OKR 101
This board walks you through OKR basics and helps you achieve your big goals faster, easier, and smarter.
✨ Share this board with your colleagues to see if the OKR framework is what your team is looking for.
📕 Why choose OKR
- Learn more about OKR
Still not sure if OKR is what you need? Check out these articles to dispel your doubts:
- What is an OKR?
OKR or Objectives and key results is a management framework designed to help individuals and teams define measurable goals and track their outcomes.
The purpose of OKRs is to speed up strategy execution to achieve better business results.
OKRs represent meaningful change, improvement and growth. It focuses on defining clear and measurable objectives along with 3 to 4 key results. These key results are also measurable.
- How do I understand if we use an OKR effectively?
Objectives come from missions. If your objective doesn’t connect to the greater mission, it won’t be effective.
✅ Check if your Key Results match the OKR methodology answer these questions. Are they specific and timebound? Are they aggressive, yet realistic? Are they measurable and verifiable?
Key results should support their attached objective. So if it isn’t clear how meeting these benchmarks will make the objective true, that’s a warning sign that the key results may not be effective.
✅ Check if your objective matches the OKR methodology answer these questions. Is this objective meaningful? Is it audacious? Is it inspiring?
- How is OKR different from other frameworks?
There are three things that make OKR so special:
- Mission is the "Why do you do it". OKRs help break up big mission into actionable goals.
- Objectives are the “What do you want to achieve”. They’re the most important things you can accomplish in the next 30-90 days
- Key results are the “How you are going to achieve that”. They are the benchmarks by which you will measure progress toward completing your objectives. There are usually 3-5 key results per objective.
- 👉 Key point. OKR helps you set a goal and decide how you are going to get there. It saves time and keeps the entire team focused and motivated.
- Why choose OKR?
The key advantages of OKR are that this framework:
- Gives a clear idea of what the company would like to achieve
- Helps employees prioritize their tasks and stay motivated
- Makes it easy to measure progress
- Lets different teams work towards the same objective, each with a clear understanding of the result they have to deliver
- Helps employees prioritize the tasks and stay motivated
- Improves communication between team members and allows them to easily get information from other teams
- Provides a flexible system of regular check-ins to ensure that key results are achievable
🎯 Set your first objective
- 🔹 Become more recognizable as a brand
- Mission answers the questions:
- What are the most important things that we need to get done?
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- What does success of this objective look like?
- What do we need to start doing or changing?
- Do they describe a meaningful change?
- Are they simple and memorable?
- Are they inspiring yet realistic?
- See an example of objective:
- What is the reason for your business or product to exist?
- Why do you keep doing it every day?
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- 🌠 Define your mission
- 📊 Gather your priorities
- Objectives come from your mission. The mission is usually the big thing that thing that everyone is working toward to achive.
Watch this TEDx speech by Simon Sinek on importance of three questions: why, how, and what. Though "why" comes first.
- Make a list of objectives you’d like to achieve using the questions below. Choose the three most important of them for now.
- ✔️ Check your objectives with these questions and adjust if needed:
📈 Choose key results
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- 🔹 Increase the number of mentions of our company from 10 to 20 per quarter
- 🔹 Increase the number of subscribers to our Twitter by 2,500 people
- 🔹 Increase the number of visitors to our website by 10%
- Key results answer the question "How are you going to achieve your objective?"
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- Are they specific and time-bound?
- Are they measurable and verifiable?
- Are they aggressive, yet realistic?
- There should be from 3 to 5 key results for each objective to help you track your progress toward success.
- See examples of key results:
- ✔️ Check your key results
💡 Take initiatives to reach the goal
- 🔃 Repeat the cycle with your next objective.
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- List initiatives and actions you can take to achieve key results you’ve defined at the previous phase.
- 🔹 Take part in thematic discussions twice a week
- 🔹 Test a new audience segment in an advertising campaign
- 🔹 Post on Twitter twice a week
- See examples of initiatives:
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