Why use OKR?

Using the JTBD framework we can talk about the problems OKRs solve well. In the simplest sense OKRs help us achieve our outcomes, quite simply because we understand what they are better. There are several specific jobs that make this happen:

Improve focus

In a world with many great ideas, maintaining focus is something almost every organisation struggles with at some point. OKRs make our most important goals explicit. This helps tell everybody in the organisation or the team what their focus should be. It helps teams by asking a simple question, does what I am doing help us reach our most important outcomes for this period? Implicitly we only build focus if we limit the number of OKRs we are creating. OKRs do not and should not cover everything an organisation is doing.

Help alignment

This is a close corollary of focus. Many of the trickiest challenges inside an organisation occur when we depend on people outside of our team. In a traditional environment each team is incentivised and focused on what matters to them. They don’t help their own case by helping another team, even when there is a strong dependency. OKRs help by making our company goals clear. In a mature organisation, related teams can even share OKRs, making their combined success fully explicit.

A common OKR anti-pattern is individual OKRs, these undermine our ability to align, because individuals tend to focus on their personal goals.

Measure progress towards our goals

Key results are first and foremost metrics. They reflect a baseline and target number. They tell us how success is measured. By defining success and putting a metric against it, we can continually see how far we have come toward our goal.

Encourage shorter feedback loops

OKRs are by their definition concerned with outcomes. Setting this focus encourages to only work on an idea that they believe will help achieve a key result. Undertaking long term, output oriented initiatives gives us much less certainty that we will achieve our goals. OKRs encourage us to test our ideas cheaply and quickly, rather than committing to long term, expensive bets where we don’t see results until the end.

Help validate our strategy

A good strategy embraces uncertainty. It represents a view of where to play and how to win. OKRs that reflect a strategic hypothesis also help tell us how valid the hypothesis is. This helps us pivot quicker to alternative approaches to achieve our mission.

Next up how to succeed with OKRs