How do horizontal teams develop OKRs?

Recently, the company has begun to fully implement the OKR (Objective & Key Result) management mechanism, which means objectives and key results in Chinese. OKR was originally founded by Intel, and was later introduced to early Google by John Doerr, an Intel executive and Google investor. Currently, some well-known Internet companies in Silicon Valley such as Facebook, Uber, etc. also use this system, some of which are relatively loose. For example, Facebook and some more formal ones such as Google.

Under the OKR system, employees and teams must first set an objective (Objective) every quarter, and then set a series of "Key Results", which can be used to measure whether the goal has been achieved. Review the completion of goals in the weekly report, and summarize the completion of goals at the end of the quarter. OKRs are proposed by employees or team leaders, not managers. OKR needs to unify personal goals and team goals. Tech Lead is responsible for the team's goals, while employees care about their personal careers and their impact on the company. The two goals are unified by jointly formulating OKRs. Since OKR is used to unify goals rather than measure results, it is generally not used as an assessment standard. Although it is also referenced during the assessment process, there is not much difference between 1.0 and 0.7. The most important role of OKR is to help you "stay focus", and "stay focus" can help you "make impact".

In Steven Levy's "in the plex", which narrates the story of Google's early development, there are several important points mentioned about OKRs:

1. OKRs must be quantifiable (time & Quantity), for example, you cannot say "make gmail successful" but "launch gmail in September and have 1 million users in November"

2. The goal should be ambitious, challenging, and Make you uncomfortable. Generally speaking, 1 is the total score, and it is better to reach 0.6-0.7, so that you will continue to strive for your goals and will not complete the goals before the deadline.

3. Everyone’s OKRs are open and transparent throughout the company. For example, each person's introduction page contains a record of their OKRs, including content and ratings (we will talk about how to score later)

The company I work for is an Internet startup. From my understanding of the company From the perspective of the purpose of implementing OKR, OKR is a tool to "unify the military spirit" and help ordinary employees think from the company's strategic level to their own specific work thinking. The main purpose of OKR is not to evaluate a certain team or employee, but to unify everyone's understanding of what needs to be done most within a certain period of time, and how to complete these things. If you just set a numerical goal, there are many ways to achieve it, some of which may defeat the original intention. With OKR, there are not only indicators, but also specific tasks on how to complete them. The summary of tasks is the completion of indicators, helping everyone to deeply understand the business, and always reminding everyone what the current task is. KPI emphasizes "what I want to do." OKR is dedicated to "monitoring what I want to do."

Our current way of formulating OKRs is that starting from each quarter, we formulate our own OKRs from the company level to the leaders of each business. The business team breaks down the big OKRs into their own tasks, and the resource team divides them into tasks according to the big OKRs. Think about the OKRs of this quarter for business, projects and your own profession, write down the completion status of your OKRs in the weekly report, and summarize at the end of the quarter. The key to formulating OKR is to fully communicate and recognize O and find out the key KR. Sometimes too many indicators are not good anyway. It is necessary to distinguish process indicators and result indicators. For example, in our company's case, DAU is a Process indicators, helping XXX user income reach XX are the final result indicators. It is very challenging to find accurate result indicators when writing KR.

The OKR template is as follows:

Teams in the company can be roughly divided into two categories, vertical business teams and horizontal support/resource teams. The UED team I am in is a horizontal team that does not directly do business, but the work it does is reflected in the business, and it is also transforming into a business team. In the past KPI era, how to measure the work of UED was a difficult problem. The business team could say how much my GMV was, and the technical team could also say how much my search algorithm improved the UV conversion rate. However, it was difficult for UED to position its goals in use. How much can research/design increase GMV or UV? This problem actually exists in the OKR era, but OKR is more about motivating yourself to focus on doing things well, and linking what you do to the company's big business goals, and Write down how to achieve it and post it on the company intranet so that everyone can see it, achieving the purpose of mutual supervision and self-supervision among peers.

So how do I set the team’s OKRs?

First, break down OKR into two parts: business and team building.

The business is to dismantle the tasks that UED needs to complete based on the goals of the supported business lines. For example, the repurchase rate in the XXX market is increased by XX%. This business has three large teams that all contribute to this goal. For the task of team 1, my team can complete the stratification and user profiling of users according to the repurchase dimension; for the task of team 2, my team can output successful experience with high repurchase rates in different industries/levels; for team 3 task, my team can develop a high repurchase potential dimensional model. Team building is also closely focused on goals, such as increasing the efficiency of project completion by 30%, learning and mastering three new analysis tools, etc.

For another example, "Absolute Focus-Using OKR to Achieve the Most Important Team Goals" translated by the Mingdao team tells the story of a startup company TeeBee using OKR to manage corporate goals.

TeeBee was founded by two young tea lovers, Hanna and Jack, from Stanford Business School in the United States. Hanna is the CEO and Jack is the product designer. From an OKR perspective, the situation when they first founded the company is:

Mission: Let tea lovers enjoy good tea

Vision: High-end restaurants or coffee shops in most areas Everyone can drink good tea

Strategy: Sell high-quality loose tea to high-end restaurants or coffee shops

OKR: None

After a few months they were stuck Dilemma: The online trading system developed by herself is not getting customers. The trading system is not easy to use and it is very difficult for customers to place orders. Hanna thinks that the priority should be to expand the business and attract more customers, while Jack thinks that one of the potential customers does not care about the quality of the tea. This This kind of cooperation goes against my original intention of starting a business. They found their investor Jim and learned to use OKR to set goals and reach agreement.

Mission: Let tea lovers enjoy good tea

Vision: High-end restaurants or coffee shops in most areas can drink good tea

Strategy: Sell ??high-quality loose tea to high-end restaurants or coffee shops

Objective 1: Prove to restaurant suppliers the value of the high-quality tea we provide

KR1: Customer renewal rate reaches 70%< /p>

KR2: 50% of renewal customers can complete the renewal by themselves

KR3: Complete 250,000 transactions

Objective 2: Optimize online order management for suppliers System

KR1: 80% of renewal orders are completed online

KR2: System satisfaction reaches 8 points (out of 10 points)

KR3: Telephone support Jianshan 50 %

OKR helps Hanna and Jack realize the current focus of the company, achieve a clear understanding of the new strategy, and let everyone work in the same direction.

If I manage my own company in the future, I will consider the following three questions when considering whether to adopt OKR:

1. What stage of company is OKR suitable for?

Although the above example applies OKR to very early-stage companies, I personally think OKR is suitable for companies with at least one relatively stable business and high employee self-motivation. In the early days of a start-up company, business changes are common. If goals are set for a quarter according to OKR, the goals are often set and changed next month. At this time, employees' personal OKRs are determined according to the old goals, or they are reset. Do it again, or employees can say no to new exploratory work, neither of which is what startups want to see. Because OKR is actually a self-monitoring mechanism for employees and is not forced to be linked to performance. If employees are not self-motivated enough and there is no good atmosphere within the company, OKR can easily become a decoration, and the goals set are only goals that can be achieved by themselves.

2. What does OKR really want to achieve?

Different companies have different purposes. From the company I work for, the upper-level strategies cannot be well communicated to the front line, especially the non-business departments cannot be well coordinated to carry out the most important strategies. Support, OKR is actually more of a tool for upper and lower communication, and secondly a tool for team self-regulation.

3. How to flexibly avoid OKR traps?

The trap of OKR is actually the same as KPI. Employees who fall within the scope of OKR will be very motivated to do it. New things that are not within the scope of OKR often find resources to do. To avoid this, the OKRs should be allowed to undergo a change process. Within the quarter, the OKRs should be revised and organized based on new and more important work.

Wu Jun wrote in "Letter from Silicon Valley" that his 2017 OKR (not limited to the company) can be used as a reference for individuals to formulate OKR:

Goal 1, complete "The Beauty of Mathematics" "English and Korean versions of this book, as well as the second edition of the book "The Road to College".

There are six key results under this goal, namely: find the publisher of the English version of "The Beauty of Mathematics"; find suitable, native English-speaking collaborators to revise the English version of the manuscript; complete the writing of the English version; strive to complete the writing of the English version before the end of the year Publish; cooperate with the publisher of the Korean version and strive to publish it before the end of the year; finally, complete the second edition of the book "The Road to College", supplement the content of public education, add a chapter about "Berkeley", and add information about college application content. Change some photos. The modifications will be completed at the end of April and will be released before September.

Goal 2: Improve part of the content of "Wu Jun Letters from Silicon Valley" and compile it into a book for publication. There are three key results under this goal. The first one is to choose topics from three directions from "Letter from Silicon Valley", with 20 letters under each topic. The second one is to supplement the selected 60 letters and expand each article into a complete content of about 5,000 words. The third one is to complete the first draft at the end of August and strive to publish it before the end of the year.

Goal 3: Update the lecture content in the business school and complete 60 hours of teaching. There are two key results: one is to organize the new content taught on some occasions last year into courseware and give it on a trial basis at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in the spring semester. Another is to divide these contents into about three 1.5 to 2-hour lectures by topic for use in future lectures.

Goal 4: Complete "Letter from Silicon Valley" in accordance with the agreement.

Goal 5: Complete travel plans and organize photography. There are four key results, namely a trip to Europe, driving around the western United States, learning the graphics tool software LightRoom, and producing five photography books, including two this year and three last year.

Goal 6, complete the study plan. There are two key results. One is to take two open online Coursera courses, one in law and one in biology; the other is to read 10 books carefully and then read 10 books quickly.

Goal 7: Complete the first draft of the book "Ten Cases in America" ??and a popular science book. There are two key goals: one is to hand over the first drafts of the two books to the publisher in October; the other is to learn from previous lessons and say hello to the friend who wrote the recommendation preface in advance.

Goal 8, exercise and run 1,000 kilometers.

Goal 9 is to complete the third phase of financing from Fengyuan Capital; Goal 10 is about family, children and repairing the yard; Goal 11 is a financial goal. Details of these three goals cannot be disclosed.

During the execution of OKR, it can be increased according to changes in circumstances, but the main direction does not change.