I always suggest teams list the job(s) they are hiring OKRs to do. It is a telling exercise, and explains why many efforts don't really end up benefit the team in the way they think.
Funny timing, I just set up monthly okr tracker for the company today.
We are moving to monthly from quarterly cadence for the whole company..we tweaked our direction more often, which made.our goals obsolete and we didn't like tweaking goals midway.. It felt we were.cheating to make goals look good.
Lastly, I am.curious how do reconcile functional team.okrs with top level okrs .. Say you want to bring excellence to product validation loops but that doesn't cascade well from top level okrs? Encouraging too many orphan KRs could.lead to misaligned priorities between teams. Wdyt?
the debate around cadence misses the point a bit - you should be able to write a multi- week / month / quarter / year OKR - there is probably an ideal cadence for a specific domain but that's really for the group to decide based on ship velocity / customer adoption / etc (i.e. some industries move faster than others)
regarding reconciling / cascading
- OKRs are an alignment tool, so they should cascade / connect from top-level goals down to each v-team that is doing work that matters
- I don't think functional team OKRs are necessary, but if the team likes the framework, go for it ...but it doesn't have to map to top-level OKRs
- example: let's say there is a top-level OKR of increase revenue from SMB customer by x%, and let's say there is a sales org that has a functional goal of hire a VP for each international region...those don't actually have to connect
- you make a good point about orphan KR...I would split them up between tactics that are mis-aligned vs. work that isn't directly aligned...in the example above, hiring regional VPs doesn't help or hurt the plan to increase SMB revenue, but if the sales team had a KR to increase % of revenue from add-ons vs core product, and SMBs don't tend to buy add-ons, then those KRs are in active mis-alignment
I always suggest teams list the job(s) they are hiring OKRs to do. It is a telling exercise, and explains why many efforts don't really end up benefit the team in the way they think.
Funny timing, I just set up monthly okr tracker for the company today.
We are moving to monthly from quarterly cadence for the whole company..we tweaked our direction more often, which made.our goals obsolete and we didn't like tweaking goals midway.. It felt we were.cheating to make goals look good.
Lastly, I am.curious how do reconcile functional team.okrs with top level okrs .. Say you want to bring excellence to product validation loops but that doesn't cascade well from top level okrs? Encouraging too many orphan KRs could.lead to misaligned priorities between teams. Wdyt?
the debate around cadence misses the point a bit - you should be able to write a multi- week / month / quarter / year OKR - there is probably an ideal cadence for a specific domain but that's really for the group to decide based on ship velocity / customer adoption / etc (i.e. some industries move faster than others)
regarding reconciling / cascading
- OKRs are an alignment tool, so they should cascade / connect from top-level goals down to each v-team that is doing work that matters
- I don't think functional team OKRs are necessary, but if the team likes the framework, go for it ...but it doesn't have to map to top-level OKRs
- example: let's say there is a top-level OKR of increase revenue from SMB customer by x%, and let's say there is a sales org that has a functional goal of hire a VP for each international region...those don't actually have to connect
- you make a good point about orphan KR...I would split them up between tactics that are mis-aligned vs. work that isn't directly aligned...in the example above, hiring regional VPs doesn't help or hurt the plan to increase SMB revenue, but if the sales team had a KR to increase % of revenue from add-ons vs core product, and SMBs don't tend to buy add-ons, then those KRs are in active mis-alignment
- tl;dr you (a) want aligned KRs (b) allow orphan KRs (c) avoid incongruent KRs