Measure What Matters

by John Doerr

A few weeks after our acquisition, my boss called an off-site leadership meeting for twenty people, including Connected Fitness stakeholders across the company. Since Under Armour followed an annual cadence, department heads were to present what they aimed to achieve that year. At MyFitnessPal, we were accustomed to investing the time to frame our objectives correctly. Our group was ready. As the meeting unfolded, Albert and I were surprised to discover that the ecommerce team was counting on us to drive significant traffic from our apps. The data team assumed we’d deliver a mass of data. The media sales team had marked us down for a set dollar amount in new ad revenues. All three had preconceived notions of what they could expect from us, with no visibility into what other teams were asking. Nor could anyone see how their targets might align with our own growth objectives, much less the bigger company picture. There were unacknowledged dependencies wherever we looked. It was our old problem at MyFitnessPal, on steroids. There was simply no way we could get all these things done. It took eighteen months to straighten out our division’s alignment, and we couldn’t have done it without OKRs. First, we had to define our capacity constraints for developing new software. Then we had to clarify our core priorities. By sharing our high-level OKRs for Connected Fitness, I could explain why certain projects required the allocated time, and where we should be doubling down on the com...