Book notes: Who Does What By How Much?
Book notes on "Who Does What By How Much? A practical guide to customer-centric OKRs" by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden
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These are my notes on Who Does What By How Much? A practical guide to customer-centric OKRs by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden.
Found the book not only practical but inspirational. OKRs FTW!
Key Insights
- OKRs high level steps:
- Leadership identifies impact, and the strategy to achieve it.
- Express them as high-level organizational OKRs.
- Teams create their ORKs, tied to the org OKRs, expressing KR as outcomes.
- Teams figure out and deliver outputs.
- Leadership identifies impact, and the strategy to achieve it.
- OKRs do not contain solutions.
- OKR key principles:
- Focus:
- Real focus means fewer OKRs.
- Autonomy.
- Alignment.
- Accountability.
- Transparency.
- Agility:
- Ability to change course in response of learning.
- Opinions and ideas, even the bosses ones, are all hypotheses; they have to be proven to be true.
- Customer-centric.
- Focus:
- Outcome:
- Outcome is a measurable change in your customer’s behaviour that creates value.
- Expressed in the form:
Who?
is your customer.Does what?
is their behaviour.By how much?
is the measure of change in their behaviour.
- OKRs work when they reflect and express your strategy.
- What challenge to tackle is the first strategy decision.
- Share your strategy as a compelling story.
- OKR writing:
- Focus on the things you can control.
- Objective:
- Provide a clear why.
- Not how you overcome the challenge but how the world has changed once we’ve solved the problem.
- Inspirational, qualitative, time-boxed, specific.
- Positive statement.
- It has a parent OKR.
- Key result:
- Expressed as an outcome.
- Target is often a guess, but there is a lot of value on the conversations to figure out.
- Do not ask open-ended questions to figure out. Close-ended questions will move the discussion forward faster.
- Key result that you cannot measure are ok.
- Make a distinction between important business as usual work and OKRs.
- Do not use OKR at the individual level.
- Common pitfalls:
- Key results as task lists.
- Writing OKRs to fit your preexisting to-do list.
- Measuring system behaviour instead of customer behaviour.
- Under-promising and over-delivering.
- Of all possible solutions, prioritize high potential value and low risk first.
- High risk, high value ideas should start with some learning (de-risking) activity.
- Learning is work and execution is work.
- Look at the rate of change in your metrics versus the effort you’re putting in:
- Consider if you want to change tactics or consider it “done”.
- Aligned autonomy requires transparency.
- Provide universal access to data:
- Without data, you’re going to have problems.
- The easiest to access the data, the faster teams can make decisions and move forward.
- Make access to data the path of the least resistance.
- Particular attention to blockers of:
- Learning work.
- Data access.
- Team autonomy.
- Killing an idea that isn’t going to work it is progress and cost savings.
- For new cultures to take hold, leaders must model them.
- It is better to deliver value in smaller batches, with consistency over time, than to swing for the fences with long-term, ambitious or wildly creative projects.
- Data from research rarely shows decisive results.
- Evaluate people’s contribution towards the team’s OKRs using the 7 key OKR principles.
- Operationalizing OKRs at scale across a large organization can often take years.
- Avoid “cascading” OKRs.
- Dependent teams might share OKRs.
- Every OKR implementation is different because every org is different.
- The most powerful predictors of success today are humility and curiosity:
- Build cultures of learning and agility.
TOC
- Intro
- Part 1 - What Are OKRs?
- Part 2 - Writing OKRs
- Part 3 - Using OKRs
- Part 4 - Making OKRs Successful in Your Organization
- Conclusion
Intro
- Every org wants to get better.
- Orgs aren’t worried about people working hard enough, but working on the wrong stuff:
- Most common reason: people lose track of what their customers want.
- Other big problems: alignment, collaboration, strategic focus.
- OKR is a tool to align teams around customer needs and focus them on company strategy.
- Everyone has a customer.
- Outcome:
Who?
is your customer.Does what?
is their behaviour.By how much?
is the measure of change in their behaviour.
Part 1 - What Are OKRs?
Chapter 1 - What Are OKRs?
- 3 parts:
- Goal-setting framework:
- Objective:
- The goal.
- Inspire the team and provide a clear why.
- Inspirational, aspirational, qualitative, time-boxed and specific enough to create urgency.
- Key result:
- How you measure progress towards your goal.
- OKRs do not contain solutions.
- Outcome is a change in behaviour that creates value.
- Objective:
- OKRs are a process:
- Not only how to set goals but also how work towards them: from daily to annual.
- OKR cycle.
- OKRs are a culture:
- OKRs should reflect the specific culture of the org.
- OKRs should be customized for each company.
- Goal-setting framework:
Chapter 2 - Why Use OKRs?
- Key principles:
- Focus:
- Real focus means fewer OKRs.
- OKRs only current strategic priorities.
- Everything else is either business as usual or must wait.
- Autonomy:
- Teams writing their OKRs and creating the results.
- OKRs are set with a mix of top-down and bottom-up process.
- Alignment.
- Accountability.
- Transparency:
- Puts pressure to improve data collection and access.
- Agility:
- Ability to change course in response of learning.
- Opinions and ideas, even the bosses ones, are all hypotheses; they have to be proven to be true.
- Customer-centric.
- Focus:
Chapter 3 - OKRs and Outcomes
- Success means that you’ve created a valuable outcome.
- Outcome is a measurable change in your customer’s behaviour that creates value:
- Output -> Outcome -> Impact.
- Very rarely use impact to write objectives:
- They are too big and the results of too many factors.
- High-level steps:
- Leadership identifies impact, and the strategy to achieve it.
- Express them as high-level organizational OKRs.
- Teams create their ORKs, expressing KR as outcomes.
- Teams figure out and deliver outputs.
- Leadership identifies impact, and the strategy to achieve it.
- Value:
- Make your customers successful.
- Respect their time.
- Solve real problems for them in meaningful ways.
- Are a delight to use.
Part 2 - Writing OKRs
Chapter 4 - Strategy and OKRs
- You can write well-structured OKRs and still focus on the wrong thing.
- OKRs work when they reflect and express your strategy.
- Strategy is an opinionated and coherent approach to addressing an important challenge:
- Important challenge: don’t have obvious or easy solutions.
- If you’ve setting OKRs for your team, then you’re using strategy.
- What challenge to tackle is the first strategy decision.
- Strategy isn’t a plan; it’s an approach.
- Steps to create strategy:
- Identify the biggest challenge:
- Finding your most important challenge is a simple thing to describe, but it’s hard to do.
- At an org level:
- What’s your goal?
- What are the obstacles to achieve that goal?
- At the team level:
- What is the most impactful thing your team can do to support your org’s strategy?
- Look at the intersection of your team’s responsibilities and your org’s goals.
- Clear connection between your strategy and the org strategy.
- Consider your peers initiatives.
- Identify your market:
- Who are the people you’re going to focus on?
- Propose your unique competitive approach:
- Prompt question on page 62.
- Identify the biggest challenge:
- Share your strategy as a compelling story.
Chapter 5 - Who Does What?
- To figure out who does what:
- What does your team have control over?
- Focus on the things you can control.
- If your team is not autonomous consider coordinating with overarching OKRs or complementary OKRs.
- Who: which customer will you target first?
- Be as specific as possible.
- List 3 to 6 plausible roles.
- Figure out “does what”:
- Tell a story about the customer’s journey.
- Pay attention to the “does what” in the story.
- Write down 3 to 6 important behaviours using the [who][does what] format.
- Pay attention also to the obstacles the customer has.
- Consider user story mapping.
- Tell a story about the customer’s journey.
- What does your team have control over?
Chapter 6 - Writing OKRs
- OKRs are best created in collaboration with your team.
- Objective: provide a clear why.
- To start:
- At the org level, one OKR per business unit.
- At the team level, only one OKR.
- 2 or 3 key results per objective.
- More OKR means less focus.
- Steps to create objective:
- Gather what you need:
- See chapter 4 and 5.
- Identify biggest obstacle:
- See chapter 4 important challenge.
- From org’s OKRs.
- Turn obstacles into positive statement:
- Not how you overcome it but how the world has changed once we’ve solved the problem.
- Self-check objective:
- Check:
- It is a positive statement.
- It does not contain a solution.
- Inspirational, qualitative, time-boxed, specific.
- Check:
- Find your parent OKR:
- No need to be strictly hierarchical.
- Gather what you need:
- Steps to create key results:
- Gather list of customers and customer story from chapter 5.
- Turn into 2 to 4 statements in the format: [who] + [does what] + [by how much].
- Self-check question: if we achieve all key results, will we have achieved our objective?
- If not, some key result is missing.
- By how much?
- Find a good enough target:
- It is possible:
- Often a guess, but there is a lot of value on the conversations to figure out.
- It is valuable:
- Easier to answer.
- Do not ask open-ended questions to figure out. Close-ended questions will move the discussion forward faster.
- It is possible:
- Find a good enough target:
- Scoring OKRs:
- Bad:
- It can lead to the team focusing on the scores themselves instead of on the results.
- Performance evaluations and compensation.
- Good:
- Diagnosis tool.
- Bad:
Chapter 7 - Setting OKRs Through Collaboration
- Top-down and bottom-up:
- Goals are both strategic and realistic with deeper understanding.
- People are more motivated.
- Process to set OKRs collaboratively:
- Top-Down
- Bottom-up.
- Collaboration:
- With leaders and peers.
- Be prepared to defend your strategy, obstacle, parent OKR.
- Discuss key result numbers.
- Dependencies and collaborations with other teams.
- Revise and publish.
Chapter 8 - Common Questions About Writing OKRs
- Make a distinction between important business as usual work and OKRs.
- Key result that you cannot measure is ok:
- Use qualitative data instead.
- Use leading indicator.
- Ask for help to figure out how to measure it.
- Do not use OKR at the individual level.
- In some cases is ok for teams to share OKRs.
- Discipline-oriented teams struggle to adopt OKRs:
- Share the OKRs of the team they are working with.
- OKR: make the team itself better.
- Treat other teams as clients, and set OKR accordingly.
- A mix f all of the above.
- Common pitfalls:
- Key results as task lists.
- Writing OKRs to fit your preexisting to-do list.
- Measuring system behaviour instead of customer behaviour.
- Under-promising and over-delivering.
Part 3 - Using OKRs
Chapter 9 - The OKR Cycle
- The only thing that matters is results.
- OKRs are one of the best frameworks for encouraging real agility.
- Learning and execution should happen continuously.
- Check-in:
- Monthly: informal.
- Quarterly:
- More structured.
- Recommit, update or discard OKRs.
Chapter 10 - Working with OKRs
- OKRs align everyone around solving problems.
- Not “when are we done?” but “How soon can we start creating value?”
- Adopt an experimental mindset:
- Express possible solutions as testable hypothesis:
- “We believe that [solution] will achieve [outcome]”.
- Express possible solutions as testable hypothesis:
- Aim to be more experimental, outcome-oriented and customer-centric.
- Before executing, start by reviewing your OKR.
- Of all possible solutions, prioritize high potential value and low risk first.
- High risk, high value ideas should start with some learning (de-risking) activity.
- Learning activity:
- First list what you are trying to learn.
- Consider what is the fastest way to learn so that you can make a decision:
- Talk or watch your customers work.
- Avoid surveys:
- Hard to do well.
- Talking to 6 clients > 100 survey answers.
- Work in smaller increments.
- Learning is work and execution is work.
- Collect and share both quantitative and qualitative data throughout your org.
- Without data, you’re going to have problems.
Chapter 11 - Checking In
- Monthly and quarterly are required if you want to make OKRs work:
- Retro and weekly can be added to other similar meetings.
- Assessing progress:
- Outcomes i primary.
- Team’s confidence on achieving the goal is a conversation starter.
- Scoring: most useful for quarterly check-ins.
- Weekly check-in:
- Not problem-solving but status meeting.
- Only for the immediate team.
- 30 mins:
- 10 mins:
- Review key results.
- Highlights that require some attention from the team.
- Confidence review.
- 10 mins:
- Discuss issues from confidence review.
- Raise blockers.
- Major new learnings.
- 10 mins:
- Decide on actions and follow-ups.
- 10 mins:
- Keep an internal record for the team.
- Share anything important with stakeholders.
- Monthly check-in:
- With stakeholders.
- 60-90 mins.
- Opening:
- Review key results.
- WIP review.
- Optional: confidence review.
- Stakeholders share any strategic updates that are important for the team’s work.
- Middle:
- Learnings: most important part of the meeting.
- Discuss obstacles: not problem-solving.
- Adjust OKRs: it should rarely happen.
- Closing: actions and follow-ups.
- Capture and share notes.
- Quarterly check-ins:
- Same as weekly but emphasis on adjusting OKRs.
- With other teams.
- Look at the rate of change in your metrics versus the effort you’re putting in:
- Consider if you want to change tactics or consider it “done”.
- When changing OKRs:
- It should never be a surprise.
- Prepare evidence.
- Bring an informed/educated proposal.
- Explain the cost of not changing OKRs.
- Retrospective meeting:
- Post the key OKR principles to prompt feedback on how the team is doing on those.
Chapter 12 - Planning with OKRs
- Embrace uncertainty and encourage agility:
- Reduce the time horizon of your plans (up to 2 quarters in advance).
- Filter out work that does not or no longer help with the OKRs:
- Sunk cost is lost.
- Hard part is saying “no”, specially to work in progress.
- Outcome-based roadmaps:
- Quarterly OKRs + potential work items + learning activities.
- Date-driven work:
- Reduce scope.
- Each small batch should generate a result.
- Review and update during checkins.
Part 4 - Making OKRs Successful in Your Organization
Chapter 13 - Start with Why
- Why to adopt OKRs:
- Problem statement.
- Vision for a positive future state.
- Hypothesis for the proposed process/culture.
Chapter 14 - Support OKRs from the Top
- All change (good or bad) is hard.
- The most important predictor of success when going through any change is consistent and continuous leadership support.
- Ways for leaders to support OKRs:
- Start with why (see chapter 13).
- Provide clear strategy and high-level OKRs first (see chapter 4).
- Trust the process and your teams:
- Aligned autonomy requires transparency:
- Weekly:
- What they’re working on.
- OKR progress.
- Learnings.
- Changes in plan.
- Weekly:
- Aligned autonomy requires transparency:
- Support learning work.
- Provide universal access to data:
- The easiest to access the data, the faster teams can make decisions and move forward.
- Make access to data the path of the least resistance.
- Create a safe culture of learning:
- Learning is key for OKR success.
- Ask “what did you learn this week?” instead of “when X will be done?”
- Killing an idea that isn’t going to work it is progress and cost savings.
- Model the values you want to see in your culture:
- For new cultures to take hold, leaders must model them.
- As a leader you must demonstrate how much you value facts and data, even if they contradict what you said publicly.
- Design the org for collaboration and agility:
- Be open to reorgs.
Chapter 15 - Managing Up. Changing Responsibilities
- Middle managers have an even harder job:
- They face pressure from every side.
- OKRs change how they do their jobs:
- Manage up:
- Tie any bosses request to an OKR:
- If there is no connection, push back or make boss drop some OKR.
- Communicate, tying up to OKR.
- Tie any bosses request to an OKR:
- Changed responsibilities:
- The taskmaster part of the manager’s job goes out of the window.
- New job:
- Ensure team’s OKRs and work are aligned with strategic direction:
- Keep an eye for when the team start drifting off.
- Setting guidelines and constraints around the team’s scope of work:
- It is better to deliver value in smaller batches, with consistency over time, than to swing for the fences with long-term, ambitious or wildly creative projects.
- Remove blockers:
- Particular attention to blockers of:
- Learning work.
- Data access.
- Team autonomy.
- Particular attention to blockers of:
- Make key decisions when team needs guidance:
- Data from research rarely shows decisive results.
- Ensure team’s OKRs and work are aligned with strategic direction:
- Adjust performance management criteria:
- Do not create individual OKRs and then use them for individual performance management:
- Dont do this.
- Evaluate people’s contribution towards the team’s OKRs using the 7 key OKR principles. Examples:
- How well they used their time in service of the OKRs (focus, accountability, prioritization).
- How well they incorporate learning activities into their work (learning).
- How well they use evidence to inform their work and make decisions (agility, learning).
- Performance management changes are key as they incentivise people’s behaviour.
- Do not create individual OKRs and then use them for individual performance management:
- Manage up:
Chapter 16 - Scaling OKRs
- Operationalizing OKRs at scale across a large organization can often take years.
- Start with a clear org strategy.
- Avoid “cascading” OKRs.
- Align by ensuring every OKR has a parent OKR.
- Dependent teams might share OKRs:
- Avoid hyperlocal optimizations.
- Promote collaboration.
- Simplifies OKR management and review.
- Timebox OKR planning to 1 month after strategic direction has been set.
- When we roll out OKRs, the people in our org are our customers.
- Use a experimental mindset.
- Every OKR implementation is different because every org is different.
- For the pilot, err on the side of radical transparency.
- Start small.
- Put your best folks on the challenge.
- Dedicated full-time OKR coaches.
- At scale, the right OKR tool makes a significant difference.
Conclusion
- The most powerful predictors of success today are humility and curiosity:
- Build cultures of learning and agility.