A Leader's Guide to Implementing OKRs (Part 2)

It has been incredible to see such a positive response to my OKRs post. So many of you reached out telling me how valuable it was to hear about the details of implementing a successful OKR program. Many of you also reached out with follow-up questions asking me to dive deeper into aspects you were struggling with in your own implementation. I thought I would share the most frequently asked questions as a follow-up post for those interested.

What tool do you recommend for tracking OKRs?

There are now many specialized tools on the market worth exploring for tracking, sharing, and grading OKRs, including WorkBoard, Betterworks, and Lattice. At Notejoy, we of course use Notejoy itself to capture our OKRs. We have an OKRs notebook with a pinned template note. Each quarter we duplicate the template note and create that quarter's OKRs. The notebook makes is super easy to flip through previous quarter's OKRs, collaboratively draft and edit them, leverage highlight colors to easily score them green/yellow/red, capture the discussion on lessons learned from each quarter's OKRs during reviews, and search to quickly get back to them.

How do you handle multi-quarter OKRs?

There are times when a given initiative must span multiple quarters. This is often the case when you are releasing a new product and that effort might take 9-12 months to launch. In this case, you want to scope the objective and key results to fit into the given quarter. You'll often find that you'll have to use output-oriented instead of outcome-oriented key results given these initiatives will be pre-launch. So your key results might be conduct a certain number of customer interviews, finalize designs for the product, develop a certain feature, or build a certain piece of infrastructure. It's important to at least make these measurable with dates associated with when you expect the activity to be done.

I still try whenever possible to find ways to include outcome-oriented measures as well. For example, when we were doing customer validation for LinkedIn Sales Navigator, we had a key result to get a certain percentage of the customers we interviewed to agree to join our pilot program, as evidence that the proposed solution was resonating enough with them that they were interested in doing a full pilot when a beta was ready. Once we had a beta available, we started leveraging classic post-launch measures amongst the beta users, including activation, engagement, and retention measures, as key results.

I also encourage teams to include future key results that won't be measured until a future date but reflect the user or business outcome you ultimately hope to achieve. This reminds the team from the get-go of what they are looking to achieve and helps inform trade-offs and decision-making within the quarter. It also helps you calibrate as an initiative drags on whether the expected key result still justifies the continued effort against that initiative.