OKRs, From Mission to Metrics: How Objectives and Key Results Can Help Your Company Achieve Great Things

What Intel, Google, Zynga, Linkedin, and Sears have in common? OKRs. OKRs translate a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The three layers of goals: Dreams, OKRs, and To dos, offer a balance between long-term goals and short-term planning, between outcomes that are desired by the organization and actual performance KPIs that drive these outcomes, between harder and softer performance measures. Francisco Mello, founder of Qulture.Rocks, takes you through the history of using goals for management, from MBOs to OKRs, and presents OKRs with a constant focus on its key differences from older frameworks such as MBOs. Table of Contents Preface Introduction What are OKRs? Why use OKRs in managing your company? Why are OKRs different? The Qulture.Rocks approach to OKRs A brief history of OKRs Mace and goal setting Peter Drucker, George Odiorne and MBO Hoshin Kanri, or Policy Deployment, in Japan Andy Grove and Intel: iMBOs John Doerr, Google, and OKRs A bit of goal-setting science Goal-setting theory, or GST Getting goals right The current state of goal management What's different in OKRs Compensation Short cycles and nested cadences Transparency Bottom-up and top-down Moonshots Where do OKRs come from? The starting point: your mission The next step: strategy The final component: visions or milestones A case study: Amazon in 1995 The OKR short cycle Nested cadences, or cycles The short cycle Planning To cascade or not to cascade? That is the question What happens after OKRs are set? Unfolding and aligning OKRs Monitoring Results meetings Debriefing Grading OKRs Running the debriefing Most common mistakes Bibliography Acknowledgements Final note Appendix I: Using OKRs in software product teams Appendix II: The Tensions of Getting OKRs Right Tension 1: Stretch x commit Tension 2: Accountability x learning Tension 3: Rigor x flexibility Tension 4: Input metrics x output metrics OKRs have helped us on the road to growth many, many times -Larry Page, co-founder of Google What Google, Intel, Zynga, Linkedin, and The Gates Foundation have in common? OKRs. OKRs, or Objectives and Key Results, translate a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. They offer a balance between long-term goals and short-term planning; between outcomes that are desired by the organization and actual performance KPIs that measure these outcomes; between the results we want to achieve and the efforts needed to do it. Francisco H. de Mello, founder of Qulture.Rocks, a Y Combinator alumn and the leading strategy execution company, takes you through the history of using goals for management, from MBOs to OKRs, and presents OKRs with a focus on how you can implement them at your company.