Empowered on objectives
Empowered has an interesting take on OKRs:
- The Objectives are set by leadership as part of strategy and reflect ~1 year business goals (e.g. improve retention)
- The Key Results are set by the individual teams to ensure they feel ownership of them. The KRs should also be business results (ideally measures), not activities.
- The leadership and the teams iterate back and forth, providing alternative objectives or results until both are happy
This style of OKRs has the objectives be directional and abstract (e.g. improve retention) and the key results be a set of metrics and counter-metrics. It is fascinatinating to contrast with Measure What Matters, which wants the objectives to be concrete and the key results to be a concrete list of actions that will achieve the objective.
Quotes
Hopefully everyone understands that these company objectives must be outcomes (business results), and not output (such as delivering on specific projects). (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 13)
We need to be careful never to confuse output with outcome. Our customers care about results, not effort or activity. (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 13)
If I had to boil it all down, I’d say that thinking like an owner versus thinking like an employee is primarily about taking responsibility for the outcome rather than just the activities. (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 13)
What’s most important about all of these examples is that they are problems to solve and not features to build. (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 53)
Generally speaking, we want between two and four key results for each objective. The first key result is normally the primary measure. Then we have one or more key results as a measure of quality–sometimes called guardrail or backstop key results–to ensure that the primary key result is not inadvertently achieved by hurting something else. (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 53)
We don’t yet have the expected values or timeframes because those will need to come from the team. The reason for that is because, if we were to provide to the team explicit measures of success including timeframe, they won’t feel that ownership over the commitment that we want in an empowered team. So the actual quantitative values need to come from the teams. (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 53)
The higher‐order point here is that the best team objective will come from a back‐and‐forth dialog between the leader and the team. (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 53)
It is the responsibility of the leaders to decide which problems should be worked on by which product teams.
Many companies think that the idea is to let the product teams come up with their own objectives, yet are somehow surprised when the organization complains of lack of direction and little is accomplished. (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 54)
Leaders also need to communicate how risk-tolerant a team should be in setting its goals. One helpful framework is:
Some people like to refer to level of ambition as either a roof shot or a moon shot.
A roof shot refers to a team being asked to be conservative and pursue lower‐risk, but also highly likely, tangible results. Optimization work fits well here.
On the other hand, a moon shot is when the team is asked to be very ambitious, such as going for a 10X improvement. (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 55)
Some commitments are special “High Integrity Commitments”
In all businesses there are occasional situations where something important must be delivered by a specific deadline date. (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 56)
These need to be specially tracked because of their unusual nature; and kept rare, otherwise:
Pretty soon your objectives become nothing more than a list of deliverables and dates, which is little more than a reformatted roadmap. (Cagan and Jones 2021, chap. 56)