Our OKRs are not working
Count your metrics first. Then run every key result through one question: whose behavior changes, and how would you know?
Priority comes from the Latin prioritas, meaning first. There can only be one first thing. You cannot have priorities, plural, no matter how badly everyone wants to believe otherwise.
Done well, on a quarterly cadence, aiming at goals that stretch without being fantasy, OKRs create real focus and accountability. Done badly they create the opposite, and the most common failure is over-engineering. Fifty objectives times ten key results each is five hundred metrics, and nobody anywhere is tracking five hundred things clearly.
The second failure is subtler. An outcome is a change in human behavior, not a shipped feature. Everyone thinks outcomes are just a synonym for results, so the sloppy key results look fine until you try to name the person whose behavior changes.
What you get
- A counting block that multiplies your objectives by your key results, which is usually the finding on its own
- The behavior-change test as a table, one row per key result
- Two questions for the leadership team, including the one about what you said out loud you are not doing
- A prompt to check the strategy above the OKRs before rewriting any of them
Where should we send it?
One email with the worksheet. You can unsubscribe from anything else in one click.
On its way
Check your inbox. If it has not landed in a minute or two, look in promotions or spam, and add sam@startuppatterns.com to your contacts so the rest arrive.
Adapted from the Organization chapter of The Mindful Product Company by Sam McAfee.