Succeeding with OKRs

From a newsletter by Jeff Gothelf — succeeding with OKRs includes understanding what they are, how they are different from traditional goals. Nice tie-in to the spirit of MVPs (without saying MVP…)

Here’s the kicker: even if you write excellent objectives and key results, it’s all meaningless if you’re not prepared to change your ways of working. Why? Because OKRs change the definition of done. Instead of shipping features, throwing a party, giving everyone a t-shirt and moving on to the next item in your backlog, you have to actually check and see whether what you shipped changed customer behaviour in the way your KR’s predicted. If they didn’t, you’ll have to go back and iterate on your work. This often means that instead of launching a scalable, high-performance, secure software solution you’ll end up running and shipping lightweight experiments, learning from them and then adjusting what you’re building (and yes, your roadmap too) until you find the right combination fo code, copy, design, value proposition and business model that delivers the results you’re after.