Measure What Matters

by John Doerr

In October 2018, for the seventy-fifth consecutive quarter, Google’s CEO will lead the entire company to evaluate its progress against top-level objectives and key results. In November and December, each team and product area will develop its own plans for the coming year and distill them into OKRs. The following January, as CEO Sundar Pichai told me, “We’ll go back in front of the company and articulate, ‘This is our high-level strategy, and here are the OKRs we have written for the year.’ ”fn6 (In accordance with company tradition, the executive team will also grade Google’s OKRs from the prior year, with failures unblinkingly dissected.) Over the following weeks and months, thousands of Googlers will formulate, discuss, revise, and grade their team and individual OKRs. As always, they’ll have carte blanche to browse their intranet and see how other teams are measuring success. They’ll be able to trace how their work connects up, down, and sideways—how it fits into Google’s big picture.