Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs

raises and bonuses) from OKRs.

Career growth, to

At the end of the quarter, a lone HR person ran around like a Jack Russell, nipping at managers’ heels to get updated numbers before the board meeting.

A limit of three to five OKRs per cycle leads companies, teams, and individuals to choose what matters most. In general, each objective should be tied to five or fewer key results.

An effective goal management system—an OKR system—links goals to a team’s broader mission. It

When we face a trade-off between our customers and a business goal, we align with the customer. When an objective seems out of line with our mantra, it gets extra scrutiny.

“We didn’t want bureaucratic compliance,” Atticus says. “We wanted enthusiastic compliance. I

We knew we needed a multiprocess architecture to make each tab its own process and protect a user’s Gmail if another application crashed. And we knew we had to get JavaScript working a lot faster. But we were up for the task of building the best browser possible.

span of four years, the mission was to reach a billion hours of people watching YouTube every day—to

One proviso: When an objective gets dropped before the end of the OKR interval, it’s important to notify everyone depending on it. Then comes reflection: What did I learn that I didn’t foresee at the beginning of the quarter? And: How will I apply this lesson in the future?