OKR Process: How to Adapt and Operationalize it
At this point you and your team probably read a lot about OKRs and decided to implement them. You got buy in from management and stakeholders. You may have even tried to defining your OKRs and something didn’t work out. We saw some teams stop here, not knowing what to do next and on how to make them work for your organization.
In this article we want to share a simple 4 step OKR Process: How to Adapt and Operationalize it to help teams successfully adapt OKRs both on smaller projects or to the whole organization.
1. What are OKRs
OKR - is a goal-setting methodology system that helps teams, organisations set and achieve goals. For this step, we would recommend you gather all the strategic partners involved in the project and align them on the same objective. We recommend running a 15–30-minute design thinking exercise called OKR definition to achieve alignment. During this exercise, you will define your objective (where you want to go) and 3-5 key results (measurable outcomes that tell you if you’re achieving your objective). Read more about writing OKRs and download a free template of the OKR definition exercise.
2. Establishing Key Result baselines
Establishing Key Results baseline is an essential step of the OKR process where many teams get stuck. Not knowing how to pull the right data or getting distracted by too many metrics you were tracking may stop you from moving forward. Use a simple table and write down:
Your Objective and Key Results.
Specify how you calculated something if it’s a complex metric
Baseline data and where you want to be at the end of the period
Progress toward the goal
At the end of this step, align with your team again (designers, developers, and stakeholders) to create awareness and align on the common goal.
3. Aligning your roadmap to your Objective
During this step of the OKR process, you will review your current roadmap or idea backlog. There are two ways you can approach this step.
The first and recommended approach is to start with your Objective and Key Results and brainstorm Initiatives to help you achieve them. Then write a Hypothesis for each Initiative to help you prioritize them based on how much impact they will make on your Key Results. Initiatives will become your roadmap. You can then design experiments to test your hypotheses.
We also worked with teams that were hesitant to go this route right away. In this case, you can start with your roadmap, add a Hypothesis to each Initiative to help you understand the impact on Key Results, prioritize Initiatives with high impact, and sunset the ones with the lowest impact. Then in the future, switch to the approach of starting from Objective and Key Results. Then brainstorm Initiatives to get you there.
How to write a hypothesis?
A proper hypothesis would look like this:
You may be influencing a few Key Results, so feel free to include all of them in one Hypothesis.
If for some Initiatives, you won’t understand the impact, we recommend you perform research to test those ideas to see if they’re worth keeping or not. Instead of starting extensive and expensive research, ask yourself, how can you learn about it faster and easier. You can learn by analyzing data, gathering feedback on quick prototypes, surveys, polls.
During this step, take time to align with your team, involve them in brainstorming to make sure you have their buy-in and support.
4. Tracking Key Results and analyzing outcomes
After you have delivered your first Initiatives, it's time to analyze results. Start with reviewing results after each release and quarterly assessing your progress toward the goal.
Reviewing results after each release
Review your key results a week or two after your release. The best way to do it is to create an automated dashboard in your analytics or reporting tool. Keep it simple in the beginning by updating progress toward your goal.
Analyze your results and see if your hypothesis was correct and reached your goal. If not, try to understand what went wrong and learn from it.
Quarterly assessing your progress
In the beginning, do a quarterly assessment to see how you are progressing toward your goal. If there are areas where you aren’t reaching your goal, try to understand why. For example, you may have initiatives with the overestimated outcome, or you were too ambitious in setting your Key Results.
As you get more familiar with tracking OKR progress, you can add other leading indicators to your dashboard that will help you troubleshoot and better understand what’s happening.
Repeat four steps of the OKR process periodically. First, we recommend starting with the yearly cycle and seeing how it goes. If you deliver a lot of Initiatives, you can switch to quarterly.
In conclusion, we hope that OKRs will change how you work, helping you grow your business.