Measure What Matters

by John Doerr

As a YouTube product manager, Rick Klau was responsible for the site’s homepage, the third most visited in the world. The hitch: Only a small fraction of users logged in to the site. They were missing out on important features, from saving videos to channel subscriptions. Much of YouTube’s value was effectively hidden to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Meanwhile, the company was forfeiting priceless data. To solve the problem, Rick’s team devised a six-month OKR to improve the site’s login experience. They made their case to YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar, who consulted with Google CEO Larry Page. Larry opted to elevate the login objective to a Google company-wide OKR, but with a caveat: The deadline would be three months, not six. When an OKR rises to the top line, “all eyes in the company are on your team,” Rick says. “That’s a lot of eyes! We had no idea how we’d do it in three months, but we understood that owning a company-level OKR showed that our work took priority.” By adding so much emphasis to a product manager’s goal, Larry clarified things for other teams, too. As in Operation Crush, everyone rallied to help Rick’s group succeed. The YouTube cadre finished on time, though they shipped one week late.