Measure What Matters

four OKR superpowers: focus, alignment, tracking, and stretching.

I doubt I ever had a key result that said, “Walk around to stay on top of employees’ morale.” We wrote down the things that needed special emphasis.

top-line goals must be clearly understood throughout the organization.

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation.

Leaders must get across the why as well as the what. Their people need more than milestones for motivation. They are thirsting for meaning, to understand how their goals relate to the mission.

Where do they begin? How do they decide what truly matters most?

Objectives are the stuff of inspiration and far horizons. Key results are more earthbound and metric-driven. They typically include hard numbers for one or more gauges: revenue, growth, active users, quality, safety, market share, customer engagement.

Besides, each key result should be a challenge in its own right. If you’re certain you’re going to nail it, you’re probably not pushing hard enough.

Keep in mind, though, that it’s the shorter-term goals that drive the actual work.

Clear-cut time frames intensify our focus and commitment; nothing moves us forward like a deadline.

For the feedback to be effective, it must be received very soon after the activity it is measuring occurs.

Key results should be succinct, specific, and measurable. A mix of outputs and inputs is helpful. Finally, completion of all key results must result in attainment of the objective. If not, it’s not an OKR.*

Too many objectives can blur our focus on what counts, or distract us into chasing the next shiny thing.

The one thing an [OKR] system should provide par excellence is focus. This can only happen if we keep the number of objectives small. . . .

if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.

“The art of management,” Grove wrote, “lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.”

you can only do one big thing at a time really well, and so you better know what that one thing is.

For structured goal setting to prosper, as our company learned the hard way, executives need to commit to the process. It may take a quarter or two to overcome your managers’ resistance and get them acclimated to OKRs—to view them not as a necessary evil, or some perfunctory exercise, but as a practical tool to fulfill your organization’s top priorities.

The more challenging an objective, the more tempting it may be to abandon it. People naturally look to their bosses in setting goals and following through. If the officers jump ship in the middle of a stormy voyage, you can’t expect the sailors to bring it into port.

To inspire true commitment,