Measure What Matters: OKRs: The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth

first slide of one early presentation: Crush, the purpose: To establish a sense of urgency and set in motion critical, corporate-wide decisions and action plans to address a life-threatening competitive challenge.

Where an objective can be long-lived, rolled over for a year or longer, key results evolve as the work progresses. Once they are all completed, the objective is necessarily achieved. (And if it isn’t, the OKR was poorly designed in the first place.)

I remember typing out that OKR on an IBM Selectric. (The first commercial laser printer was a year away.) Then I posted a hard copy on my carrel for people to scan as they walked by. I’d never worked at a place where you wrote down your goals, much less where you could see everybody else’s, on up to the CEO.

Marginalized contributors. Rigidly cascaded systems tend to shut out input from frontline employees. In a top-down ecosystem, contributors will hesitate to share goal-related concerns or promising ideas. • One-dimensional linkages. While cascading locks in vertical alignment, it’s less effective in connecting peers horizontally, across departmental

An OBJECTIVE, I explained, is simply WHAT is to be achieved, no more and no less. By definition, objectives are significant, concrete, action oriented, and (ideally) inspirational. When properly designed and deployed, they’re a vaccine against fuzzy thinking—and fuzzy execution.

Let’s assume you do well and move up to manage more and more people. Now you’re no longer paid for the amount of work you do; you’re paid for the quality of decisions you make. But no one tells you the rules have changed. When you hit a wall, you think, I’ll just work harder—that’s what got me here. What you should do is more counterintuitive: Stop

The more ambitious the OKR, the greater the risk of overlooking a vital criterion. To safeguard quality while pushing for quantitative deliverables, one solution is to pair key results—to measure “both effect and counter-effect,” as Grove wrote in High Output Management. When key results focus on output, Grove noted: [T]heir paired counterparts sho

The most powerful and energizing OKRs often originate with frontline contributors. As a YouTube product manager, Rick Klau was responsible for the site’s homepage, the third most visited in the world. The hitch: Only a small fraction of users logged in to the site. They were missing out on important features, from saving videos to channel subscript

Less is more. “A few extremely well-chosen objectives,” Grove wrote, “impart a clear message about what we say ‘yes’ to and what we say ‘no’ to.” 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.