depend on us to create an intuitive self-serve platform that can be used without extensive training. In the Aspirational example, we relied on that guiding principle to justify our intention to increase activity per user, matching our measurable goal against that core tenant of our business.

Cascading OKRs

Alignment can also exist against goals other than a multi-year strategic priority, particularly for shorter period OKRs. We leverage the concept of “cascading” OKRs (see Measure What Matters, Chapter 7, for more detail on cascading OKRs) to break down longer annual projects into more manageable milestones. To support their responsibilities to the Aspirational OKR above, the Marketing department might elevate several components up a level and start their own OKR as follows:

Aligns To	Increase average monthly activity per user by 15% for Q4 vs. Q4 in Prior Year
Team:	Marketing	Committed
Objective:	Publish at least one blog post per month highlighting under-utilized features	Target Date

The marketing team’s Key Result from the annual corporate OKR becomes the goal in the form of their Objective for this period. In turn, the Objective from the corporate OKR becomes the justification, or the “why” for the marketing department, and is entered into the “Aligns To” box. Cascading OKRs in this manner also provides a valuable through-line from a company priority to a department responsibility, as the Key Results that would follow from this OKR create a project plan for the department manager. Further assignment of work to the individual level can, in turn, support employee engagement by providing clear understanding of how each individual's work links to broader company initiatives.

Operational Excellence

A final point about alignment is that small projects matter. While operational efficiency is distinct from strategy, it remains a goal worth striving for. We encourage department OKRs to pursue process and productivity improvements that reduce employee headaches and increase profit margins. The example Committed OKR emerged from a pain point identified by our AP Specialist. Note that regardless of the point of alignment, all Objectives should adhere to the rules about a defined benefit and an unambiguous target.

OKR Type (Committed or Aspirational):

When uncertainty was our only certainty, we didn’t adjust by creating more easily achieved targets in our objectives, but instead learned to distinguish our Aspirational OKRs from those that are Committed.

We refer to Committed OKRs, such as the shift in our AP process, as “Must Dos.” These commonly include internal facing projects or goals defined by qualitative milestones where the timing and execution of the key results and the objective are under the control of our team members. We typically have a high level of confidence that completing the key results of a committed OKR will result in achievement of the objective.

In contrast, Aspirational OKRs provides permission for teams to pursue the superpower “Stretch for Amazing.” In our example OKR, growing activity by 15% year-over-year would be a meaningful improvement over our typical per user increases, and the Aspirational designation clearly announced this as a stretch goal with uncertainty to the entire company. We weren’t 100% sure we could hit that target, or even that we had identified the right Key Results to take us there, but knew that setting a lofty goal would force us to think creatively and identify new approaches.

(For those following along in Measure What Matters, a callout box in Chapter 12 provides further detail on the distinction between the two.)

Our expectation is that Committed OKRs be completed nearly 100% of the time. By contrast, our guidance is that our Aspirational OKRs should be achieved about 60-70% of the time. They should be “more likely than not”, but if we found ourselves constantly hitting those stretch goals, it implies we should be asking more of ourselves and setting them a little higher.

Target Dates:

Setting target completion dates at the Key Result level is the easiest way to measure progress and access the “Track for Accountability” superpower, and we require them without exception for all OKRs.

During the period, our departments hold regular (typically no less often than bi-weekly) meetings to discuss work completed on their Key Results. Like with any detailed project plan, by comparing actual progress against these documented deadlines we can, in real time, define next steps and react immediately if we are falling behind. We also aggregate the progress relative to target completion dates for Key Results for all departments across the Company into a single dashboard. Defining these Target Dates thus allows the executives to more easily monitor these OKRs in real time ahead of the end of the period, and provide better support to their teams.

You will note that the Committed OKR has sequential Target Dates, and resembles a project plan. This typically is common for sets of Key Results completed by a single person or team, in which one activity is a prerequisite for the next. While a list of Key Results wouldn’t be expected, for example, to be inclusive of every step in a detailed Gantt Chart, they will represent the major milestones (so long as they are specific and measurable) for that project.

By contrast, the Aspirational example represents an annual corporate-wide OKR, where different departments had different Key Results to complete in parallel. As in the example of the cascading OKRs, these Key Results would elevate to the Objective for each departments’ OKR. Then, within those department OKRs, the Key Results would be more likely to fall more sequentially, as they represent a project assigned to a single team.

Team:

Finally, requiring OKR authors to explicitly identify who is involved up front increases the likelihood of coordination across departments.

As mentioned in the post Getting Started with OKRs, insufficient coordination across teams was an issue that often doomed our quarterly goals to failure. Teams would be halfway through a period before foisting an urgent requirement on another department, only to learn there was no planned capacity to help. We now require anyone requiring the involvement of another person or department to confirm alignment and availability with their counterpart on that team before finalizing the OKR. To the extent there is a conflict regarding the availability of Team A to support Team B, while still completing their own OKRs, a member of our Executive Team now has ample notice to step in and work with the respective department heads to prioritize and allocate resources.

We actually originally used the term “Dependencies” for this section, leveraging the nomenclature used by our software development teams during their planning cycles, to identify the other departments whose time would be required to complete all of the defined Key Results. The term “Team” was adopted more recently to be inclusive of the department or person leading the OKR as well as outside groups, and to better reflect the upfront collaboration that was occurring.

Your Turn!

The table below may help link the benefit of these supporting cast members of the OKR anatomy to the superpowers we are using OKRs to unlock. This small bit of additional information will complement the What and the How of your Objectives and Key Results, and increase your chance of creating real improvements in your company or department.

Defined OKR Component	Superpower Activated
Aligns To	Focus and Commit to Priorities
Team	Align and Connect for Teamwork
Target Dates	Track for Accountability
OKR Type	Stretch for Amazing

Importantly, you don’t need to wait to complete your training and implementation of OKRs to benefit from the additional detail that these components provide. If you find yourself consistently falling short of your quarterly goals, take the following steps:

Start immediately in your next planning cycle by identifying which one, and one only, of these superpowers would most benefit your team. Revisit the superpower table from the first blog post (OKRs and Their Superpowers) and choose the weakest part of your planning and execution efforts, keeping in mind you can often create a larger net benefit to your team more easily by taking an area of poor performance and making it average than trying to take a point of strength and making it even better.
Start requiring the inclusion of that one component like a new ingredient in your planning recipe. Remain disciplined and return-to-sender any draft quarterly goal presented to you without that component specifically defined. Whether you use OKRs, Rocks, or some other framework, any of these tools can be applied, and its inclusion will immediately improve whatever meal you're planning. Just like bacon.
Tackle the remaining components one by one as makes sense as you evolve fully into using the OKR framework. I’d recommend continuing to prioritize by targeting your weakest application of superpowers, because you and your team will feel the biggest improvement working in that order. But - if you’re really stuck and need advice on where to start - add these elements one at a time exactly in the order as presented in the table right above, starting with “Aligns To.”

This has perhaps been my favorite post to write to date, as it represents our biggest learnings on the use of OKRs outside of the instructions available in books or articles we found. Outside of OKR Type, these terms, how we use them, and even how we tacked them on to the OKR template our departments start with each quarter, are the results of three years of internal trial and error. Certainly the concept of, for example, identifying the team that would work on a project ahead of time isn’t on par with Archimedes’ “eureka” moment when stepping into his bathtub. But when we first required it in writing to accompany a submitted OKR, it was like removing a massive unseen obstacle to our success, and we all wondered what took us so long.

I am hopeful this article, and its anatomy lesson, saves you some of our struggles and provides you with a bit of a cheat code to your own success.