How to write Key Results

Everyone is busy, and everybody wants to know that the work that they are doing is helping their team and company succeed. This is where well thought out Key results come in. You’re trying to connect the work that is happening with outcomes.

This means that the ‘as measured by’ Key Results are the ‘success criteria’ for your Objective. The measurable ‘outcomes’ you want to achieve at the end of a period of time, usually a Year or Quarter.

When you look on the web for OKR examples you will find lots of variation in how Key Results are written. Some good and some really bad. That said, the thing about an open-source framework like OKR is that if you follow a few guiding principles you can relax a bit and not let the best get in the way of the good, or good enough.

The Best Key Results Have Measurable Outcomes

Metrics / KPIs Make Great Key Results

Key Results that are trying to improve metrics make great Key Results. The debate then becomes about which and how many metrics to measure, and what the target values should be. We will discuss Key Result difficulty and OKR grading in a moment.

• Increase [METRIC /KPI] from X to Y
• Reduce [METRIC /KPI] from X to Y
• Keep [METRIC /KPI] above X
• Keep [METRIC /KPI] below X
• Keep [METRIC /KPI] between X & Y

Give thought to how the target is achieved as well. If you are trying to increase a KPI to a target value, is success measured by:

• The metric value at the end of the year or quarter
• The sum of the weekly or monthly value updates
• An average of the weekly or monthly updates across the year or quarter

Milestones Can Work As Key Results As Well

If your Objective is to achieve specific milestones in a period then your might set-up a Key Result that looks like this in ZOKRI. This type of Key Result could easily be an To-dos as it’s an Activity / Project.
 

Open New Office Location

0% Start
5% Propose Region
10% Agree Region
15% Propose Location
20% Agree Location
50% Hire Region Head
70% Acquire Office
80% Hire Team
100% Up & Running

The definition of what success looks like for Milestone Key Results is a little more complicated as it might be Hard to achieve but unlike KPI based Key Results, 70% might not be a good result. So if you do want to use Milestones as a Key Result and not an To-dos, where possible we would recommend setting the difficulty as Business-as-Usual, where 100% is the definition of success.

Key Results With Harder To Measure Outcomes

Binary Key Results

There’s no rule that says Key Results can not be binary – either done or not done. It is however hard to track progress between weeks, and it’s hard to grade as 70% of not done is a little strange. That said we do have the ‘Confidence’ input in ZOKRI. If progress looks back in time, Confidence is a prediction of the future state of your Key Result and can actually be a better indicator of how a Key Result is progressing.

Activity Based Key Results

With Key Results you want to be measuring outcomes not effort. This means you’re measuring a ‘success factor’, not your means of achieving success.

The general guidance is that if you’re doing an activity that involves: completing, defining, providing, helping, developing, planning, creating, delivering, building, implementing, releasing, or launching, then this might be better denied as an To-dos. To-dos can have more flexible due dates that can be within a period or extend beyond the standard OKR planning periods. Which is common for activities.

That said, if you want to create Key Results that are activities you can. ZOKRI makes these easy as well and even link tools like Jira to a Key Result in a number of different ways.

Try To Turn Activity Based Key Results To Outcome Based Key Results

If your Key Results involve:

• Completing
• Defining
• Providing
• Helping
• Developing
• Planning
• Creating
• Delivering
• Building
• Implementing
• Releasing
• Launching
  Etc…

And success means completing valuable and important projects and tasks, then a question that needs to be answered is – what would be the impact of delivering this project or task?

What would be the desired measurable outcomes?

If we ‘build’ the new feature we ‘think’ we will:

• Increase Weekly Active User from X to Y
• Increase Free to Paid Conversions from X% to Y%

If we ‘launch’ a campaign we ‘think’ we will:

• Increase Organic Traffic from Paid Search Keywords by 20%
• Generate 1000 downloads
• Generate 200 MQLs for Sales

If we ‘complete’ the re-platforming of our tech we ‘think’ we will:

• Increase Story Points Per sprint from X to Y
• Increase release frequency from X to Y
• Reduce Customer Reported Bugs from X to Y

Try making your Activity your Objective

Another way to make activities in to OKRs is to use the activity as the Objective. For example:

Launch [FEATURE NAME] to help sell and retain more customers

• Get 50% of existing customer adoption to adopt new feature
• Reduce X as reason for churn or closed / lost to zero

“Avoiding measurement is a zero sum game where the impact of hard work is ambiguous and therefore matters less, we ultimately achieve less, and perhaps worse of all, we learn less because we can’t connect what we’re doing with what works or doesn’t – opening the door to being busy doing things that don’t work.”

Key Result guidance

• Create a set of 2 to 4 Key Results for each Objective
• Key Results should be measurable and therefore ‘ideally’ contains a metric (KPI) & a target (increase, decrease or maintain over time) with leading indicators being better than lagging, especially for quarterly Key Results.
• Metric based Key Results should be hard to achieve with 70% to 100% being good and amazing achievements.
• Milestone based Key Results are OK as well but need success criteria defined – is 70% good?
• Binary – Done / No Done Key Results should be the exceptions
  
  

Why should Key Result targets be hard?

There is over 35 years of research on goal setting that beyond telling us what we know, which is goal setting is an essential part of achievement, the research tells us why goal setting works and the conditions that make some goals way more effective that others.

• Goals increase our focus on the relevant activities – Goals serve as a directive function. They direct attention towards goal relevant activities, and away from irrelevant ones.
• Hard goals prolong effort – When employees can control their time, e.g. they work remotely, hard goals prolong their effort, with sustained effort helping to achieve more.
• Hard goals increase effort – Hard goals are energising and lead to greater effort. Easy to achieve goals have low levels of impact and value so should be avoided.
• Hard goals accelerate learning & improved collaboration – Hard goals cause the arousal, discovery and use of task relevant knowledge and strategies. Easy goals don’t.

Useful tips:

If you are not measuring the right metric (KPI) find out if it’s possible and get a baseline. It’s better to define and target the right metric and plan to track it than measure the success of a poor metric you do have.

If you want to add a project or a task, it’s usually better to add it as an To-dos.

OKR alignment

When organised as a cascade, this is called Vertical Alignment, and follows a Parent / Child type relationship.

Horizontal alignment typically comes from having transparency and conversations between teams, and mutual agreement that there is alignment and not conflict.

In large organisations it is typical to opt for fewer tiers in the cascade and invite departments and teams to satellite company Objectives in a one-tier flat structure. This is because the thought, time and effort of creating N-levels of a cascade are an overhead employees can get confused by.

ZOKRI allows you to report progress for single OKR and branches of aligned OKRs, and ensure progress is updated as the cadence you require.

Company, Departmental and
Cross-functional team OKR

It is common to have Company OKRs and both departmental and cross-functional team OKRs.

Cross-functional OKRs are a result of thinking about what the OKR should be and who is best placed to work towards achieving it, regardless of their current department.

Cross-functional teams require the support of team managers, and the impact or opportunity-cost of using a departmental team member to contribute towards a cross-functional OKRs should be openly discussed, understood and agreed.

OKR Owners & Collaborators

Accountability is central to goal setting, as is collaboration. With OKRs, every OKR has one Owner, and can have one or more individual or team collaborators.

Individual Key Results can also have their own Owners and Collaborators where required.

During the life-cycle of an OKR lots of people may also be asked to drop what they are doing and contribute, often via To-dos. This is because OKRs are high-priority, and important goals that have been discussed at length and committed to.