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OKRs have been a part of many companies that I've worked at since they're an effective way to align folks in an organization from top to bottom, empirically and transparently.

Setting OKRs

objective

• Goal/what we want to change or achieve
• Directional

key result

• what metric do we want to influence
• Measurable, reasonably achievable
• Choose 2-4, each with a target number (and optional stretch target)
• Too many == harder to focus

initiative

• how we do it
• Things we do (like projects) to achieve the key results
• Assign a DRI/Driver for the initiative
• DRI = Directly Responsible Individual (from Apple)

Derive program OKRs from company mission/vision/goals/objective. How does your program or team fit into the org? Work with stakeholders.

Hierarchy: everything should flow into their parent:

company mission/vision/goals ← program objectives/KRs ← program initiatives ← individual work items

Tracking/linking

Try to connect every piece of work the team member does with an OKR (even maintenance work if possible).

• Each OKR gets a shortcode (O1-KR2), which can be set up in any tool used by the team (Notion, Github, Sheets, etc)
• Enables everyone on the team to use them and reference them for everything they do
• Ideally, track OKRs in one place, but if you don't like the prescribed tool you can track them in your own preferred tool as well

Cadence

Annual vs quarterly

• Objectives: annual or quarterly depending on scale (or roll them over each quarter)
• I prefer quarterly for KRs for faster iteration and adaptation
• Review KRs periodically (bi-weekly?)
• See How I Work Cyclically for more info on this

Examples

Imagine you ran an infrastructure program for a blockchain company (like me). Lets say the company had typical goals: earn money, and avoiding security breaches.

Assumptions: - These OKRs are quarterly - Baselines are mostly calculated from the previous quarter's numbers

Security-related

Objective 1: Reduce centralized point of failures to ensure reliability

Objective 2: Improve incident prevention and response

Objective 3: Increase security of production infra

Notes:

• ✅ Objectives are what we want to change/directional
• ✅ KRs are quantitative/measurable, influencing specific metrics
• Objectives all work towards the company goals of earning money and avoiding security breaches
• For all KRs, need to determine baseline then ensure % change is achievable
• O1-KR2: this is based on publicly-known risks of a Geth supermajority circa 2023-2024
• O2-KR3: avoidable: subjective, but incidents that could have been reasonably avoided with better systems, processes, or monitoring. Example: server crashes due to out of disk space; avoidable by setting alerts and reasonable thresholds.
• O3-KR2: offboard means revoke credentials for an individual (in case of compromise). Setting a baseline for this would be a bit subjective but important to run through an offboarding session to get this.

Revenue-related

Objective 4: Increase and diversify revenue

Notes:

• ✅ Objective is what we want to change/directional
• ✅ KRs are quantitative/measurable, influencing specific metrics'
• ① I based this on an actual KR "Participated in 3 new revenue-generating opportunities". Improved by changing ambiguous "participated" to actually contributing revenue and defined a % of total revenue.
• ② Need to ensure % change is achievable
• ② Also, need to separate independent variables. If revenue is denominated in USD, but price of cryptocurrency increases, revenue would increase but not be caused by the initiatives/actions of the program.