Replace competitive ratings and stack rankings with transparent, strength-based, multidimensional criteria for performance evaluations. Beyond the numbers, consider a contributor’s team play, communication, and ambition in goal setting.

Say a teacher wants to remind a fifth-grade class to bring the novel they’re reading to school—and keep reminding them every Monday morning without resending. That’s a classic “delight” feature, but was it worth the engineering time to make it a top-line priority? Would it move the needle for user engagement? When our answer was no, we decided to

First, said Edwin Locke, “hard goals” drive performance more effectively than easy goals. Second, specific hard goals “produce a higher level of output” than vaguely worded ones.

Google is propelled by our moonshot culture. The very ambitious is very hard to do. In a healthy way, our team realized that the success of Chrome would ultimately mean hundreds of millions of users. Whenever we invent something new at Google, we’re always thinking: How can we scale it to a billion?

We discuss them at weekly all-hands meetings. At a recent off-site retreat, I demonstrated our OKR process to the larger leadership group—and they just ate it up. “Best off-site we’ve ever had,”

the best idea should win, not the biggest title, and that still holds true today.

High-performance organizations home in on work that’s important, and are equally clear on what doesn’t matter.

time bound and unambiguous,

In more mature organizations, feedback is ad hoc, real-time, and multidirectional, an open dialogue between people anywhere in the organization.