The OKRs of Book Writing (or How I wrote OKRs for our book launch)

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Book launch week has arrived! After literal years of work it all comes to this — the release of our new book on OKRs, Who does what by how much?, into the world. And while I can’t wait for you to read it and tell me what you think, I wanted to address a question that has come up multiple times from readers over the past few months — do you have OKRs for the book?

Dog food is the best food

The short answer is yes. Of course we have measures of success for the book. And yes, they are formulated as an OKR statement. We wouldn’t be eating our own dogfood if we didn’t do that. So, without further ado, here is how we’ve set goals for our new OKR book using OKRs.

A reader-centric objective

Since objectives should reflect the benefit we’d like to create for our customers, in this case our readers, we were forced to consider what we hope people will take away from the book. Our initial take was along the lines of “write the most practical book about implementing and scaling OKRs.” That’s a solid objective but focuses too much on the writing and, frankly, on us not our readers. We then asked ourselves, if we did write “the most practical book about implementing and scaling OKRs” what benefit would our readers get from it? We ended up here:

Make it dead simple for any team in any organization to get started with implementing and scaling OKRs in the next 2 years.

Qualitative, inspirational, aspirational, reader-focused and time boxed. Just like our book prescribes.

What will people be doing if we succeed?

Now that we have our objective we have to measure it. As the new book says, we need to figure out who does what by how much. Looking at our target audience, we identified 2 personas for our objective: the general reader and the HR learning partner or team leader in an organization. Since our key results need to be outcomes — measurable changes in human behavior — we need to look at what these folks will be doing differently if we achieve our objective.

We ended up with the following key results:

Readers purchase the book at least 5000 times in the first month.

50% of readers who purchase the book in the first month leave a positive review on Amazon.

HR learning partners/team leaders reach out at least 10 times in the first month inquiring about a bulk book purchase.

Each KR above answers the book’s titular question: who does what by how much? Interestingly only one of our KR’s is a ratio or a rate. The rest are absolute numbers. Why? If you’ve read any of the blog posts here before you know I strongly advocate for ratios or rates as key results to help us sense how we’re trending. However, in the case of a brand new product, like our book, there is no baseline so we have to start with absolute numbers.

Is this the right OKR for the book?

Honestly, I’m not sure. It’s our best guess as of right now. I think over time, once folks have had a chance to read it, I’d like to add a key result about inbound questions, comments and feedback to more accurately gauge if we’ve truly helped folks better implement OKRs. For now though I’d like to see folks buy it, say something nice about it and hopefully get their boss to purchase it for the whole team. Initially, to us, that’s a good sign that we’ve hit the objective.

One more time so it’s all together in one place, our OKR for the book is:

Objective: