Measure What Matters

by John Doerr

The following April, we relaunched the platform with a sixty-day pilot program for a hundred employees in our operations group. Our senior vice president for operations and delivery, had his doubts going in. But with sharpened training, plus improvements to the software, he became an enthusiast. Within less than two weeks, he was shooting emails to the pilot group: Why did you write this objective that way? What’s the metric here? I don’t get this OKR, it isn’t what I’m seeing from client feedback. And his people were thinking, He’s paying attention! I’d better look at this more closely. Winning our troops over to OKRs wasn’t easy or instantaneous, far from it. Transparency is scary. Admitting your failures—visibly, publicly—can be terrifying. We had to rewire people from how they’d been raised since kindergarten. It’s like your first scuba dive, when you go thirty-five feet down and the adrenaline is pumping and you’re scared out of your wits. But when you come back up, you’re exhilarated. You have a new insight into how things work beneath the surface.