OKRs and their Superpowers

In my current role as CFO of a growth stage marketing software business, I introduced the Objective & Key Results framework (popularly known as OKRs) to the company about three years ago. In 2019 our company had reached the size where centralized strategic planning needed to be executed by a decentralized group of team members and managers across two countries and four time zones. At that time we were setting annual and quarterly targets for the overall company and its departments. However, we found that goals expressed as a single line or target KPI often lacked specificity and failed to sufficiently connect with the company’s broader strategic priorities.

In response to these challenges in 2019, the executive team adopted the OKR framework, applying the theories presented by John Doerr in Measure What Matters, and we have continued to expand their use at SproutLoud to this day. The four primary benefits of OKRs were defined by the author as their “Super Powers,” and they provided a path to improve the shortcomings of our existing planning process. I created and shared the table below throughout the company to translate those super powers more clearly into a set of benefits to be realized by our business and its employees.

Super Power	How it Helps Us
Focus and Commit to Priorities	We can prioritize the most important goals - so we all know what matters
Align and Connect for Teamwork	Identify cross dependencies and risks Fosters cooperation with other departments
Track for Accountability	Publishing progress lets us keep ourselves, and each other, on plan
Stretch for Amazing	Identify aspirational goals - hard goals drive meaningful progress

Three Years Later...

We now have nearly 30 managers writing OKRs which capture the focus of their efforts for a given period. These are then shared at every level of the company, within and across teams to ensure alignment ahead of time, particularly for those activities requiring cross-department cooperation. Each period, over 200 team members rely on this common sheet of music to clearly identify their responsibilities, meeting regularly to track progress. A handful of OKRs tying to our primary annual corporate goals and strategy priorities are presented to the entire company at our quarterly Town Hall meetings and our senior management team is transparent and accountable to their results, both good and bad.

I have been fortunate enough to drive this implementation at the company, helping all levels of management learn to write strong and measurable goals. OKR implementation for us, however, has been a learning process. While we were confident that the principles would apply to a growth stage business like ours, implementation would have to be self-driven. Without any team members with previous experience with OKRs, we were relying on Measure What Matters and similar instructional content, much of which was written for large, public businesses. We have achieved success, but we still would have benefited from referencing content written to apply those same lessons to the practical realities of a mid-sized business, department, or division.

Bring OKRs to Your Business

My goal, over a handful of articles, is to share how we did it: what worked, what didn’t, and what we learned along the way. Our managers are using OKRs for the first time, which means that if you are looking for ways to improve your company, department, or division you can put this tool in place quickly and effectively, even without any existing institutional knowledge.

My favorite business books do more than describe how their theories worked at someone else’s job. They also tell me what I can do at mine. My hope is that if you’re thinking about bringing OKRs to your workplace, this series of posts can be interesting, prescriptive and (maybe?) even occasionally entertaining, as you start your journey.

So bookmark this page, meet me back here regularly, and let me help you get started.