OKR should enable, not restrict
Don't put them into the meat grinder!
Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) should inspire people to contribute meaningfully to the organization's ambitions. They should enable people to look for ways to make a mark. OKRs should help people to work towards achieving outcomes.
Through this, OKRs should change the narrative from output to outcome. They should help the organization avoid the pitfalls of a feature factory, cranking out stuff no one wants.
You should be wary when a leader suggests linking the OKRs to Jira stories to ensure people work on the right things. Sure, teams may work on initiatives, epics, stories or whatever you call them, to push the OKRs in the desired direction. But finishing these items doesn’t mean you moved the needle.
Most product environments are complex. People may have a good idea of what they need to do to create the desired outcome. But they won’t know this unless they actually check, asking “Did the output we created indeed lead to the desired outcome?
The crux of working with OKRs is using the Key Results to inspect progress regularly and defining actions that you expect will increase the chances of being successful. These regular check-ins should occur at least monthly, preferably even more frequently. These regular moments of inspecting can easily be part of Agile events, like the Sprint Review.
OKRs are about relying on data you can easily collect and inspect. When it is hard to collect the data it is not helping to have a good Key Result. For example, when you don’t have a good view of the Value Chain, you may struggle to know what the lead time for change is. You either need to find ways to improve this or dismiss it as a Key Result.
When the data doesn’t change frequently, it also isn’t useful for regular inspection. For example, when you only survey client satisfaction once a year, you can’t use this data as a Key Result. You can either find ways to have a more frequent insight into client satisfaction or forget about using it. Defining Key Results is quite challenging.
One thing is for certain though: relying on completion of all items linked to an OKR is not going to inform you about the desired impact. There’s a danger of putting all your ambitions, hopes and dreams into a meat grinder, resulting in a pile of minced meat.
One aspect often missed is learning what did not work and sharing it openly. Not only regarding activities and outputs, but also the OKRs themselves.
Love the article. It's unfortunate that OKR, and even any metrics, are usually difficult for people to grasp and understand how they can influence it in a meaningful way. My experience when trying to bring metrics as part of decisions is that, most of the time, people have a decision in mind, and then try to find and even "clean up" the metric that will support it.
Humans are humans. We try to understand our world mostly through some stories or narrative, not numbers. "Tell me how this help would help us achieving our objectives and what you would be able to show me afterward to prove it" have given me way better results than any request for a specific metrics. Sure, the end result is the same ("we expect this metric to grow"), but it is now better contextualize in a less abstract concept.