What are OKRs?

Devised by Andy Grove at Intel, OKR is a framework for strategy execution and alignment. It provides an approach to setting, measuring and re-evaluating your goals as an organisation, as a business unit and as a team.

OKRs are about driving outcomes. Outcomes are the measurable beneficial effect for your customers, your employees or your organisation.

As Christina Wodtke says in Radical Focus , OKRs “reframe goals from a device to assess performance to one that inspires and amplifies it.”

In simplest terms OKRs are made up of two portions: Objectives - the qualitative aspect Key Results - the quantitative aspect.

Objectives communicate an aspirational goal that benefits your organisation, your employees or better still your customer. They should be memorable, inspirational and clear. An example objective:

Provide user support that our customers love

Key Results are the quantitative detail of OKR.

Your achievement of an objective is measured by your key results. Key results are the heart of the framework. They should be challenging, as Google founder Larry Page says , OKRs should make people “uncomfortably excited”.

Key results must be measurable and are ideally expressed in the form of from x to y where x is a baseline and y is the target.

Two example key results that could go with our example objective:

Increase customer queries resolved at first contact from 73% to 90%

Increase customer satisfaction of helpdesk callers from 7.8 to 9.2

That’s it, OKRs are conceptually very simple. Unfortunately using them successfully is not quite so simple!

Next up: Why use OKRs?