OKRs, From Mission to Metrics Quotes

“The process of finding out if features will indeed produce results is called discovery. Discovery happens via experiments, or the smallest efforts (i.e., time from the team) that can prove our hypotheses of what features will drive Outcomes, and what Outcomes will drive Impact. Product teams should always be running experiments that test those hypotheses, with the least code possible.”
― Francisco S. Homem De Mello, OKRs, From Mission to Metrics: How Objectives and Key Results Can Help Your Company Achieve Great Things

“What separates great product teams from mediocre ones is how often they get those assumptions right, and/or how quickly they iterate when wrong.”
― Francisco S. Homem De Mello, OKRs, From Mission to Metrics: How Objectives and Key Results Can Help Your Company Achieve Great Things

“In order to increase the profitability of the company, we will have to increase sales, cut costs and expenses and implement Six Sigma.”
― Francisco S. Homem De Mello, OKRs, From Mission to Metrics: How Objectives and Key Results Can Help Your Company Achieve Great Things

“Vision without execution is just hallucination” -Thomas Edison”
― Francisco S. Homem De Mello, OKRs, From Mission to Metrics: How Objectives and Key Results Can Help Your Company Achieve Great Things

“But the most engaging part of the planning process should be having people figure out how they’ll achieve their OKRs. OKRs have to be aggressive enough so that people don’t quite know how to reach them at the start of the journey. Even if they have an idea of what they should do, there must be a chance of the OKR not being hit. For example, let’s say your company needs to grow 25% in revenues in a given quarter. How the company will hit that goal is going to be a matter of great thinking and creativity. The journey starts with analyzing the data to understand pockets of opportunity. Where can the sales process be improved? Where is there breakage in the sales process? Where are the low hanging fruits? Let’s say this analysis shows that salespeople have too few leads and therefore need more leads to work on. You then calculate that at your recent-past conversion rates, you’d need to grow leads by 100% in order to grow sales by 25%. That’s the first hypothesis. So you unfold a “grow the number of leads” Objective to marketing and a Key Result of “generate 15,000 more inbound leads quarter-on-quarter.” Of course, there’s a chance that growing leads won’t result in more sales. Getting it right is good management and good thinking.”
― Francisco S. Homem De Mello, OKRs, From Mission to Metrics: How Objectives and Key Results Can Help Your Company Achieve Great Things

“Ignore “Google” As one of the best known companies in the world and because it’s often cited as a pioneer in adopting OKRs, Google is always held as a benchmark in content and methodology for OKRs. Our suggestion is that you ignore any reference to Google in implementing your OKRs. First of all, things that work for Google might not necessarily work for your company. Second, our empirical research with more than 20 Google employees has shown that there’s no homogeneous format for OKRs within the company, or between departments (e.g., how sales or product treats the subject) or across geographies (e.g., how Brazil, the US, and Europe address the issue). We’ve even found that four of those people that dind’t even know what OKRs were, and many who used OKRs as a high-level task list, which it’s NOT. Some official Google resources on OKRs, such as their human resources website, re:Work, explain the methodology simplistically and give out terrible OKR examples (one suggested Objective is “Eat 5 Pies”). Finally, don’t learn about management from companies that don’t really need to be well-managed. Google is a money minting machine because of its Adwords advertising business, and it really doesn’t matter if it has a strategy or not, or how well it executes it: Cash will keep pouring in. For execution lessons, look at tougher businesses, like retail and manufacturing. That’s where management really can make or break a company.”
― Francisco S. Homem De Mello, OKRs, From Mission to Metrics: How Objectives and Key Results Can Help Your Company Achieve Great Things