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

by John Doerr

Aspirational OKRs The set of aspirational OKRs will by design exceed the team’s ability to execute in a given quarter. The OKRs’ priority should inform team members’ decisions on where to spend the remaining time they have after the group’s commitments are met. In general, higher priority OKRs should be completed before lower priority OKRs. Aspirational OKRs and their associated priorities should remain on a team’s OKR list until they are completed, carrying them forward from quarter to quarter as necessary. Dropping them from the OKR list because of lack of progress is a mistake, as it disguises persistent problems of prioritization, resource availability, or a lack of understanding of the problem/solution. Corollary: It is good to move an aspirational OKR to a different team’s list if that team has both the expertise and bandwidth to accomplish the OKR more effectively than the current OKR owner. Team managers are expected to assess the resources required to accomplish their aspirational OKRs and ask for them each quarter, fulfilling their duty to express known demand to the business. Managers should not expect to receive all the required resources, however, unless their aspirational OKRs are the highest priority goals in the company after the committed OKRs.

Some simple tests to see if your OKRs are good: If you wrote them down in five minutes, they probably aren’t good. Think. If your objective doesn’t fit on one line, it probably isn’t crisp enough. If your KRs are expressed in team-internal terms (“Launch Foo 4.1”), they probably aren’t good. What matters isn’t the launch, but its impact. Why is Foo 4.1 important? Better: “Launch Foo 4.1 to improve sign-ups by 25 percent.” Or simply: “Improve sign-ups by 25 percent.” Use real dates. If every key result happens on the last day of the quarter, you likely don’t have a real plan. Make sure your key results are measurable: It must be possible to objectively assign a grade at the end of the quarter. “Improve sign-ups” isn’t a good key result. Better: “Improve daily sign-ups by 25 percent by May 1.” Make sure the metrics are unambiguous. If you say “1 million users,” is that all-time users or seven-day actives? If there are important activities on your team (or a significant fraction of its effort) that aren’t covered by OKRs, add more. For larger groups, make OKRs hierarchical—have high-level ones for the entire team, more detailed ones for subteams. Make sure that the “horizontal” OKRs (projects that need multiple teams to contribute) have supporting key results in each subteam.