To help you out, we’ve compiled the most important information about successfully implementing the method, along with some relevant OKR examples.

What Are OKRs?

The OKRs definition portrays them as a means of creating measurable goals and bringing everyone in an organization together behind a common mission. In the 1970s, John Doerr created this strategy for the venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers. He used OKRs to help them grow into one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, and then he scaled it across Google. Nowadays, businesses of all sizes use OKRs.

Each OKR’s objective is a broad goal with no deadline, such as “launch product X successfully.” The Key Results explain what you’ll need in order to accomplish that objective and how you’ll know when you’ve completed it. For example, the “launch product X successfully” objective could include Key Results such as “have 300 people registered for the beta” or “generate $10,000 in revenue by September.”

Why Are OKRs Important? 

The OKR method helps you in the process of turning good ideas into excellent implementation. You can articulate your goals, set priorities, identify opportunities, and track and measure progress. Moreover, you can use OKRs to align strategies to business goals and compare success across teams. They can also create a culture of continuous improvement and serve as an accountability tool.

Implementing OKRs

There are many approaches to goal management, so you should prepare ahead and think about how you’ll put the OKR framework into action. The usual way is to have the executive team create company-level OKRs. Then they would employ a cascading method, requiring the department heads to link their team OKRs to the overall business goals and then cascade to the next level. 

However, this traditional top-down model comes with specific challenges, such as the risk of slowing down the progress. So, when it comes to successfully implementing OKRs, collaboration at every point of the process is essential. 

Keep employees engaged and motivated and let them have a clear vision of why they should set and try to accomplish the particular OKRs. Try to invite them to the brainstorming sessions and set ambitious goals together. Everyone will be able to visualize where the organization is moving and align their OKRs in the same direction. This approach will streamline the goal-setting process and enhance employee satisfaction. 

Moreover, remember that the OKRs framework emphasizes simplicity and prioritization. A general rule of thumb is to set one or two organizational goals. Get each team to focus on up to three objectives, each with three to four key results. This will ensure that your team’s efforts and initiatives move effectively and in the same direction.  

Finally, set up a system of weekly alignment meetings where you’ll review the OKRs and communicate the results. A productive check-in includes constructive feedback, accountability, reporting significant progress, crafting strategic plans, and developing an action plan.

Top OKR Examples

Good objectives and key results keep the team focused on the essential issues and encourage weekly discussions. When your team creates OKRs, they should also have some ideas or plans on how to get them accomplished. Here are some OKR examples to consider to inspire your next brainstorming sessions.

Company OKR Examples

Company Objective 1: Grow our global business.

Key Results: 

• Hit a global sales target of $200 million.
• Achieve 100% YoY sales growth in the X geography.
• Increase the average deal size by 30% using upsells.
• Enhance customer service to reduce churn to less than 7% annually.

Company Objective 2:  Build an excellent corporate culture. 

Key results: 

• Launch an ongoing two-way closed-loop feedback process.
• Maintain a weekly Staff Pulse Score of at least 8.
• Celebrate any type of progress every week.
• Launch a monthly all-hands open Q&A meeting.

Sales Department OKR Examples

Sales Team Objective 1: Improve the team’s sales performance.  

Key Results: 

• Maintain a sales pipeline of qualified leads valued at least $300,000 per quarter.
• Boost close rate from 20% to 23%.
• Boost scheduled calls per sales agent from one to two per week.
• Grow the average deal size from $10,000 to $12,000.  

Sales Team Objective 2: Create higher-quality leads.

Key Results: 

• Generate the list of lead metrics and scripted questions to collect in CRM.
• Ensure at least 70% of leads completed obligatory Q&A filled in.
• Automate the data collection from the backend to CRM.
• Redesign the user engagement form by introducing two new screening questions. 

Marketing Team OKR Examples

Marketing Team Objective 1: Increase our reach and brand awareness outside of X geography.

Key Results: 

• Generate one new thought leadership article weekly.
• Increase newsletter signups by 100 per week.
• Boost website traffic by 15% from the X geography. 

Marketing Team Objective 2: Improve customer retention and customer lifetime value (CLV).

Key Results:

• Share 20 customer case studies by September 15.
• Boost email newsletter open rates from 30% to 50%.
• Improve positive mentions from 60 to 90.

Content Marketing Team OKR Examples

Content Marketing Objective 1: Improve our SEO.

Key Results: 

• Get 5 inbound links from relevant websites every quarter.
• Improve the internal on-page optimization and improve 15 pages every quarter.
• Enhance our website loading speed.
• Create two recent blog posts a week optimized around strategic keywords.

Content Marketing Objective 2: Create helpful and informative blog articles.

Key Results:

• Interview 100 industry thought leaders.
• Drive 500,000 organic traffic visitors to the blog by March 10.
• Earn 300 PDF downloads by the end of Q1.

Customer Success Team OKR Examples

Customer Success Objective 1: Retain our customers, reducing churn where factors are in our control.

Key Results: 

• Conduct post-engagement debriefs for all contracts above $50,000.
• Develop a program to conduct account reviews.
• Achieve average customer retention of 75% annually. 

Customer Success Objective 2: Expand customer support coverage to Spanish and Italian to improve customer satisfaction and enhance customer acquisition.

Key Results: 

• Hire and onboard four native speakers of each language for phone support by September.
• Expand the automated online support pipeline to each language by September.
• Develop an in-house translation tool to aid non-speakers in simple problem solutions by January. 

Engineering Team OKR Examples

Engineering Team Objective 1: Launch new product architecture.

Key Results: 

• Have the engineering team contribute X story points.
• Design 4 tests with QA.
• Complete data migration.

Engineering Team Objective 2: Build a top-notch engineering team.

Key Results: 

• Offer a $200 reward for referrals. 
• Hire three referred engineers by the end of Q1.
• Maintain a 2:1 onsite interview-hire ratio.

Engineering Team Objective 3: Improve the response rate for critical bugs in testing.

Key Results:

• Hire four engineers by April 10.
• Improve response time from 15 to less than 10 minutes.
• Monitor non-essential meetings every two weeks to determine if necessary.

Finance Department OKR Examples

Financial Department Objective 1: Improve the annual budget approval process

Key Results: 

• Have a meeting with every VP.
• Review budget proposals before mid-Q1.
• Complete the final budget by February.

Financial Department Objective 2: Improve the financial reporting process.

Key Results: 

• Hire a new bookkeeper.
• Implement the cloud-based version of Xero.
• Close our financials within one week of a quarter.

How To Write Your OKRs 

A good company objective describes what you’d like to achieve. It should be broad enough to allow teams to design team objectives yet specific enough to ensure everyone knows where they’re going. Before finalizing high-level goals, leadership should solicit feedback from the teams and clarify expectations.

Team objectives should provide the team with purpose, urgency, and focus. Remember that team objectives aren’t projects; they’re problems to solve or improvement possibilities to explore. Ultimately, they should align with the company goal.  

In addition to writing an objective, you also need to write key results. While an objective is an issue to solve or an improvement opportunity to investigate, key results are the measurable outcome required to achieve a specific objective. They contain a metric with a target value and measure the progress towards achieving the objective. Ideally, each team would identify two to four key results for each objective. 

The Bottom Line

OKR bridges the gap between goal formulation and execution, allowing firms to shift from an output-based to an outcome-based approach to work. The OKR framework aids leaders and their teams prioritize, align, and evaluate their efforts. 

Linking company and team objectives to key results helps team members see how their everyday work fits into the broader picture and where they should focus their efforts to improve. Hopefully, these OKRs examples will facilitate the implementation and ensure success.

The post Best Examples On How To Successfully Implement OKRs appeared first on Focus.

Feedback at Focus

You asked – we delivered. You can send feedback to your teammates and managers. The feedback feature is designed to spark creativity, put out potential fires, and help teammates show up as their best selves.

You can either give feedback to a teammate in free form or follow questions at Focus. It doesn’t matter which way do you prefer more. The most important is delivering value to people you are working together. 

How to send feedback?

Just choose a teammate in the People section. Go to feedback and then click on the Give Feedback button. 

Also, you can choose the privacy of feedback. Everyone can see public feedback. However, private feedback is hidden from everyone. Only the teammate you sent feedback and admin will be able to see it.

Also, you can ask for feedback from your teammate by clicking the Ask feedback button. In this case, Focus sends a notification to the teammate.

Other updates at Focus

Privacy at Weekly Plans and Weekly Updates

By default, all weekly update answers are public. Everyone can see it. However, if you want to make answers private when only authors and admins can read answers, then use the Privacy feature in weekly updates settings.

Go to Settings > Weekly Updates Campaign and make Private answers active clicking on the checkbox.

Same works for weekly plans.

Privacy at OKRs

More privacy.

You asked us about privacy at OKRs several times. We have it now. 

You can specify privacy when you are creating OKRs.

There are 3 levels of privacy at OKRs:

• Public. Everyone can see an OKR.
• Team. Only your team, owners of key results, and admin can see an OKR.
• Private. Only you, owners of key results, and admin can see an OKR.

Cheers!

Best,
Anton

The post Feedback and more  appeared first on Focus.

The challenge we see with current updates is the lack of connection between weekly action items and OKRs. Yeah, we have the questions about the main OKR next week. However, it doesn’t really show what you did for specific OKR last week.

So, OKR-based updates solve this problem.

IMPORTANT! OKR-based updates work only on the web platform. If you want to use the Focus bot for Slack, you should run classic weekly updates. Yeah, it’s still possible to use classic weekly updates.

How it works

To show you how OKR-based updates work, I want to mention how classic updates work.

You can see in the picture above how the classic update works. We have 3 questions, which help to align the team on a weekly basis. 

The questions:

• What did you accomplish last week?
• What is your key insight of this week?
• How was your experience at work this week?

About OKR-based approach

The OKR approach is based not only on weekly updates but on weekly plans too. 

Everything starts on a weekly plan now. 

Answering what you are going to do this week, you should choose OKRs and specify action items for each OKR.

It’s time to work now. 

At the end of the week, you run a weekly update. And you have here your weekly OKRs and action items you have mentioned on the last weekly plan.

Also, you can add something that you haven’t mentioned on the weekly plan.

You should only choose it is completed or not. If it’s not completed, the system asks you for details.

However, the main goal of the weekly update is specifying OKR you were working on last week and connecting it with action items.

It allows seeing the detailed traction on your progress. How much the OKRs were moved for the last week, what you accomplished, what wasn’t accomplished, and why.

It gives you a better understanding of what you should improve and how strong you are following your OKRs.

How to set OKR-based updates?

If you want to use OKR-based updates, drop us a message via support@usefocus.co. We will set everything up for you.

Cheers!

Best,
Anton

The post OKR-based updates appeared first on Focus.

A new feature is coming. I’m excited to announce the 1:1 meetings at Focus. The 1:1 meetings help employees to grow and develop strong relationships with people.

“You spend so much time finding great people, it’s worth it to help them grow to be the best they can be.”

JUSTIN ROSENSTEIN, (Co-Founder, Asana)

You can use 1:1 meetings in Focus now.

The 1:1 meetings consist of the 7 main pieces in Focus:

• Monthly focus – help to keep eyes on the most important goal this month
• Talking points – things you want to talk about at the meeting
• Action items – todos that are synchronized with the Task menu
• #1 thing to achieve next week – the main focus for the next week
• Notes – for feedback or any ideas
• Follow up – for expanding your meeting outcomes
• And private feedback – only you see these notes.

To create your first 1:1, choose a teammate for the meeting and fill fields you want to talk about. 

The 1:1 meetings are available on the Pro + Culture plan.

Let me know what you thing about 1:1 meetings.

The post 1:1 meetings at Focus appeared first on Focus.

Last two weeks, we updated a bunch of things, and it’s time to show you what you can do at Focus.

The new OKR Tree

We rebuilt the OKR tree. The tree had only 3 levels of objectives before – the company’s OKRs, teams, and individuals. However, customers asked us to add more levels because they have more complex structures. For example, company’s OKRs -> departments’ OKRs -> teams’ OKRs -> individuals’ OKRs. 

So, it’s possible to do now. No more limits at the OKR three now. To build the tree, you should specify a parent OKR in OKR settings.

Date filter in OKRs

We added date filters to objectives. It’s possible to sort OKRs based on the time range of the OKR’s due in date. It allows you to see objectives for the current quarter by default and focus on them. 

OKR notifications on Slack

We added more data in notifications in Slack. The Focus bot will send notifications when someone updates OKRs. It’s possible to see previous metrics and the progress that the team has.

You can set OKR notifications in Slack here. And this is the guide on how to install and set the Focus bot.

Updates in pricing

We updated the pricing model in September. Here are 2 changes:

1) Annual plans. There is a 20% discount for annual plans now. 
2) Free plan. The focus plan with OKRs is free for individuals now.

Let me know what you think.

Cheers!

The post The new OKR tree, date filter, and notifications at Slack appeared first on Focus.

You can use the new Slack bot for 3 things now: 

• Run check-ins or other campaigns (daily check-ins, weekly updates, weekly plans, or your custom campaigns)
• Get OKR notifications and updates in Slack
• Run Icebreakers in Slack

How to install the new Focus bot?

1. Delete current Slack bot in your Slack workspace (Settings & administration > Manage apps > click on the bot “focus v1” and click “Remove bot” button in the bot settings). 
2. Install the new bot (button will be here)

About the bot Settings

After installation, you can set bot for your team. You can specify members for check-ins (by default, the bot will send the check-ins to everyone), change time, or choose a public channel for results delivery. If you choose a public channel, please add the bot to this channel. 

Check your campaign settings here.

If you create Objectives at Focus, the Focus bot will send notifications when someone updates OKRs (Objective and Key Results). It helps to sync the team and focus on the most important things. To use it, please specify a public channel for OKRs notifications and add the Focus bot to the channel.

Also, the bot can remind users who didn’t update their OKRs last week or last 2 weeks. 

You can edit OKR settings here.

Let me know what you think about the new bot.

Check our Guide for Slack

The post Focus bot 2.0 for Slack appeared first on Focus.

New week – new feature.

We added custom check-ins. It’s possible to create different campaigns at Focus now. 

You can run as many check-ins as you want. For example, if you want to set more campaigns than basic daily check-ins, weekly updates, and weekly plans, then create a new campaign with your own questions and schedule. 

These are custom check-ins at Focus. 

How to create your campaign

1. In Settings, click the button “Create Campaign”

2. Fill the form to create your custom check-in. 

Few things to know about custom campaigns:

– Name – the name of the campaign. It’s displayed in the sub-menu at the Check-ins & Plans menu. Also, people will receive a notification with the name of the campaign.

– Questions – it’s the questions you want to ask your team.

– Interval – it shows how often you want to run this campaign. You can choose daily, weekly, biweekly, or monthly frequency.

– Participants – people who will participate in the campaign.

After creating the campaign, you will be able to edit it in the Campaign menu.

All answers you will see on Check-ins & Plans menu. Just click on the title with the new campaign’s name.

Also, you can find statistics in the Dashboard menu.

So, this is custom check-ins in Focus. Let us know what do you think about it. 

Pricing updates (removing the Free plan)

Also, we are going to do several updates to our pricing model in September. 

First, the Free plan will be removed. We decided to close the free plan because it takes a lot of resources to support free plan users. Also, we are going to decrease yearly plans discount from 30% to 20%. 

So, if you want to get yearly access to Focus, it’s the best time to do it with old and the lowest price.

Cheers! 

The post Custom Check-ins and pricing updates at Focus appeared first on Focus.

We added Weekly Plans at Focus. 

It helps your team to plan the week. We got few requests from users that it’s not enough to run Weekly Updates to sync a team. It’s better to plan the week on Mondays and then run weekly updates on Fridays. 

That’s why we built the new feature. Weekly plans have the same principle as weekly updates. People will get notifications to plan their week.

By default, Focus asks 3 questions:

• What are you going to do this week?
• What is one thing you can do this week to get the best outcome?
• What is your main OKR next week?
  

You can change, add, or remove questions in Settings > Weekly plans. The last question is connected with the list of OKRs (like it was in weekly updates before). 

How to activate weekly plans

If you are a new user, then weekly plans work by default in your account. 

If you are an existing user who already runs a weekly updates campaign, you need to turn on Weekly Plans in Settings. Just click on status, which is Disabled for you.

And check the timezone in weekly plans settings. Also, if you want to ask a question about OKRs in weekly plans, not updates, then you need to do few actions more:

Also, Focus asks the question about the main OKR for the next week in Weekly Plans now, not Updates. If you want to return workflow and use the questions where people can choose OKRs from the list, then you should do few actions:

1. Deactivate OKR question in Weekly Plans. To do that, click on the checklist to change status. Then confirm the form by clicking on the button Submit to save these settings.
   

2. Activate OKR questions in weekly updates. Just go to weekly updates settings and activate it. And remove Question 3 “What are you going to do next week?” in weekly updates. You have it in weekly plans now. Don’t forget to click on the button Submit.

That’s all.

Now you can use weekly plans together with weekly updates. 

Also, we made the left menu simpler. All check-ins, updates, and plans are located in Check-ins & Plans section. You can choose Daily Check-ins, Weekly Updates, or Weekly Plans on the top menu.

Cheers! 

Anton Cherkasov,

Founder at Focus

The post New Feature: Weekly Plans appeared first on Focus.

A new feature at Focus. Icebreakers.

Icebreaker questions are designed as simple team-building activities to help teammates into a little team bonding. It allows people in your team to connect on a personal level. Focus generates simple and fun icebreaker questions each week.

So, how does it work?

1. You turn on Icebreakers campaign in settings. 

2. Each week, you and your team get the new funny icebreaker to answer. 

That’s all. Simple right?

Things you can customize in Icebreakers:

• Icebreaker questions. We have a library of icebreakers questions. However, you can add, edit, or remove questions as you want.
• Day and time. By default, Focus creates the new icebreakers at 10 pm Friday. However, you can change it.
• Email notifications. Focus can notify your team about the new icebreaker. Just turn email notifications in settings.
• Choose specific participants on the web app or Slack. In this case, Focus will notify these specific participants (or specific teams).

Boost team morale. Have fun together. Build happy and high-performing remote teams.

Cheers! 

Anton Cherkasov,
Founder at Focus

The post Icebreakers appeared first on Focus.

Quick update. 

We added more details about OKRs. Now you can get all information about the objective or key result. To do that, you need to click on a specific objective or key result.

Also, you can update it, specify the current status, comment, and even make notes.

By the way, notes are a great thing to see how your traction is going on during the time. 

And you can update the whole objective or specific key result.

Cheers! 

Anton Cherkasov,
Founder at Focus

The post OKR details appeared first on Focus.