365 Days In a Product Manager’s Life: Day #11 — Objectives & Key Results (OKRs)

In the world of Product Management, paving an efficient path towards realizing your organization’s goals will play a huge factor in success as a PM. Not only can you save a lot of time and resources, but you also have a better insight into how your product team is performing in relevance to your product’s lifecycle. To achieve great work, Google’s product teams utilize the objectives and key results (OKRS) method to plan out organization-wide objectives and measure their success based on specific agreed-upon benchmarks. You might think, “how hard is it to set goals and objectives?” well, it’s actually not a very simple task for product and engineering teams. Today, I spent most of my time learning about this model and working on implementing it for our product. Here are my thoughts:

Before entering the world of Product, I thought of goals using the S.M.A.R.T framework:

• S: Specific
• M: Measurable
• A: Attainable
• R: Relevant
• T: Time-bound

S.M.A.R.T's goal is to help create better attainable goals and facilitate proper measurements and definitions of success. This is great on a personal scale, but when we talk about an organization, we need a deeper/stronger framework that ties to the group's overall vision. Here’s what I love about the OKR framework:

It focuses on outcomes over outputs.

Accordingly, by following the OKR framework, the product team no longer focuses on producing features as the goals; generating value for the end-user becomes the main objective. By visualizing their progress according to the problems they are solving for their users and the value being created for them, the product team can perform better as a whole. The other part of this framework, the Key Results, acts to measure your success and achievement.

Here are a few lessons I learned while drafting up some OKRs today:

1. Understand your product lifecycle, and then create a few OKRs based on the different stages of your product’s lifecycle.
2. Good objectives follow the S.M.A.R.T framework: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound. ( A good objective: Increase user adoption by 50% before the end of the year.)
3. Less is More: choosing no more than three objectives allows the team to focus on progress on the areas of highest customer value. Setting too many objectives will distract the team from the important goals.
4. Lists results, not tasks: Key results are a measure of the work, not the work that needs to be completed. (a good key result: 50% increase in user adoption)
5. Sitting down with your entire team and dedicating time to brainstorming and coming up with OKRs will help the team align and collaborate better. Take breaks to recharge, or break it down to multiple sessions.

While I still haven’t finalized the OKRs that I was working on today, I am halfway through. I have definitely gained a much deeper understanding of our team’s mission and vision by spending time digging into the outcomes we need to achieve in 2021. Setting your OKRs will also help you assess whether you evaluate your product's performance properly and accurately. In most cases, you will find huge areas of opportunity by collaborating with your team to list your objectives and key results.