In this guide, you’ll learn about the strategies that will enable you to achieve your goals and how to track OKRs successfully.

Who Can Use OKRs

With businesses expanding exponentially, change is the only constant in today’s world. Unfortunately, many companies react slowly to these developments because they are unsure how to handle them. As a result, they can’t help but feel exposed, which has a negative impact on their profitability, sustainability, and staff engagement.

Excellent execution of good ideas is made possible by the OKR framework. Unlike KPIs, OKR goals are bolder and more ambitious. Setting OKR goals makes it possible for a business to be adaptable, flexible, current, and experience exponential growth. They can help you boost high-performing teams and tighten employee engagement. 

Although OKRs were widely employed by technology businesses initially, any company that appreciates the ideas of openness, responsibility, and accessibility can embark on an OKR journey. Companies like Allbirds, Google, and Netflix, are some of the top companies that use OKRs.

Photo by RODNAE Productions

How To Plan and Track Company OKRs

Since aligning and cascading OKRs can be quite complicated, OKRs should be viewed as company-wide initiatives where various functional teams work toward an objective and are accountable for the key results. OKRs are therefore viewed as team OKRs rather than individual OKRs. Cross-functional team OKRs are often considered to work best. 

That being said, if you want to improve the results of your work, keeping track of your OKRs is essential. This practice will help you identify what and how to assess, and provide a clearer understanding of your team’s overall progress. You can effectively design and track OKRs using these nine best practices.

Focus on Descriptive Objectives and Measurable Outcomes

Utilize concise, descriptive language to pinpoint the attributes you wish to improve when writing your objectives. You should then use the descriptions to write well-informed key results. Conversely, key results should be expressed in measurable, quantitative terms that support the company objectives.

Write Benchmarks for Every Key Result

Not every key result necessitates the same level of effort. For instance, if you’ve written an objective with four key results, it doesn’t mean you’re halfway done when two of the key results are achieved. Using weighted measurements for every key result will help you compute your progress more accurately and provide a more precise progress indicator.

Set Accountability and Responsibility for Every Key Results

There will probably be several teams or individuals allocated to the key results. To confirm that all participants can contribute to ensuring that all associated activities are performed, clearly outline the expectations and obligations for every key result.

Loop In the Whole Team  

Not all OKRs will require the entire team to be involved in every OKR, but communicating the objectives and key results transparently will keep everyone informed about the company priorities and the goals you’re trying to achieve.

Schedule Regular Performance Reviews

The best company strategy to monitor progress and analyze the current success rates is to examine your OKRs regularly. To review your OKRs, schedule monthly, weekly, or daily meetings, based on the set timelines.

Discuss What You’ve Learned 

It is crucial to revisit the key results achieved, along with the steps used to achieve them and what you can learn from them. For example, one of your key results for the quarter was to boost the number of newsletter subscribers by 20%, but you’ve only boosted it by 17%. If you want the team benefits from this outcome, talk about why this key result was unsuccessful.

Examples for Company OKRs

Each company’s OKR can focus on outcomes in different areas, such as revenue, brand, product, culture, service, and growth initiatives. Here are some of the top company OKR examples that can help you successfully implement yours. 

Growth Company OKR Examples

Objective: Expand into the Italian market and achieve a 20% market share in 12 months.

Key Result 1: Conduct a comprehensive market study by January 15.

Кey Result 2: Launch an Italian-language product version with the top 3 requested features by April 1.

Key Result 3: Train and employ 5 bilingual customer support reps by March 15. 

Brand OKR examples 

Objective: Maintain an awesome customer experience

Key Result 1: Accomplish a Net Promoter Score of at least 25  

Кey Result 2: Boost Net Customer Retention to at least 95%

Key Result 3: Accomplish 85% or higher WAU for product engagement

Objective: Win customer love and trust

Key Result 1: Identify customer requirements and add design features accordingly

Кey Result 2: Address customer needs and pain points

Key Result 3: Enhance the implementation process for managed customers 

Culture Company OKR examples 

Objective: Create an excellent company culture

Key Result 1: Launch an OKR platform to nourish company transparency

Кey Result 2: Accomplish an Employee Pulse Survey score of at least 8 within 5 business days

Key Result 3: Celebrate 5 or more “small wins” in our weekly meetings.

Objective: Build an OKR-centered company culture

Key Result 1: Achieve an average of 80% progress on company OKRs

Кey Result 2: Ensure 90% of key results are updated every two weeks

Key Result 3: Achieve an OKR design score of 75 on average

Customer Service Company OKR Examples

Objective: Enhance consumer retention to boost the profit margins

Key Result 1: Enhance product onboarding 

Кey Result 2: Create a long-term nurturing strategy 

Key Result 3: Improve client lifetime by focusing on corporate MQLs

Product OKR examples

Objective: Make our product a “must have” product

Key Results 1: Grow from 1,000 to 3,000 users

Кey Results 2: Attain 5,000 engaged users

Key Results 3: Enhance consumer experience by implementing competitor features

Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash

The Bottom Line

Company OKRs serve as the foundation for organizational, departmental, and individual activities by outlining the company’s top priorities. However, a company OKR program isn’t meant to cover everything your business needs to get done because having too many of them might undermine organizational effectiveness through complexity and complication. When appropriately implemented, company OKRs assist individuals in producing practical and motivated work and assist leadership in connecting with the most crucial business objectives.

The post Company OKRs Guideline – How To Plan And Track Objectives and Key Results appeared first on Focus.

In today’s read, we’ll explain four tried-and-tested ways to use OKRs in product management, discuss their benefits, and provide examples of OKRs you may use as a starting point. 

Why Do You Need OKRs For Your Product Management

Product managers are responsible for identifying consumer needs and ensuring that the product is developed in a way that resonates with the target consumer while also meeting the company’s business goals. To succeed, product managers should go back and use an OKR product management framework as a collaborative goal-setting tool to define measurable goals and track their outcomes. Using OKRs can serve as a guideline while encouraging engagement among your team. In addition, you can use OKRs to create an environment where your product team will be able to work with a purpose. When used right, OKRs can help you create high output management, increase communication, and enhance team alignment.

OKR Product Management Examples

Objectives and key results will keep the product team focused on the right goals and encourage them to work diligently to achieve those goals. When setting up OKRs, it’s key that you have a plan on how you will accomplish them. Here are some OKR project management examples for setting better objectives and key results for their full effect.

Objective: Research customers’ demands and expectations to improve the product 

Key Results: 

• Watch 50 product usage records and compile learnings in the early stage
• Get 20 interviews from customers in the early stage
• Analyze all the information and find three key points to improve

Objective: Launch the new product successfully

Key Results:

• Complete 30 interviews for customer development by Q1
• Run two new product training sessions for the sales and marketing teams 
• Review 20 customer product marketing requirements
  

Objective: Create a product vision statement

Key Results:

• Interview 20 potential customers for feedback
• Point out three aspects in user experience mockups to enhance product usage engagement
• Reach usability score of at least 8 on user experience mockups from 30 potential customers

Objective: Boost the speed of delivery for the new product features

Key Results: 

• Boost the sprint team speed from 25 to 33 points
• Reduce the defects-per-feature rate from 2.3 to 1.5
• Lower the average lead time from through delivery of the product feature by five weeks

Objective: Boost onboarding of users 

Key Results:

• Decrease trial abandonment rate from 40% to 28%
• Increase the percentage of users with feature completion from 60% to 74%
• Enhance trial conversion rate from 37% to 45%

Objective: Launch the second version of the organization’s main product successfully

Key Results:

• Get over 5,000 signups 
• Get product reviews published in at least 10 publications
• Improve the OTD rate from 50% to 65%
  

Objective: Add more personalization features to the product  

Key Results:

• Boost the number of users who use the personalization features from 15% to 40%
• Allow the most frequently asked customization features and get more than 500 users
• Lower the drop-off after the first 30 days from 50% to 35% 
  

Objective: Test the new app’s MVP before it goes live

Key Results: 

• Complete the 10 core wireframes
• Conduct user flows test with at least 15 people 
• Finalize user tests with at least 10 strangers remotely

Objective: Build the best product team

Key Results: 

• Reach Internal Employee Satisfaction score of 9
• Roll out 5 blog articles about the organization’s product management process
• Carry out the new agile process for delivery and discovery for 3 teams

Objective: Improve the product management team

Key Results:

• Create team performance metrics  
• Boost unit test coverage percentage from 30% to 40%
• Use automated CI/CD to reduce the time for deployment from 15 to 5 minutes

OKR Product Management Best Practices

Objectives should be challenging, actionable, and time-bound, whereas key results should be clear and measurable. The best OKRs for product management should enhance the team’s creativity, focus, and productivity. Be careful not to take too many OKRs at once as too many challenges might spread your team’s focus thin. Instead, set up three objectives per quarter. For each objective, have three to five key results. 

Setting OKRs is more than a simple framework where you write down the objectives and key results. Instead, it’s a process that involves multiple stages:

Involve everyone — For a successful OKRs rollout, everyone from executives to junior employees should be involved. This approach improves productivity and team alignment. Coordinate your product management OKRs to your organizational goals, and then communicate which metrics you’ll use to measure the success.

Develop action plans — As soon as you set the OKRs, the teams should provide action plans for achieving the key results. The success of this step depends on collaboration. Once the action plans are complete, the teams can get to work. 

Consistent check-ins — It’s a common practice to set OKRs every quarter. You can choose another timeline that works for you, but it’s crucial to have regular check-ins to gain progress updates and ensure the OKRs are in motion. During these check-ins, you can identify and assess unexpected hurdles, come up with a creative solution, and review key results as needed.

OKRs review — Analysis is crucial at the end of each OKRs period. This is an excellent opportunity to track the OKRs performance and how it might reflect the need for changes in your organization. 

Support collaboration — Ensure that individuals are free to communicate, engage, and debate the list of objectives with one another. Create an online community or area where the entire team can post updates, discuss problems, and generate ideas for solutions.

Benefits of OKR Product Management 

As we said, OKRs for product managers help them choose the right priorities, measure progress, and align efforts with the organization’s goals. Here are some of the main benefits of product management OKRs:

Prioritization

Setting up multiple goals is often tempting for product managers. However, it’s usually better to focus on just a few initiatives; OKRs can provide a consistent path that product managers can follow, prioritize the most important goals, and stay focused. 

Enhances Operational Agility

Many businesses prefer agile product management because it enables them to operate in the present. When setting OKRs, you don’t need to rewrite the entire approach. Furthermore, the framework allows for setting flexible key results that can be changed at any point.

More Vertical and Horizontal Alignment 

All organizational levels ought to participate in the process of defining OKRs. Successfully implemented OKRs strengthen internal cohesion and improve the alignment of corporate objectives.

Better Project Progress Tracking

Since product managers are in charge of developing and maintaining the product roadmap, keeping track of progress is crucial. By accurately documenting, defining, and monitoring the advancement of your projects, OKRs can help you keep track of your team’s goals.

OKR Product Management: The Bottom Line

Setting good OKRs helps you establish attainable goals, monitor progress, and foster team engagement and cooperation that empowers your team to produce measurable results. To ensure a cohesive implementation, use OKRs across all areas of product management, from product strategy and delivery through product vision, roadmaps, and discovery.

Creating good OKRs requires frequent iterations but with a well-defined strategy and strong teamwork, you can easily streamline the process.

The post 4 Effective Ways To Use OKRs in Product Management appeared first on Focus.

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.

So you know what OKRs are and are in need to tips to improve them. Even if you aren’t sure about OKR’s, we’ll give you the full rundown; a start to finish of everything a leader implementing OKRs needs to know! Here we have 7 essential tips for setting better OKRs.

To recap on OKRs:

OKRs are Objectives and Key Results. It’s a goal-setting framework, a methodology, an overall powerful planning strategy. It’s used by companies and startups to keep teams organized. One of the most notable companies using OKRs is Google. You can read about it on Google’s reWork initiative : reWork.

Objectives are the roadmap. It’s the qualities and the goal you want your team to reach by the end of the week, month, quarter, or year.

Key Results are the quantitative data. They define what you need to check off to reach your objective. Fulfilling all the key results means success.

An example OKR from our 20 Human Resources (HR) OKR examples article:

Objective: Create an amazing training program
Key results:
– Achieve 100% training completion rate
– Increase employee performance post-training by 30%
– Decrease new hire turnover from 30% to 10% 

In case you really are new to OKRs, here’s some Focus blog articles to get you started What are OKRs and How to set powerful OKRs.

Some other great OKR sources are Felipe Castro, Bernard Marr, and Forbes.

OKRs work wonders, but you have to learn how to set them correctly for their full effect.

Now onto the 7 tips for setting better OKRs:

1. The first tip is to be specific. Know what your goal is and provide the key results you want to see. If this happens to be your first time setting an OKR, it’s okay to be off the mark a little. Test the waters and adapt to those first results. You want to aim high but not unreasonably so in the beginning.

Less is More!

2. My second tip goes hand in hand with being specific. Less goals and less key results means that you focus will be on one area. Don’t include minute details or small items. Only include key results that exemplifies the completion of your objective.

For every objective 3-5 key results is recommended. Any more than that will loosen your concentration. Along with that, 3-5 objectives per team layout. Stay concise and stay concentrated!

Our blog provides all the tips and tricks you need to succeed so definitely check us out. You can request a free demo today!

Which leads me to my third tip.

3. There are two types of OKRs and I suggest to start off with Roofshot OKRs then transition to Moonshots. In short, roofshots are challenging, but approachable. You can expect your team to carry out roofshot OKRs to the fullest potential.

OKRs are known for being both ambitious and uncomfortable.

Moonshots, on the other hand, are a little more advanced. Like it’s name suggests, moonshots require you to “shoot for the moon”; challenge the team to ask different questions and take new, creative approaches. These OKRs seem out of your teams limits and impossible to be fulfilled to the max. It’s reserved for more developed teams that understand the OKRs.

Read my previous article about Roofshot and Moonshot OKRs for the full explanation on why you need to start off with roofshot OKRs.

4. Make sure everyone in your team is notified and understand the OKRs. Define what materials or resources you expect them to use. Should the whole team be involved or subgroups? These are things you need to think about.

Aside from weekly or monthly company meetings, your organization should also hold one on one meetings for clarification.

One on one meetings have plenty of benefits as listed in our blog. Read here for 9 one on one meeting tips.

5. Check in with your team to learn about their vision. Everyone can be handed the same prompt and write their version drastically different. Everyone should agree to the vision and OKR that you have. It’s important that your team understands why they should care and put in the effort.

Leaders should define the potential growth that their team could have through these goals. Show that it is pushing them in the right direction.

Tips 4 and 5 both echo the theme of transparency.

Let your organization know the strategies your thinking off-including why you choose certain key results to prove that you’ve reached a certain objective.

6. My sixth is to reevaluate and re calibrate. If your OKRs are not working out the first time around, you need to analyze the root of the problem. Don’t be afraid to ask your team for their feedback on the OKRs. It is their OKR as much as it is yours.

Keep an eye out for the progress your team has made and change some key results if necessary. It’s alright to readjust what your objectives and key results are. You will keep on having to transform your OKRs.

A stagnant yet long term OKR is a sign of neglect. Keep your OKRs up to date to reflect what’s important and signals success.

7. Last but not least, reviewing and evaluating your progress is important. This last tip requires you to understanding what went wrong and revise your OKR. As a leader, you should never make another OKR without looking back at the previous ones.

OKRs are great because you can build off of the older one to keep making high goals for your team. The last OKR should be the stepping stone for the next one and so on.

Now that we’ve reached the end, make sure you remember these 7 tips to setting better OKRs. Thank you for reading this blog and make sure to check out everything else that Focus has to offer.

Use Focus! We can assist and guide your team in all matters from OKRs to meetings. Our tools at Focus keep your team on track, in sync, and focused on what really matters.

Focus not only utilizes OKRs but daily check ins, a Slack bot, and more. Our team at Focus can attest to its helpfulness and benefits.

The post 7 Tips for setting better OKRs appeared first on Focus.

So you’re managing a team and you need some help with synchronicity. Need to know what’s going on with everyone in your team? Daily Stand-ups sound like just the thing you need! Learn about daily stand-ups or daily scrum. These meetings are not just a status update, it’s an essential tool.

Read for our tips and suggestions with team development.

There are three main parts that we will cover:

1. Defining Daily Stand-up
2. Why you need it as a leader
3. Implementation
4. Why you need Focus

Defining the Daily Stand-up

Daily stand-ups, daily scrum, daily meetings or whatever name you know them as are all the same thing. They are daily check-in meetings you have with your team.

Daily Stand-ups are timely, informal, and get to the point. No need to prepare presentations or rehearse, just go down a list of critical information you need to share. Your team should provide information on their obstacles and possibly what they’re doing to mitigate these problems.

The advantage to daily scrum is that you can give your input right away. Give some criticism or share some helpful tips.

You can even shut down ideas and help narrow down what your team should be doing.

These meetings originated as a tool for development teams-Agile development teams that it. Agile teams are defined by the Harvard Business Review here: Agile at Scale. They’ve grown since then and should be utilized by all teams, non-technical or otherwise.

Why you need it (as a leader)

These daily scrum are vital for team coordination. They are an effective form of communication that help you stay on task.

When your team is in sync, you can achieve more. Get better results, faster results more efficiently.

For example, you want to have your team post on the company’s social media everyday. Creating a calendar and delegating the tasks is the first step. If someone misses a post or creates something not to your liking, a face to face meeting, even over video call is the best way to communicate your message. A quick call can aid in overcoming misunderstandings.

Daily stand-ups prevent critical issues from growing.

These frequent stand-ups don’t allow for issues to fall through the crack. Because problems can be address easily as they appear or even before they’re noticeable, they can be tackled on the spot.

Daily Stand-ups are not just individual reports.

The benefit of doing daily stand-ups is its notable difference from a normal meeting or report. If you treat these daily stand-ups like a a report meeting then you lose it’s value.

Here are some examples of how you can stay in sync:

1. Write a mini agenda/list so that the team can view
2. Don’t go off topic in daily stand-ups
3. Stay active in group chats
4. Use Focus (more details below)

At Focus, our main goal is to help teams achieve the most! We want to share our technology and OKR guides so that no matter how big or small your organization is, it can reach it’s full potential. We believe in daily stand-ups and that every leader should give it a try!

Implementation

So now that you’re ready to start having these daily scrum with your team, here’s what you need to know.

Rule #1 is to know your team’s schedule. Find a time that works for everyone and that means everyone. Having expected attendance and participation gathers respect. You show respect for your team and take time to check up on them, so they should share their honest thoughts and comments in return.

Rule #2 is to keep it short. This is not the time to have long, deep in-depth conversations. These daily stand-ups can delve into personal topics, but should ultimately stay light and focused. You want to understand what’s going on and any obstacles. Any “blockers” that need more than 15 minutes to explain should be saved for a later meeting, which you can plan during this daily check-in.

The length of daily stand-ups are a great advantage. Each party has to equally participate and the limited time helps everyone stay focused to not only talk about their plans but also actively listen.

On a side note, these meetings are short, so remember to be on time!

There’s no space for uncomfortably in daily stand-ups.

Rule #3 is to always address impediments. If your team never has any issues then it’s because they don’t feel comfortable diverging information. As there are always ways to improve, there will always be obstacles to your goal. Leaders should aid in teamwork, meaning your team should not be too intimidated to let you know what issues they face. Be wary of this secrecy. Even if your team is at their peak performance, have them share their impediments and how they can address them.

There’s no time for passivity.

The last major rule is to stay committed! Don’t give up on these meetings. Daily means daily. As casual as they may be, your team should treat is an a important part of their day. The more you value these stand-ups the more your team will as well. Lead by example and you’ll soon enjoy the benefits of daily stand-ups!

My personal tip is to thank people for their time! As quick as these meetings are, it’s always polite to give a “thank you” to the person for their time. It’s better not to assume what your team’s schedule might be. Last minute changes can happen to these meetings, and you might not know what plans they had to move to make it on time. Take advantage of this time to recognize your employee’s hard work and build your professional relationship! It never hurts to be polite and friendly. This relationship can translate into work and in turn improve your team’s commitment.

Daily Stand-ups go a long way.

Read our tips on one on one meetings:

9 One on One Meeting Tips

What are One on One Meetings

Why you need Focus

At Focus, we pride ourselves on being communication-oriented and solution driven. Our use of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) helps our team to stay on task and figure out creative solutions.

Read more about these OKRs on our blog:

What are OKRs

We use many forms of communication to let our team know our status. Focus had daily check ins where you share your actions and tasks as well as meaningful insight. Every member of the team can see what everyone else is doing. To make this process even more convenient, we have a Slackbot for these daily check ins as well. Weekly team meetings and one on one meetings are a must for our team. Our blog serves as evidence of this synchronicity!

We post about the changes Focus has gone through on our blog:

Focus Update

Daily stand-ups, check-ins, and OKR are growing in popularity so you and your team should give us a try! Don’t lag behind all the teams and start-ups. With Focus, you’ll find ease in fostering clarity and teamwork across all types of departments and projects!

Schedule a meeting with our CEO and team at Focus.

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The post Daily Stand-ups are a Must! Here’s Why. appeared first on Focus.

We always hear that we should shoot for the stars, but what does that really mean? It’s great to set big goals but how big should you aim for? What are these Moonshots and Roofshot OKRs and in which context should you apply them? Which one is right for my company or team? These are all good questions and you’ve come to the right place.

Now that you know about OKRs and the basics of making OKRs, let’s go even more in-depth. This article introduces and describes the differences of Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs. These are the two types of OKRs that you can make. Read about the fundamentals you need to know about Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs and the guide to utilizing them correctly. At the end of the article, there are extra tips for your team to have successful OKRs.

A quick refresher on the fundamentals of OKRs:

OKRs are Objectives and Key Results.

First, the objective is where the team wants to be or what the teams wants to achieve.

Secondly, key results are the metrics or milestones that track how the objective is going to be fulfilled. These are meaningful performance measurement tools. For each objective, there should be at least 3 key results. There can be up to 5 Key results, but 3 is recommend.

OKR is a goal setting framework that adapts to work for your team. It values the bigger picture and measures what matters. Transparency is key and this structure gives everyone a clear goal to focus on. OKRs also provide a clear explanation or impact of what the team’s achievement of the key results will bring.

You can read more on Focus and why our company revolves around OKRs: Founder’s Story.

This article covers 5 main sections:

1. Moonshot OKRS
2. Roofshot OKRs
3. Table Comparison
4. How to use Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs
5. Extra Tips

Moonshot OKRs

Moonshot OKRs are those that seem overly ambitious. These stretched and aspirational goals challenge your team. It’s a new project that no one has touched upon yet. It pushes everyone’s limits and set a new definition for what’s possible. Since it requires the team to “shoot for the moon” and as a result, the goal will seem almost out of reach.

The pathway to this goal is undefined, unstable, risky and require experience.

Often time all the resources are not listed out and the research you have is limited. Your team has to pave the path and should start off having no real knowledge of the step by step of how to attain the end goal. This type of OKR is fluid and has room for variance. The team’s understanding of the status quo is broadened. Most companies, such as Google, use Moonshots. As a result of this formidable objective, success with a Moonshot OKR means achieving 60 to 70% of the key results.

The drawback to this type of OKR is that your team would be highly unlikely to fulfill 100% of the goal. The consequence of this drawback could deter investors or funding, so planning ahead for the unknown is a necessity.

Teams that know how to set Moonshot OKRs and afford the damages should stay cautious whilst realizing that even though they fail to “reach the moon”, where they land is still a remarkable accomplishment.

These types of goals help the team to curate revisions, assess their action plan, and find areas for improvement. The results are used as data to create the next Moonshot OKR.

In short, Moonshots are high risk and high reward.

Example:

Objective: Create a marking campaign and increase brand presence

Key Results:

-Increase daily blog readers from 10 to 100

-Increase social media following by 200%

-Sponsor 10 Influencer product reviews on Youtube

-Curate 2 Business Partnerships with Local Community targeting product demographic

Roofshot OKRs

Roofshot OKRs (also known as committed OKRs) include achievable goals. This second type of objectives are still described as difficult but still exist within the team’s known trajectory. Success for a Roofshot OKR means reaching 100% of the key results.

These OKRs are akin to contracts; Roofshots are a guaranteed commitment and results need to be met. You can expect this OKR to be successfully completed by the end of its timeline.

Once finalized, the common understanding is that the OKR will be completely fulfilled. Hence the reason it’s also referred to as “committed” OKR. An unfinished Roofshot goal should be met with serious discussion. While OKRs in their nature are inherently hard, Roofshots are a defined commitment that includes the tasks easily lined up. Missing the target with this OKR highlights that there is a critical blind spot in the team’s operation.

These OKRs provide the much needed results for teams that are looking for steady goals and stability. It can connect different interdependent teams by having them each know what to expect from the other.

Example:

Objective: Improve brand presence

Key Results:

-Create 5 articles

-Get 15 reader surveys and reviews

-Open Accounts on 6 Popular Social Media Networks

-Start a company hashtag that

Some more general OKR examples can be found here on the Focus blog: HR examples, Product Management examples, and Marketing examples.

Table Comparison

Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs have different purposes, meaning they should be used for different contexts. There are various advantages of each that should be considered. This table reiterates the lengthy description of Moonshots and Roofshot OKRs from above and compares them.

*Just a reminder that all OKRs are supposed to be inherently hard. They are not a list of tasks, but rather goals. No OKR, whether Moonshot or Roofshot, should be taken lightly.

How to use Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs

Start with Roofshots

Due to the overtly ambitious nature of Moonshot OKRs, experts like Felipe Castro recommend that beginners start off with Roofshot OKRs. You want to start off big, but still within reason. New teams need motivation and small successes are necessary. Roofshots provide the stable foundation that set your team off on the right foot. Using Moonshoot OKRs in the beginning can demotivate the team. It might let the team harbor an uncommitted mindset and culture of not reaching the full potential. Additionally, you take a gamble with the Moonshots compared to the guaranteed success of a Roofshot. Moonshots provide an opportunity for growth in the right context, so it’s best to wait till the team is ready to manage and take on bigger risks.

Transition to Moonshots

However, all OKRs should be designed with the intention of pushing the team out of their comfort zone. Some might even prove to be somewhat uncomfortable. Once the team matures, transitioning to Moonshot OKRs keeps everyone on their toes. It would force the team to develop creative solutions and ask more questions. Without changing to Moonshots, the team’s progress could stagnant. In short, the team should start with Roofshot OKRs to build and develop a results-based mindset then transition to adding Moonshots. The team could go further to expand their limits after orienting themselves to this way of thinking.

The Perfect Mixed Approach

The transition to using Moonshots means to combine them; creating a mixed approach. Your objective would include one Moonshot key result and the rest would be Roofshots. A combination of these OKRs when used wisely could prove a powerful strategy. It means having an attainable goal while setting aside 10 to 30% of the key results as a Moonshot. A combined Moonshot and Roofshot OKR allows for the advantages of both types.

The Moonshot and Roofshot OKR combined should be the endgoal because Moonshots on its own require quite a bit of caution and risk-taking. It’s my recommendation that non-OKR experts reach and stay using this combined method. A Moonshot OKR’s profit is not always promised and the pathway is unstable. Your team would enjoy the multitude of benefits listed above and avoid undesired business outcomes with the implementation of a Moonshot AND Roofshot OKR. This way the team finds space for development whilst maintaining most of their current success rate.

Extra Tips

Whether making a Moonshot or Roofshot OKR, labeling is one of the most important steps. The OKR should be transparent and understandable. It’s a signal of the team’s expectations; this is what everyone deems as achievable. Being clear is important because everyone on the team knows where to direct their focus and motivation. Who wouldn’t want to stay on track with the rest of the team?

A team that works with the same objective in mind is a team that conquers Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs.

While Roofshots have easily defined resources, Moonshots instead require the over usage of resources. An example of the usage of resources is involving everyone in the team and all the teams in the company.

A defined objective that everyone can focus on means everyone realizing their role in the big picture.

Another tip I have is to start off with a good team. Read our CEO’s article on building a great team as well as Forbes’ article on workplace team bonding.

Lastly, after learning about Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs, it’s time to make some! Be prepared for the unexpected and proceed with caution, but don’t let that get in the way of your excitement for the future.

The post Moonshot and Roofshot OKRs: Learn about the two types of OKRs appeared first on Focus.

No matter how long you’ve been in business, you’re bound to be overwhelmed by all the acronyms tossed around. In this article, we’ll discuss OKRs vs. KPIs, two popular acronyms that help you set your goals, and measure performances and results.

We’ve covered OKRs a bunch in previous posts, so we’ll start with KPIs. We’ll discuss OKRs down the line. But first….

What does KPI stand for?

KPI stands for 

Key
Performance 
Indicators

They are performance metrics aimed at evaluating success, output, quantity, and/or quality of ongoing activities (i.e. projects, programs, products, and etc), and individuals. KPIs are unique for each team, company, and industry so don’t go implementing someone else’s KPIs into your workflow because it worked for them.

How do I define my KPIs

You define your KPIs according to your core business objectives. They should be linked to strategic objectives and not just anything that can be measured, otherwise, you are wasting time and resources. It can be a challenge, but you can ask yourself 6 simple questions:

KPI OUTCOME

What is the desired outcome
Why is the outcome desired
How will you influence your desired outcome
Who will be in charge of the outcome
When will you track the outcome

Here’s an example of how to answer these questions:

KPI OUTCOME: Website traffic growth
What: Increase website traffic by 10% this quarter
Why: Achieving this target will build brand presence which in turn can make the brand more profitable
How: Adding more SEO-friendly content, improving funnels to the site, adopting new marketing strategies and tools, creating more engaging content on social media.
Who: VP of Marketing will be in charge for this metric
When: The KPI will be reviewed on a weekly basis

Tips for super effective KPIs

• Make the information succinct, clear and relevant to be absorbed and acted upon more quickly
• Focus on outcomes, not business activities
• KPIs metrics should be very carefully thought through. No random numbers for the sake of having a number.
• KPIs need to express metrics that are integral for a business’s success
• Ensure that your KPIs are attainable

When you encounter a KPI that needs improvements, it becomes a starting point in creating OKRs.

What does OKR stand for?

OKR stands for

Objective
Key
Results

Like KPIs, half of OKRs are metrics while the other half is the objective aka your goals. With OKRs, you set your objectives and see your success with your key results. They’re more inspirational and help everyone share the company vision.

Aspects of OKRs:

• Measurable – there should be a significant percentage/number of improvement you need to achieve.
• Ambitious – the goal must seem impossible but can be reached with enough effort. They should be inspirational.
• Flexible & Agile – Your timeline to meet these goals must be to respond to changing conditions.
• Clear – everyone needs to know and understand what your OKR is and how they are contributing.
• Bidirectional – this means that teams define their tactical OKRs (bottom-up) and see how they align with the C-levels strategic OKRs (top-down).

Companies such Google, Microsoft, and Netflix use OKRs. C-level executives set these objectives for everyone to follow, with contributions made by the team. OKRs are both strategic (annual goal) and tactical (monthly/quarterly). Their purpose is to align teams with transparent goals and metrics in which the teams set their own goals in a bottom-up approach. When employees are able to have a voice in company goals, employee engagement increases.

In the battle of OKRs vs. KPIs, the ambitious nature of OKRs means your goals will be hard to achieve 100% of the time. It’s best to achieve 60-70% of your objectives, while anything more means it was too simple and anything less means you didn’t plan well enough to execute it. KPIs measure the metrics to help you achieve your goals by helping you see what areas you can improve or adjust on.

It’s important to note that because you are setting ambitious goals that will be very hard to achieve, failure of achieving an OKR should not be calculated into an employees’ bonuses. If you connect bonuses with OKRs, then employees will not set ambitious goals for themselves that could have benefited the company.

Objectives themselves are not countable, but with key results they are. Key results are the metrics that tell you what you have done and what else needs to be done to get to your goal. Teams can choose one or several key results, but it’s recommended to have three to five. The less you have the more you can focus.

How do you set OKRs?

John Doerr, who brought OKRs to Google, used the following formula:

I will (objective) as measured by (this set of key results)
Here’s an example of how that would be filled in:

I will get people to visit my website as measured by (1) Increasing traffic from 5,000 to 10,000 by the end of the quarter and (2) creating 20 new pieces of SEO-friendly content on the website.

OKRs are commonly written this way:

Objective: Get more traffic to my website

Key Result #1 Increase traffic from 5,000 to 10,000 by the end of the quarter

Key Result #2 Create 20 new pieces of SEO-friendly content on the website

If you remember only one thing about OKRs, then remember they MUST be measurable. As Felipe Castro says, “Measurement is what makes a goal a goal. Without it…all you have is a desire.”

Pros and Cons: OKRs Vs. KPIs

The pros of OKRs

John Doer outlines the 4 superpowers of OKRs

Superpower #1 – Focus and Commit to Priorities

You hone in what’s important and everyone is clear on what is not. OKRs dictate the hard choices leaders need to make and make communication between departments, teams, and individual contributors more precise.

Superpower #2 – Align and connect for Teamwork

Making goals transparent and shared everyone links to the overall company goal, identify cross-dependencies, and coordinate with other teams effectively and share ownership. When individuals connect with the organization’s success it makes top-down work more meaningful.

Superpower #3 – Track for Accountability

As OKRs are periodicly checked, graded, and reassesed thanks to data, if a key result is endanger, you are notified and are able to track it or revise/replace it.

Superpower #4 – Stretch for Amazing

With OKRs’ ambitious nature it motivates workers to excel by pushing themselves more than they thought possible. It tests their limits due to no fear of failure to worry about.

The cons of OKRs

While there are good aspects of OKRs, there are some drawbacks

OKRs, in general, are just straightforward lists that can easily make it hard to find relationships between different objectives and how each objective can feed into another. This creates transparency and alignment issues. Transparency issues can also arise if OKRs are only designed bottom-up creating a lack of clarity on what the business is trying to achieve as a whole.

Because of the difficulty in making different OKRs relate and align, it also comes with a hefty investment. It can a long time to fully integrate a company, or even a single team, to OKRs, and some departments like experimental and research-based, can’t even make OKRs work at all, no matter the effort. People can be hesitant about trying a new approach and end up throwing in the towel because it’s easier to just go back to how things was like before because it was familiar.

The pros of KPIs

KPIs track progress and make performance across teams visible with access given to accurate results and metrics daily, weekly, and/or periodically. This helps to track the progress of a team’s goal and make decisions easier, especially for managers looking to redesign or modify future strategies. It also shows who is underperforming and how to improve upon that as well

The cons of KPIs

Result-oriented and short-term oriented KPIs runs the risk of a decrease in quality of standard and output as workers feel discouraged from implementing innovative approaches and lose the overall strategic vision. If attaining short-term goals begins to take more priority, it gets in the way of long-term goals.

What is the difference in KPIs vs. OKRs?

First, OKRs sit on top of KPIs, but not because it’s better.

OKR is a strategic framework while KPIs are measurements within that framework.

The overall difference between OKRs vs. KPIs is the intention behind setting goals. OKRs are aggressive, ambitious goals concerned with the whole process and improving performance drastically while KPIs are treated as health metrics to check and measure the output of ongoing projects and specific activities.  They are substantially different but will make you more productive and help achieve your goals faster.

Look over this chart for a quick go-to reference:

Conclusion

So, in OKRs vs. KPIs, which one is better?

Well, it’s not that simple. They have different purposes. and so can be used alone for certain things.

Let’s say you want to scale or improve current plans or projects, KPIs are the way to go.

On the other hand, if you have a more broad vision or want to change the full direction of your company or project, OKRs are better.

Instead of seeing it as OKRs VS. KPIs, think of it as OKRs AND KPIs because ideally they should be used together. KPIs can coincide with the Key Results of OKRs. By implementing both OKRs and KPIs, you drive your team to grow and accomplish greater goals.

We built a focus management platform to help companies be more effective and stay focused on top priorities in daily operations. You can try Focus for free to automate check-ins, one on one meetings, and OKRs. Start working smarter with Focus today.

The post What’s the difference between OKRs vs. KPIs? appeared first on Focus.

Teams often lose focus on top priorities for a multitude of reasons. At Focus, we believe that staying concentrated on what “matters” is one of the most important skills for product teams.

Here are some sources of distraction your team may face:

1. The team works on a hard project for too long. Instead of validating the main idea in a month, the team had developed the project for half of the year, which is quite a long interval of time.
2. The team created a new project, but it doesn’t fit the company’s vision and strategy. However, the project is so cool and motivating that the team finds themselves enjoying it.
3. Stakeholders from different teams can’t agree on strategic questions or concepts, resulting in a lack of progress for the project.
4. The team makes a product that’s designated for a non-target customer or the product’s value proposition doesn’t fit the company’s vision.  

How can a product team stay focused?

I talked with many companies and found that there were two main problems when the team struggle to stay focused. Either they don’t know the company’s vision or teams set the big objectives but forget about them in daily routines. We, admittedly, struggled with this issue too and that’s why we decided to build Focus.

We also discussed the reasons why it happens and how a company can fix it. Based on these conversations, we found 3 main pillars that a company should have for staying on what matters the most:

• Clear vision. CEO and CPO should describe a clear vision for everyone. What’s most important for the company? Why does it matter? ‘Why’ is the core question for any company. Learn more about why it matters with Simon Sinek, who explains why you should start with why. Without establishing and communicating your vision, it’s hard to identify if a new project or initiative is a good fit or not for the company on the medium to long-term.
• Right OKRs. Setting right OKRs that fit the company’s vision is the next step to marry strategy with tactics. 
• Constant processes. The challenge is staying focused on OKRs in daily operations. We see that a lot of companies forget about them because of routines and different unimportant but urgent tasks. You know this, it’s called fighting fires. The only way to stay on top of your priorities day-to-day is to create a workflow that enables your team to be more focused. Daily and weekly check-ins where you discuss your OKRs should be a fundamental processes in your company. 

How to stay focused?

Lead by vision

Vision is an inspirational story about a new future when your company achieves new goals. And how your customers and the team will live better when it happens. 

Why should you talk about vision?

Because people love a good story.

Yuval Noah Harari wrote in his books ‘Sapiens’ and ‘Homo Deus’ that humanity evolved because of the ability of humans to come up with memes – stories that make people change their behavior and distribute them to others.

During product development, all systems (product, code, architecture, client segments, contexts, etc.) are becoming ever more complex exponentially. However, teams’ competencies increase linearly. It explains why a company changes teams three times on average during this journey:

• First there’s the team that launches product
• Then the team that scales it
• And the team that builds processes for the main market

This has less of an impact on founders because they work mostly with the company’s vision, which is not restricted by complex systems and product architecture.

According to research on presentation methods, messages delivered as the stories can be up 22 times more memorable than just facts.

Great vision, which inspires the team and fits the company’s purpose increases motivation and helps to stay focused on the most important things. It works even for making a small decision because the team will remember the vision and think about how the new decision impacts on the ideal future the company is building towards.

Vision leadership works not only for founders. In this Product Leadership book, authors advocate for each Product Manager to work on creating and delivering the vision for product hypotheses.

In Amazon, all employees learn to talk the vision language. After you have written a document, you read the press release one more time and ask yourself: is it an ambitious idea to work on it? Should we do it or it doesn’t matter so much? It allows us to work and make decisions guided by the vision.

Principles to create a vision for product teams:

1. It is necessary to know your market segment and do customer validation with MVP. The vision should describe the future of target markets with the solution to their current and future needs.
2. The product teams’ vision should be aligned with the company’s vision. Stakeholders should be involved in crafting it.
3. You should find the best vision for your team after several iterations talking with stakeholders and coworkers. By the way, Working Backwards by Amazon embodies this approach.

Set the right OKRs 

If the CEO or CPO doesn’t have the right goals, then nothing will work. Of course you don’t want that. But how to set goals in the right way?

OKR is the most proven tool for setting goals. 

Different teams depending on their sizes might have different OKR cycles. Small startups and companies with few stakeholders often use 2-month intervals. Large companies prefer quarterly OKR cycles. 

Companies usually don’t set OKRs correctly in the first cycles. Using OKRs is a continuous process of improvement. The team runs retrospectives and analyzes what works and what doesn’t. It’s an ongoing learning process. Implementing the framework is hard, however, OKR is the best tool to stay focused.

If you had tried OKRs and it didn’t work, it doesn’t mean that OKR doesn’t work. It means that you haven’t found the right way how OKRs could work for your team.

You can read more about how to use OKRs in this article.

Processes that help to stay focused

1. One on one meetings are a great way to reiterate the vision and tie the employee’s personal development to the goals of the company. It’s the one on one meeting where you can elaborate on what the company is building towards and how each individual team member can contribute to it in their area of responsibility. It’s also a great place to get feedback on any activities that you thought would tie into the vision and the goals set but the rest of the company either doesn’t understand or just thinks it’s not aligned.
2. Automatic daily and weekly reminders of what the team has accomplished. It’s short messages with new updates for a specific channel or chat, which is visible for founders or executives. It helps founders to realize current status and ask the team if something went wrong. 
3. Public channel for check-ins where everyone publishes daily achievements. It’s like daily standups but in written type with outcomes that the person achieved the day before and what they plan on doing next.
4. Ruthlessly say no to ideas that don’t fit the company’s vision and goals.
5. The CEO and CPO should strictly follow their goals and stay focused on it every day. If they run some side projects, everyone would see it. People might start to do side projects too. Leading by example is the best way to show the team that focus on top priorities is crucial for the company. 
6. There is a Weekly Business Review (WBR) at Amazon. Every Product Manager updates key metrics of the team and marks objectives with the colors green, yellow, and red (like OKRs). It explains where they did well and where they fell short. In your company, you can gather all WBRs in Focus or any other software where managers will analyze it and give feedback.
7. Monthly Business Review (MBR) and Quarterly Business Review (QBR) are the same as for other timeframes. It’s analyzed one time per month and per quarter.

What is the focus?

Imagine you changed your vision twice and you are working with the last vision now.

It’s Q2 2020 now, and you set the company’s OKRs and teams’ OKRs to achieve your vision.

You move forward but you see that some teams are doing something that doesn’t fit the company’s vision. You are beginning to close these projects.

In the daily check-ins, CPO should: 

• Correlate team’s route if it moves in a different direction
• Stretch the team for achieving larger goals

Some tips to stay focused for product teams

1. If everything is top priority it means nothing is priority. Limit the number of items you work on at the same time. It depends on the team, but 2-3 maximum is a good golden rule.
2. Having a good manager/mentor in the company who has an incredible way of splitting the product vision into a set of core values.
3. Transparency and clarity of what’s important to achieving the mission are an absolute necessity.
4. Start your day with the most important item that day, finish it. Don’t stop or get distracted by anything.
5. Next move to routine items that should be done daily. This is a boring list that you deal with which contains daily/weekly/monthly tasks. Take them on one at a time and complete as many as your psyche will allow.
6. Lastly, intermittently switch from routine to your ‘bonus list’. The items that are fun but lightly affect the trajectory. This will make your day more fun.
7. At the end of each day ask yourself “What were the 1 or 2 important items completed today that I’d be proud of at the end of the year?”
8. When you get overwhelmed and struggle to focus, you might ask yourself what you should do if you could only do one thing that day.

Summary

Staying focused is the permanent process that starts with the CEO and CPO. Here are 3 main pillars that any company should have to stay on what matters the most:

• Clear vision
• Right OKRs
• Continuous processes

It’s a continuous process that takes full attention of all people in the team, especially C-level managers. There is no silver bullet here. However, to stay focused on what matters is a crucial skill for any company. 

We built a focus management platform to help companies be more effective and stay focused on top priorities in daily operations. You can try Focus for free to automate check-ins, one on one meetings, and OKRs. Start working smarter with Focus today.

The post How to Stay Focused for Product Teams appeared first on Focus.

OKRs is a goal-setting framework that increases employee engagement while helping people to focus on the most important things.

However, one of the biggest challenges with OKR is setting the right goals. I talked with a lot of HR Professionals who proved that their OKRs are not perfect.

That’s why we gathered the best practices and created 20 OKR examples for HR teams. In this article, you will find goals for main Recruitment areas: 

• Recruiting
• Onboarding
• Training and development
• Employee relations
• Employee satisfaction
• Compensation and benefits

Before we start, a short talk about OKRs.

What is OKR?

OKR (Objectives and Key Results) is a system for uniting an organization across the most important goals. Companies like Google, Netflix, Twitter, and others use OKRs.

Why do they do it? 

OKRs help companies to focus on the most important goals, align the team, and increase employee engagement. 

An objective is WHAT we want to achieve. It’s an ambitious goal, which motivates and inspires the team. 

Key results are metrics that track HOW we get to the objective. Are we in the timeframe? Should we increase the velocity or change the goal? Are we going in the right direction or we lose the focus? Key results give you answers to these sorts of questions and measure the objective’s progress.

Why do OKRs increase employee engagement?

There are several reasons. First, OKRs are interesting and ambitious goals that inspire people to achieve new heights. Another reason is the method of creating goals. It’s not only a top-down process as it works with Key Performance Indicators (KPI). Setting objectives and key results is a joint process when half of the goals are created top-down and the other half bottom-up. It allows everyone to participate in the goal-setting process and be more responsible for goals that people set themselves.

If you want to know more about OKRs, you can read this article on how to set powerful OKRs. And here are OKR examples for marketing and product teams.

OKR example

Objective: Create the best workplace in the world
Key results:
– Run interviews with each of 257 employees to find areas for improvements
– Decrease new hire turnover from 20% to 5%
– Increase employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) from 50% to 90%

20 HR OKR examples

We created these objectives for inspiration to help you create your best OKRs for People Operations Teams. All OKRs include 6 main recruitment areas: recruiting, onboarding, training, and development, employee relations, employee satisfaction, compensation, and benefits.

HR OKR examples for Recruiting

Objective: Create the A-Team
Key results:
– Hire 5 A-class engineers this quarter
– Increase the quality of hire from 30% to 60%
– Maintain cost per hire at $4,000 

Objective: Make recruiting great
Key results:
– Increase employee retention rate from 80% to 95%
– Increase in hiring manager satisfaction from 30% to 60%
– Maintain cost per hire at $3,000 

Objective: Hire the best people
Key results:
– Increase the quality of hire from 40% to 80%
– Increase performance appraisal rate from 3.4 to 4.5
– Decrease first-year churn rate from 30% to 10%

Objective: Improve recruiting funnel
Key results:
– Decrease time per hire from 40 days to 20 days
– Increase application completion rate from 40% to 80%
– Increase Candidate Net Promoter Score from 50% to 80%
– Maintain cost per hire at $3,000 

HR OKR examples for Onboarding

Objective: Make great onboarding
Key results:
– Create a detailed 3-month onboarding program
– Achieve 100% training completion rate
– Achieve 90% new employee satisfaction rate

Objective: Improve the onboarding program
Key results:
– Decrease time-to-productivity from 6 weeks to 3 weeks for new hire
– Increase training completion rate from 70% to 100%
– Decrease first-year employee turnover from 30% to 10%

HR OKR examples for Training and Development

Objective: Create an amazing training program
Key results:
– Achieve 100% training completion rate
– Increase employee performance post-training by 30%
– Decrease new hire turnover from 30% to 10% 

Objective: Improve the effectiveness of the training program
Key results:
– Decrease the time to complete the course from 30 to 15 days
– Improve the average training score from 70% to 90%
– Increase the return of the investment (ROI) of the training program from 130% to 260%

Objective: Build an awesome mentorship program
Key results:
– Increase the participation rate from 30% to 60%
– Increase the talent retention rate from 80% to 95%
– Increase employee satisfaction rate from 65% to 90%
– Increase internal promotions by 50%

Objective: Make Employee Development Better
Key results:
– Increase the number of employees with an Individual Development Plan (IDP) from 50% to 100%
– Implement Continuous Performance Reviews
– Increase the number of employees who run biweekly 1 on 1 meeting from 50% to 100%
– Increase employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) from 40% to 80%

Objective: Implement Continuous Performance Management
Key results:
– 100% of employees participate in a quarterly review process
– 100% of employees run weekly updates on the pulse of morale and overall employee satisfaction
– 90% of employees run biweekly 1 on 1 meeting
– Increase employee productivity from $65 per hour of work to $100 per hour.

HR OKR examples for Employee Relations

Objective: Create an Amazing Culture
Key results:
– Reduce the number of internal complaints from 8 to 2 per month
– Increase the number of monthly recognitions coming from employees from 25 to 50
– Increase employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) from 40% to 80%

Objective: Improve Employee Relations
Key results:
– Reduce the number of employees who report they have a bad manager from 5% to 2.5%
– Increase the average employer performance score from 3.2 to 4.5
– Increase manager satisfaction rate from 65% to 90%

Objective: Build Effective Employee Appraisal Processes
Key results:
– Switch from Yearly Performance Management to Continuous Performance Management
– 100% of employees fill 360 Degree Feedback surveys
– 80% of critical objectives are achieved by the end of the year

HR OKR examples for Employee Satisfaction

Objective: Create the Amazing Culture
Key results:
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) from 60% to 90%
– Reduce Employee Absenteeism from 3% to 0%
– Decrease employee turnover from 30% to 10%

Objective: Boost Employee Wellbeing
Key results:
– Increase Weekly Pulse Score from 3.5 to 4.7
– Increase employee retention rate from 80% to 95%
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) from 60% to 90%  

Objective: Make Great Employer Branding
Key results:
– Increase candidate quality rate from 8% to 16%
– Decrease cost-per-hire from $3,000 to $1,000
– Increase employee referrals from 5% to 10%  

Objective: Increase Employee Engagement
Key results:
– Increase employee productivity by 50% 
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) from 70% to 95% 
– Decrease employee turnover rate from 20% to 5% 

HR OKR examples for Compensation and benefits 

Objective: Build an Effective Compensation Strategy to Retain Employees
Key results:
– Decrease % of employees below the salary band from 30% to 15% 
– Increase employee productivity by 50% 
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) from 70% to 95% 
– Decrease employee turnover rate from 20% to 5% 

Objective: Design Irresistible Employee Benefits Program
Key results:
– Retain benefit revenue ratio at 10% 
– Decrease the absence rate from 10% to 5% 
– Increase ROI of Employee Benefits Program from 150% to 200%

Summary

We made these OKR examples for your inspiration. You can use these examples and create your own based on it. Making your own OKR, you set goals that fit your needs much better. Current OKR examples help you to avoid the most popular OKRs mistakes that companies make. 

At Focus, we believe that using OKRs is the process of continuous improvements. OKRs can bring your team significant benefits like focus on top priorities, alignment in your organization, synchronization, and much more. For using and tracking OKRs, you can use Focus. It allows teams to keep the focus on top priorities in daily operations. Start working smarter with Focus today.

The post 20 Human Resources (HR) OKR Examples appeared first on Focus.

What are some Product Management OKR examples and why do you need to set them? Product is probably the most important function in your company. Together with Sales and Marketing they are the ones that make sure the hard earned money you invest in them is delivering the maximum value to your business. This means that a focused Product Team can be the pilot who adjusts the engines (your engineering team) on the rocket-ship you call a company. But this also means that every effort that is not spent on delivering on the main objectives for the company will be a loss multiple times over, loss of the effort put in, and a loss of the opportunity cost of something better that it could have been spent on. OKRs are a great way to get your Product Team focused, but how is it done?

Throughout our content at Focus we are referring to functions with capital letters, such as Product, Sales, Customer Service, etc. When we don’t use the capitalized version, we mean the thing being built. Psst, are you in Marketing? We have 21 OKR examples for you too ?

What is Product Management?

Why are we talking about this in a post that’s about how to set OKRs for Product Teams? We are talking about it because Product is a nebulous, nascent and often misunderstood field. This can lead to the whole OKR thing going sideways for unfortunate Product folk even before the first O is set. So, what is Product Management? Let’s take a step back and see Product within the Scrum framework:

Scrum (n): “A framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value.”

Scrum Guide November 2017 version

I highlighted the part about value because at its simplest form, that is what Product Management is about. Are you a Portfolio Manager, Product Manager, Product Owner, Business Analyst or god forbid a Project Manager doing Product stuff at an organization that doesn’t understand the role? First of all, make them listen to Marty Cagen and explain to them that your daily activities should be tied to maximizing value to users and, consequently, to the business.

Product Team OKR examples

Cool, why don’t we just set this as our main objective? Not so fast. Product Management is also about finding the balance in delivering this value. Could you deliver outstanding value today by ignoring technical debt? Sure, you could. But what about tomorrow? Could you only focus on your users and shut your internal stakeholders up? Sure, but your relationships would suffer and you couldn’t effectively lead without authority, one of the hallmarks of any good Product Manager.

With this is mind, let’s group some of the activities a Product person does at a company. Since Product can take many different forms and different companies, this list by no means will be exhaustive, but let’s give it a shot. If you have ideas or feedback, do get in touch via the chat bubble on the bottom right.

Let’s group Product Management and Product Owner activities into 4 large areas. Sometimes it’s one person dealing with all of them vertically, sometimes the responsibilities are split between strategic and tactical, so pick accordingly.

• Vision and strategy
• Ideation, alignment, validation, prioritization
• Build, measure, learn
• Release and grow

Let’s break these 4 big areas down into smaller ones and let’s look at some examples. You should only select 3-4 OKRs per quarter per team, so don’t think that you need to have as many OKRs as we have in our examples here. Identify what area needs improvement the most and formulate your powerful OKRs to support you and your team.

Vision and strategy

Without a bold and clear vision and a killer strategy, it will be difficult to prioritize and ultimately deliver maximum value to your customers and the company. What OKRs can help focus your efforts when it comes to vision and strategy? Let’s look at some themes and OKR examples.

Domain knowledge

Objective: We have so much awareness on our competitors that we can sell their product better than they can
Key results:
– Talk to 10 customers who have switched to a competitor
– 8 out of 12 of the Sales Team members can name our top 5 competitive advantages
– Increase the number of new users who switched from a competitor from 5% to 15%

Objective: Become the champion ti the customer
Key Results:
– Conduct interviews with at least 40 of the top 100 customers
– 80% of people in the company can name at least 3 out of our 5 user personas
– Reduce churn rate from 20% to 12%
– Increase NPS (Net Promoter Score) from 47 to 65 
 

Share the mindset

Objective: Everyone at the company should share our awesome vision
Key Results:
– 50 out of 65 of our employees should accurately recite our vision and mission statement
– Reduce vertical feature requests from 5 per month to 1
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) from 35 to 70
– Time spent in meetings remains an average 8 hours per week for each employee

Objective: Make the Jobs-To-Be-Done approach a core skill for everyone
Key Results:
– 9 out of 10 user stories submitted by sales have a well formulated user story
– 2 out of 10 feature requests can be solved without building new features
– Increase day 30 retention from 65% to 85% 

Turn vision into strategy into roadmap

Objective: Create a culture where metrics and data drive our business and product decisions
Key Results:
– 8 out of 10 user stories have success metrics defined and evaluated after release
– 4 out of 10 user stories have a projected business value attached to them
– New feature adoption is at a minimum of 60%
– Marketing investment on feature launches remains stable at 4 hours per feature launched

Objective: Be radically ahead with your backlog
Key Results:
– There are 4 times as many written user stories in the backlog as stories on a sprint
– There are estimated tickets for the next two sprints - average storypoint: 85 

Ideation, alignment, validation, prioritization

You can be the best PM in the world with the most contacts, stellar industry knowledge, and a time machine. You still will fail if you don’t rally the company around coming up with new ideas, aligning on what to do, why, and in what order of priority.

Empower to ideate

Objective: Make stakeholders the center of the ideation process
Key Results:
– 4 out of 10 completed user stories came directly from stakeholders
– Increase eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) for the sales team from 32 to 55
– Increase the demo to sign-up conversion rate from 30% to 60%

Align team and stakeholders

Objective: Delightfully transparent and radically aligned prioritization
Key Results:
– 0 sprints are affected by mid-sprint critical priority items
– Stakeholders rate the transparency of the prioritization process with at least 4 out of 5
– Complaints about prioritization come up only at most on 3 retrospectives out of 10
– New feature adoption is at least 40% 

Build, measure, learn

This is the mantra of a well tuned Scrum Team. After the team, together, with the stakeholders has identified problems to solve, created user stories, refined and estimated them, they are ready to be taken into a sprint. 

Seamless maker time

Objective: Create a blissful work environment for the scrum team
Key Results:
– Sprint goal is delivered 8 times out of 10
– Zero new stories are taken into the sprint after it has been started
– Story points delivered each sprint can increase from 45 to 55 

Build with quality

Objective: Deliver a delightfully smooth customer experience while shipping more
Key Results:
– Maximum 2 critical bugs are reported by customers per sprint
– NPS score stays 65 or increases
– Story points delivered per sprint stay flat at 45 or increases 

Measure what matters

Objective: Switch from gut feeling product decisions to being radically data driven to reduce complexity
Key Results:
– Every user story has success metrics attached to it
– Increase eNPS score for the Sales and Customer Service teams from 40 to 65
– No new feature with less than 40% adaption rate remains live by the end of the quarter 

Iterate with confidence

Objective: Bring maximum value to customers with the least amount of investment
Key Results: 
– Every feature must have an MVP version and at least 1 iteration
– No feature shall be delivered over multiple sprints
– Increase NPS score from 65 to 75 

Release and grow

You have identified your customers’ pain points, devised and validated a solution, broken it down to manageable iterations and built it, feels good, right? Don’t want to discourage you, but if you botch the release even the best feature or improvement can fall flat and fail to gain adoption, ultimately not contributing to the most important measure most companies have, growth.

Release smoothly

Objective: Achieve magical CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery)
Key Results:
– Increase number of releases from 4 per quarter to 16
– Reduce complaints on retrospectives about deployments from an of average 2 to 0.5
– Keep number of critical bugs reported by customers below 2 per release

Objective: When we release, our customers can’t help but be impressed
Key Results:
– Increase NPS from 45 to 75
– Increase average first month feature adoption by customers from 30% to 65%
– Maintain newsletter unsubscribe rate in line with the current 6%
– Maintain average product related customer service conversations at 34 a day 

Product Management OKR examples to grow

This is where all the AARRR metrics (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) come into place and where having well implemented analytics is crucial. Don’t worry, a bit further below we’ll give you examples on what to track if you only have limited analytics capabilities. AARRR metrics make for some of the most impactful Product Management OKR examples.

Objective: Convert more visitors, simple as that
Key Results:
– Increase demo signups by 20%
– Increase demo conversion rate to signup by 10%
– Increase self serve signup from 5% to 20%
– Keep cost of a demo booked below $45

Objective: Make a radically smooth user onboarding and activation experience
Key Results:
– Reduce churn through onboarding funnel steps 3 and 4 from 60% to 20%
– Reduce time to wow moment (setting up first OKR) from 4 days to 1 day
– Increase profile completion rate from 20% to 85%
– Increase NPS score from 55 to 75

Objective: Achieve stickiness
Key Results:
– Increase day 30 retention from 30% to 75%
– Increase weekly frequency of usage from once a week to three times a week
– Increase free to paid plan upgrade rate from 5% to 15%
– Keep Customer Success time invested per free user flat

Objective: Spin up the referral flywheel
Key Results:
– Increase customer acquisition through referrals from 0 to 0.2 per existing customer
– Maintain 30% churn for referral cohort, in line with sales acquired 
– Don’t let LTV (Lifetime Value) drop below $50 from $75


Objective: Achieve sustainable profitability
Key Results:
– Reduce customer acquisition cost from $150 to $75
– Increase LTV (Lifetime Value) from $50 to $100
– Reduce churn from 75% to 30%

Objective: Shut_up_and_take_my_money.gif (Increase cash flow)
Key Results:
– Increase value of yearly payments from $130k to $300k
– Increase number of large accounts (50+ seats) from 8 to 25
– Increase free to paid plan conversation rate from 15% to 30%
– Maintain free plan churn at 45%  

Product Management OKR examples when you have limited data

A key tenet of OKRs is that KRs need to be measurable. This assumes you have done the necessary groundwork and have readily available, reliable data. But what if that’s not the case in your organization? A lot of small companies don’t invest in data in the beginning. And I’ve seen even bigger, post Series A companies where data just wasn’t there. Sounds familiar? Don’t worry, there is a lot of data you can get even out of a simple Google Analytics implementation to your website and asking devs to help you with some database queries once in a while. And there is data you can gather just by sending out a simple Google Forms.

Objective: Convert more visitors, simple as that
Key Results:
– Increase time spent on page from 30 seconds to 2 minutes
– Increase number of pages viewed per visit from 1.1 to 2.1
– Increase number of of visitors who sign up for free trial (visitors vs new free users) from 5% to 15%

Objective: Make a radically smooth user onboarding and activation experience
Key Results:
– Reduce steps to wow moment (when customers said in research they definitely will keep using the product) from 12 to 6
– Increase activated users (one who created a check-in) from 10% to 40%
– Increase proportion of users with a profile picture from 30% to 80%

Objective: Make our product well known and well liked
Key Results:
– Increase NPS score from 55 to 75
– Add 200 reviews on Capterra
– Increase average review score on Capterra from 4.1 to 4.6 

Product Management OKRs are Scrum Team OKRs

I’m a big proponent of Scrum Teams having one set of OKRs on a team level. If it’s your first time doing OKRs, it’s probably best to only set them at a team level anyway. This way you can avoid one of the biggest mistakes -having conflicting OKRs.

You should still assign one person to be the lead on the OKR itself though. It is logical to choose your Scrum Master or Product Owner as the lead, but if you want to instill a bit more outcome driven thinking, ask a developer to volunteer.

All right, but how does a Scrum Team OKR look like? In a healthy company, each Scrum Team has a single Product they are responsible for or a group of features within a more complex Product. This makes it pretty simple to pick a set of OKRs as usually you have a clear idea of what makes the Product or feature set successful for the given period. And you can use the examples we shared above and tweak them to fit your team.

Get focused

Having great OKRs set up is only a piece of the puzzle. What is more challenging is keeping the team focused on their objectives day after day, sprint after sprint. This is why we developed Focus, where you can set your OKRs up, but instead of forgetting about them until the next quarter, we devised a solution that can help your team stay on top of them. We incorporated OKRs into daily and weekly check-in rituals. They take no more than 2 minutes a day but the result is a team who knows what they are working on that day is moving the needle. Reduce useless work, drive motivation by clarifying purpose and reach the maximum potential of your team. Check out focus and use some these Product Management OKR examples to get started.

The post 23 OKR examples for Product Managers appeared first on Focus.