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

by John Doerr

Not one Intel product was modified for Crush. But Grove and his executive team altered the terms of engagement. They revamped their marketing to play to the company’s strengths. They steered their customers to see the value of long-term systems and services versus short-term ease of use. They stopped selling to programmers and started selling to CEOs.

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission. And the process can’t stop with unveiling top-line OKRs at a quarterly all-hands meeting. As LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner likes to say, “When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.”

Key results are the levers you pull, the marks you hit to achieve the goal. If an objective is well framed, three to five KRs will usually be adequate to reach it. Too many can dilute focus and obscure progress. Besides, each key result should be a challenge in its own right. If you’re certain you’re going to nail it, you’re probably not pushing hard enough.

When it came to goal setting, Andy Grove felt strongly that less is more: The one thing an [OKR] system should provide par excellence is focus. This can only happen if we keep the number of objectives small. . . . Each time you make a commitment, you forfeit your chance to commit to something else. This, of course, is an inevitable, inescapable consequence of allocating any finite resource. People who plan have to have the guts, honesty, and discipline to drop projects as well as to initiate them, to shake their heads “no” as well as to smile “yes.” . . . We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.

focused on a single ten-week goal: to interview 200 teachers across the United States and Canada. (I guess you could say that was my first OKR.) After contacting 500 teachers on Twitter, I wound up with 250 one-on-ones, exceeding my objective.

Maneesh had already been nudging us to back our decisions with more data, and Chamath showed us how to paint a picture with one page of it. Plus he taught us to discern what was inessential, like our number of registered users. Nobody cared how many teachers registered on Remind if they never came back to use it.

For example: To this day, one of our most requested features is a repeated message. Say a teacher wants to remind a fifth-grade class to bring the novel they’re reading to school—and keep reminding them every Monday morning without resending. That’s a classic “delight” feature, but was it worth the engineering time to make it a top-line priority? Would it move the needle for user engagement? When our answer was no, we decided to shelve it—a tough call for a teacher-centric organization. Without our new goal-setting discipline and focus, we might not have held our ground.

After sharing my individual OKRs at an all-hands meeting, I was surprised by just how much it helped the company rally around the process. It showed everyone that I, too, was accountable. Our contributors feel free to evaluate my OKRs and tell me how to improve them, which has made all the difference.

As a species, we crave connection. In the workplace, we’re naturally curious about what our leaders are doing and how our work weaves into theirs. OKRs are the vehicle of choice for vertical alignment.

OKRs are not islands. To the contrary, they create networks—vertical, horizontal, diagonal—to connect an organization’s most vital work. When employees align with a company’s top-line goals, their impact is amplified. They stop duplicating efforts or working counterproductively against the grain.

We created company OKRs for people instead of matching people to our OKRs—we had it backward. Some objectives were too narrow, others too nebulous. If an HR manager got stuck trying to connect to the high-level goals for product or revenue, we’d add a top-line objective just for that person. Soon we had a cornucopia of company OKRs, but what really mattered at MyFitnessPal? We’d lost the forest for the trees.

When you come down to it, alignment is about helping people understand what you want them to do. Most contributors will be motivated to ladder up to the top-line OKRs—assuming they know where to set the ladder. As our team got larger and more layered, we confronted new issues. One product manager was working on Premium, the enhanced

subscription version of our app. Another focused on our API platform, to enable third parties like Fitbit to connect to MyFitnessPal and write data to it or applications on top of it. The third addressed our core login experience. All three had individual OKRs for what they hoped to accomplish—so far, so good. The problem was our shared engineering team, which got caught in the middle. The engineers weren’t aligned with the product managers’ objectives. They had their own infrastructure OKRs, to keep the plumbing going and the lights on. We assumed they could do it all—a big mistake. They got confused about what they should be working on, which could change without notice. (Sometimes it boiled down to which product manager yelled loudest.) As the engineers switched between projects from week to week, their efficiency dragged. When returning to a product after an interruption, they’d have to ask themselves: How does this go again? The Premium work was especially urgent for revenue, yet it went in fits and starts.

Alignment doesn’t mean redundancy. At MyFitnessPal, every OKR has a single owner, with other teams linking up as needed. As I see it, co-ownership

weakens accountability. If an OKR fails, I don’t want two people blaming each other. Even when two or more teams have parallel objectives, their key results should be distinct.

We began pinning our key results to deadlines instead of revenue or projected users. (Example: “Launch MFP Premium by 5/1/15.”) After a feature launched and some real data came back, we’d be in a stronger position to assess its impact and potential. Then our next round of OKRs could be more realistically keyed (or stretched) to projected outputs.

Over its long history, by tech standards, Intuit has survived one competitive threat after the next by staying a step ahead. Most recently, it sold Quicken and reconstructed QuickBooks Online as an open platform. Subscriptions soared by 49 percent. “Whenever Intuit makes a wrong turn,” UBS analyst Brent Thill told The New York Times, “they quickly get off the gravel and back onto the blacktop. That’s why the company has done so well for such a long time.”

Any thirty-plus-year-old company accumulates layers of complex technology—especially a technology company. In IT, we’re always juggling the needs of internal partners with the demands of our end users. We bridge technology and business outcomes. Maybe toughest of all, we must balance the task of making systems work perfectly today (as our people expect) with our mandate to invest in the future. For example: Intuit used to have nine different billing systems to serve our array of products, and each of them had special challenges. When you’re putting out fires every day, it’s hard to build a next-generation billing technology.

My research suggested that OKRs might help us change the way we operate, even how we perceive ourselves.

When a new project comes up for discussion, they’ll ask one another how it fits into our OKR template. If it doesn’t, they’ll rightly raise a red flag: “Why are we doing this?”

OBJECTIVE Enable every Intuit worker to make decisions based on “live” data.

There’s an art to goal setting, and more than a few judgment calls. If you choose to temporarily elevate a key result, it helps to be candid about it. Leaders need to explain, “Yes, I want us to focus on that one

right now as a top-level objective. When it no longer needs the extra attention, we’ll let it drift back down into a KR.” It’s a dynamic system. You’re always adjusting the altitude.

Daniel Pink, the author of Drive, agrees: “The single greatest motivator is ‘making progress in one’s work.’ The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged.”

One proviso: When an objective gets dropped before the end of the OKR interval, it’s important to notify everyone depending on it. Then comes reflection: What did I learn that I didn’t foresee at the beginning of the quarter? And: How will I apply this lesson in the future?

On top of these one-on-ones, teams and departments hold regular meetings to evaluate progress toward shared objectives. Whenever a committed OKR is failing, a rescue plan is devised.

OKRs do not expire with completion of the work. As in any data-driven system, tremendous value can be gained from post hoc evaluation and analysis. In both one-on-ones and team meetings, these wrap-ups consist of three parts: objective scoring, subjective self-assessment, and reflection.

The simplest, cleanest way to score an objective is by averaging the percentage completion rates of its associated key results. Google uses a scale of 0 to 1.0: 0.7 to 1.0 = green.* (We delivered.)

0.4 to 0.6 = yellow. (We made progress, but fell short of completion.) 0.0 to 0.3 = red. (We failed to make real progress.)

Altogether, we averaged 62.5 percent (or a raw score of 0.625) on our KRs for this objective, a respectable grade. The Intel board judged it below expectations but not too far below, because they knew how aggressively management set our goals. As a rule, we’d enter a quarter knowing we wouldn’t achieve all of them. If a department so much as approached 100 percent, it was presumed to be setting its sights too low—and there would be hell to pay.

Our goals are for ourselves,so if we set ambitious goals and get only 60%, -we get to tell the story of what we achieved for ourselves, too. We have been doing this internally at the WSP.

Googlers are encouraged to use their OKRs in self-assessments—as guides, not as grades. As Shona Brown, former SVP of business operations, explained it to me, “It wasn’t that they got a red or yellow or green, but here was a list of what they’d delivered on that was above business as usual and connected to the overall goals of the company.” The point of objectives and key results, after all, is to get everyone working on the right things.

In the end, the numbers are probably less important than contextual feedback and a broader discussion within the team.

Learning “from direct experience,” a Harvard Business School study found, “can be more effective if coupled with reflection—that is, the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience.” The philosopher and educator John Dewey went a step further: “We do not learn from experience . . . we learn from reflecting on experience.”