Measure What Matters

Thousand percent improvement requires rethinking problems, exploring what’s technically possible and having fun in the process.

You know, in our business we have to set ourselves uncomfortably tough objectives, and then we have to meet them. And then after ten milliseconds of celebration we have to set ourselves another [set of] highly difficult-to-reach objectives and we have to meet them. And the reward of having met one of these challenging goals is that you get to play again.

“If you set a crazy, ambitious goal and miss it, you’ll still achieve something remarkable.” When you aim for the stars, you may come up short but still reach the moon.

at Google unless you were driven to succeed. As a leader, you didn’t want to find yourself at the end of the quarter, standing in front of the company with a big red on the screen, having to explain why and how you failed. The pressure and discomfort of that experience made a lot of us do a lot of heroic things to avoid it.

He wanted people at Google to be “uncomfortably excited.”

As a leader, you must try to challenge the team without making them feel the goal is unachievable.

Stretch OKRs are an intense exercise in problem solving.

I tried to be thoughtful and systematic and not too emotional, and I think that helped.

“No, we didn’t reach the goal, but we are laying the foundation to break through this barrier. Now, what are we going to do differently?”

Engineers struggle with goal setting in two big ways. They hate crossing off anything they think is a good idea, and they habitually underestimate how long it takes to get things done.

It took discipline for people to narrow their lists to three or four objectives for their team, but it made a huge difference. Our OKRs became more rigorous.

In other words, the most important things need to get done first or they won’t get done at all.

In a world where computing power is nearly limitless, “the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.”

Stretch goals can be crushing if people don’t believe they’re achievable.

Maybe the best thing about OKRs is how they track your progress to a target, especially when you’re behind schedule.

“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

A manager’s “first role,” Drucker said, “is the personal one. It’s the relationship with people, the development of mutual confidence . . . the creation of a community.”

“If a conversation is limited to whether you achieved the goal or not, you lose context. You need continuous performance management to surface the critical questions: Was the goal harder to achieve than you’d thought when you set it? Was it the right goal in the first place? Is it motivating? Should we double down on the two or three things that really worked for us last quarter, or is it time to consider a pivot?

For companies moving to continuous performance management, the first step is blunt and straightforward: Divorce compensation (both raises and bonuses) from OKRs. These should be two distinct conversations, with their own cadences and calendars.

What are you working on? How are you doing; how are your OKRs coming along? Is there anything impeding your work? What do you need from me to be (more) successful? How do you need to grow to achieve your career goals?