OKRs are our quarterly goals to execute our strategy. To make sure our goals are clearly defined and aligned throughout the organization. For more information see Wikipedia and Google Drive (GitLab internal). The OKRs are our quarterly goals.
Before the quarter:
Owner: Objective as a sentence. Key result, key result, key result.
During and after the quarter:
Owner: Key Result as a sentence. Key result, key result, key result. => Outcome, outcome, outcome.
We only list objectives prefaced with your role title. We do OKRs up to the team level, we don't do individual OKRs. Although, an individual might have OKRs if they represent a unique function. For example, individual SDRs don't have OKRs, the SDR team does. Legal is one person, but represents a unqiue function, so Legal has OKRs. Part of the individual performance review is the answer to: how much did this person contribute to the team objectives? We have no more than five layers in our team structure. Because we go no further than the manager level we end up with a maximum 4 layers of indentation on this page. The match of one "nested" key result with the "parent" key result doesn't have to be perfect. Every owner should have at most 3 objectives. To make counting easier always mention the owner with a trailing colon, like Owner:
. The advantage of this format is that the OKRs of the whole company will fit on three pages, making it much easier to have an overview.
The key results are updated continually throughout the quarter when needed. Everyone is welcome to a suggestion to improve them. To update: make a merge request and assign it to the CEO. If you're a team member or in the core team please post a link to the MR in the #okrs channel and at-mention the CEO.
At the top of the OKRs is a link to the state of the OKRs at the start of the quarter so people can see a diff.
Timeline of how we draft the OKRs:
It's important to score OKRs after the quarter ends to make sure we celebrate what went well, and learn from what didn't in order to set more effective goals and/or execute better next quarter.
Spontaneous chat messages from team members after introducing this format:
As the worlds biggest OKR critic, This is such a step in the right direction :heart: 10 million thumbs up
I like it too, especially the fact that it is in one page, and that it stops at the team level.
I like: stopping at the team level, clear reporting structure that isn't weekly, limiting KRs to 9 per team vs 3 per team and 3 per each IC.
I've been working on a satirical blog post called called "HOT NEW MANAGEMENT TREND ALERT: RJGs: Really Just Goals" and this is basically that. :wink: Most of these are currently just KPIs but I won't say that too loudly :wink: It also embodies my point from that OKR hit piece: "As team lead, it’s your job to know your team, to keep them accountable to you, and themselves, and to be accountable for your department to the greater company. Other departments shouldn’t care about how you measure internal success or work as a team, as long as the larger agreed upon KPIs are aligned and being met."
I always felt like OKRs really force every person to limit freedom to prioritize and limit flexibility. These ones fix that!
OKRs should be ambitious but achievable. If you achieve less than 70% of your KR, it may have not been achievable. If you are regularly achieving 100% of your KRs, your goals may not be ambitious enough.
Some KRs will measure new approaches or processes in a quarter. When this happens, it can be difficult to determine what is ambitious and achievable because we lack experience with this kind of measurement. For these first iterations, we prefer to set goals that seem ambitious and expect a normal distribution of high, medium, and low achievement across teams with this KR.
The complete hiring plan is kept in the Hiring Forecast doc. Hiring is not an objective in-and-of-itself. However hiring critical members for a team can be considered a key result. This is because recruiting top technical talent in a competitive startup environment can consume a large proportion of management's time and those hires are modeled into our product development goals. Keep all hiring-related KR's in the 'Team' objective. Hiring goals cannot be stretch goals because we cannot open up more vacancies than are in the financial plan. So plan to hit 100% of your hiring goals.