While most product people can agree on the attributes of an effective goal, turning them into tangible results is a different story. Goals quickly lose their effectiveness when product teams are not able to link them to the actions of their daily work.
However, before you join in the OKR hype, it makes sense to take a couple of steps back. In this MTP Engage Hamburg talk, I use the learning journey of the (fictional) start-up Analytico to walk through the stages of getting started and scaling objectives and key results (OKRs) in a product organisation.
The goal of this talk is not just to point out the pitfalls to avoid when adopting OKRs or to share best practice that you should unconditionally follow. Instead, my goal is to promote an individual approach of implementing OKRs over following a one-size-fits-all blueprint.
How well OKR works for your organisation doesn’t depend on how rigidly you implement routines or whether you’re able to achieve Google-like success rates for your key results. Instead, the key for using OKRs to encourage outcome thinking in your organisation depends on your willingness to learn and adapt as you move from cycle to cycle.
