How to implement OKRs at your small business

Metadata

• URL: https://radreads.co/okrs/
• Author: [[Khe Hy]]
• Publisher: [[radreads.co]]
• Published Date: 2022-06-25

Highlights

• Here’s how the lines of communication multiply as you go from 3 employees to 14 employees:

Source

• The average manager has 7 direct reports (and assuming 40 hour work weeks) is responsible for the direction of 280 hours a week.

• I quickly came to the realization that one of my most important roles was to set the direction to ensure that our ladder was leaning against the right wall.
• support our broader vision while keeping us accountable on a much shorter time frame.
• system to succeed, it needed to be:
  • Lightweight
  • Actionable
  • Easy to maintain
  • Understood by everybody
  • Supportive of experimentation and pivots
• The purpose is to take a longer-term goal (i.e. an Objective) and pair it against some measurable milestones (i.e. some Key Results).
• Why is this OKR important to the company?
• How will the company be changed if we succeed?
• look for a “unifying theme” that will spread across departments:
• Objective, Perdoo’s blog recommends three types of Objectives:
  • Build: Create something that didn’t exist before (like an onboarding sequence)
  • Improve: Make something that already exists better
  • Innovate: Do something drastic, on your product, marketing or organizational structure.
• One of the trickiest parts of Key Results is that they need to be outcomes, not outputs.
• These are a few poor key results:
  • Interview 5 CTO candidates
  • Make 20 outbound sales calls
  • Ship 3 new features
• Instead, you’d want to measure the outcome of these efforts:
  • Make 3 new hires
  • Generate $10,000 in new sales
  • Increase time user engagement to 30 minutes a day
• we report weekly on our progress in a dedicated Slack channel.

Linking

• Use OKRs for professional development

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