Join me for a 90 minute masterclass on Objectives and Key Results on April 7, 2021.
OKR anti-pattern: reverse engineering key results to match your backlog
I work with teams around the world every day helping them implement objectives and key results. I’ve written about OKR here a lot over the last few years and now, as the goal-setting framework is catching on broadly, the anti-patterns have become increasingly obvious. One such anti-pattern I’ve noticed recently is teams reverse engineering their … Continue reading OKR anti-pattern: reverse engineering key results to match your backlog
Without psychological safety there is no learning and there is no agility
If teams don’t feel safe sharing what they’ve learned, they’ll never be agile. Psychological safety ensures teams doing discovery can implement the feedback they learn in the process anda truly be agile.
What is an OKR? Here are the basics.
Objectives and Key Results. Ask around and you’ll hear a level of adoption across industries and domains similar to the big wave of Agile adoption in the late 00’s into the 10’s. For a 40 year old goal-setting framework, OKRs are having quite an impact on the business world. There are increasingly more books on … Continue reading What is an OKR? Here are the basics.
If we're managing to outcomes, how do we know we're doing a good job?
Part of the reason organisations struggle to switch to managing to outcomes is that its difficult to measure employee performance. Once that becomes difficult, how do we know someone did a good job? How do we know if that person should receive a raise? A promotion?
Metrics Mountain: A realistic visualisation of any customer lifecycle metrics
For as long as I've been working professionally the visual metaphor for moving customers through an experience has been The Funnel. The idea being that we have the most amount of people engaged at the beginning of an experience and as the experience goes on, fewer and fewer people are still participating in it. You've … Continue reading Metrics Mountain: A realistic visualisation of any customer lifecycle metrics
What does an agile product roadmap look like?
One of the biggest challenges in product management is planning the work in a linear, visual way. Sure, we’ve had “roadmaps” for a long time but they betray the true nature of software development. Digital product development is not linear. It is iterative. We build some things. We ship them. We see how they impact … Continue reading What does an agile product roadmap look like?
What happens after OKRs?
So you’ve made the leap to Objectives and Key Results. Congratulations. And you did it right. You wrote qualitative objectives that were aspirational and inspirational. They’re aligned to your strategic goals and the executive team is on board. Your Key Results are written as measures of behavior (your customers’ or your employees’), just the way … Continue reading What happens after OKRs?
You suck at OKRs. Here’s why.
This post was originally published to my newsletter subscribers (13k of them now). If you’d like to get these in your inbox sign up here Every company I work with these days claims to be using or trying to use Objectives and Key Results. Conceived at Intel and popularised by John Doerr and more recently … Continue reading You suck at OKRs. Here’s why.