Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

by John Doerr

Reach 1 billion hours of watch time per day [by 2016], with growth driven by:

Good time bound objective. Is 1 billion quantitative though? Key results include measurable quantities to be defined...

Stretch goals can be crushing if people don’t believe they’re achievable. That’s where the art of framing comes in. Clever manager that he is, Shishir cut our BHAG down to size. While one billion daily hours sounded like an awful lot, it represented less than 20 percent of the world’s total television watch time. Introducing that context was helpful and clarifying,

There was another thing out there way bigger than us, and we were trying to scale up to it.

we’d commit to some watch-time-negative decisions for the benefit of our users.

Once the billion-hour BHAG was set, however, we never did anything without measuring impact on watch time.

My job was to keep an eye on the gray, the nuances that might get overlooked.

Notice her perspective, her identifying the two inputs that drive their flywheel, user watch time and active user base. These multiply to yield the total daily hours. YouTube was missing a key result to realize it's stretch objective

Daily watch time is driven

by two fa...

the average number of daily active viewers (or DAVs) and the average amount of time tho...

we began putting people’s names next to our YouTube company goals, with colored bars denoting progress: green, yellow, or red.

quarter after quarter, year after year. I felt personally responsible for that OKR.

We’d achieved the stretch OKR many thought was impossible, ahead of schedule.

Great vision, audacious goal, strong leadership, and a talented team motivated to work toward the goal for the right reasons...this is how you get it done

ambitious and clear.

People need a benchmark to know how they’re performing against it. The catch is to find the right one.

we began to advance beyond watch time by factoring user satisfaction into our recommended videos.

This is where values driven businesses thrive. What happens when you reach your goal? How do you decide what to focus on next to grow your business if you lack the values and vision that will define the business? Refer to the monk and the riddle...

continuous performance management. It is implemented with an instrument called CFRs, for:

continuous performance management to surface the critical questions: Was the goal harder to achieve than you’d thought when you set it? Was it the right goal in the first place? Is it motivating? Should we double down on the two or three things that really worked for us last quarter, or is it time to consider a pivot? You need to elicit those insights from all over the organization.

We replaced it with a set of more frequent touch points between managers and employees.

“The first is a set of monthly one-on-one conversations between employees and their managers about how things are going.

“The second is a quarterly review of progress against our OKRs. We sit down and say, ‘What did you set out to accomplish this quarter? What were you able to do—and what weren’t you able to do? Why or why not? What can we change?’

“Third, we have a semiannual professional developm...

“The fourth bit is ongoing, self-driven insight.

But we want to probe a little deeper: ‘Thank you. What one thing did you like about it?’ The idea is to capture more specific feedback in real time.”

centers on five questions: What are you working on? How are you doing; how are your OKRs coming along? Is there anything impeding your work? What do you need from me to be (more) successful?

How do you need to grow to achieve your career goals?

Peter Drucker was one of the first to stress the value of regular one-on-one meetings between managers and their direct reports.

Andy made one-on-ones mandatory at Intel.

The point of the meeting,

is mutual teaching and exchange of information. By talking about specific problems and situations, the supervisor teaches the subordinate his skills and know-how, and suggests ways to approach things. At the same time, the subordinate provides the supervisor with detailed information about what he is doing and what he is concerned about. .

Take this purpose to advisor meetings as well. Specific, and focused on teaching to improve performance in the job

five critical areas have emerged of conversation between manager and contributor:

Goal setting and reflection,

Ongoing progress updates,

Two-way coaching,

Career growth,

Lightweight performance reviews,

coaching trains its sights on future improvement.

“Feedback is an opinion, grounded in observations and experiences, which allows us to know what impression we make on others.”

Feedback can be highly constructive—but only if it is specific.

Here’s the precious opportunity for people to say to their leaders, What do you need from me to be successful? And now let me tell you what I need from you.

Institute peer-to-peer recognition.

When employee achievements are consistently recognized by peers, a culture of gratitude is born.

Establish clear criteria.

Recognize people for actions and results:

Share recognition stories.

Newsletters or company blogs can supply the narrative behind the accomplishment, giving recognition more meaning.

Make recognition frequent and...

Hail smaller accomplishm...

Tie recognition to company goals and strategies.

any organizational priority can be supported by a timely shout-out.

Low Value Objectives (aka the “Who cares?” OKR).