Need To Know For The CEO

Episode #7

Matt & Ian
KPIs vs OKRs

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KPIs vs OKRs Is Nuanced

In this episode, Matt and Ian delve into the commonly misunderstood topic of KPIs versus OKRs. This is a frequent question they encounter in their consulting work, prompting them to clarify the nuances between these two essential metrics.

By addressing these questions, Matt and Ian aim to help organizations understand how to effectively use both KPIs and OKRs.

Is KPI vs OKRs The Right Question?

While the question of KPIs versus OKRs is reasonable, it might not be the right one. The real focus should be on optimizing how metrics are used. Both KPIs and OKRs are types of metrics, but they serve different purposes within an organization.

“OKRs and KPIs are both metrics. That, to me, is the real heart of the question.”

Understanding these differences is crucial to leveraging the full potential of both metrics in driving business success. To learn more about how to leverage metrics effectively, check out our OKR consulting services.

Master The Different Types of Analytics

Different types of analytics that organizations should be familiar with are explored. Categories such as descriptive, root cause, predictive, and prescriptive analytics are broken down, explaining their roles in decision-making processes.

“Metrics don’t exist in isolation. You need to identify the relationships between them.”

Understanding these various types of analytics allows organizations to better interpret their data and make more informed decisions on implementing KPIs.

Core Use Cases for KPIs and Metrics

Various core use cases for KPIs and metrics, such as dashboards or health metrics, onboarding new team members, and forecasting, are discussed. These metrics are essential for tracking the health of a team or organization and for communicating strategic goals effectively.

“Metrics help us make a journey from opinion-based decision-making to evidence-based decision-making.”

Using KPIs and metrics in these ways helps teams stay aligned, focused, and accountable.

OKRs and Metric Maturity

OKRs are described as point-in-time goals aimed at achieving something over a period, often quarterly. The structure of OKRs, which includes a qualitative objective paired with quantitative key results, is explained.

“OKRs stitch together a qualitative objective and quantitative key results, which measure progress toward the goal.”

Understanding this structure is crucial for organizations to set and achieve meaningful OKRs.

Leading Metrics and Feedback Loops

The importance of leading metrics, which are indicators that can be influenced in a reasonable timeframe, is emphasized. This leads to the importance of short feedback loops, which are crucial for timely and effective adjustments to strategy.

“Great OKRs act on leading metrics.”

By focusing on leading metrics and maintaining short feedback loops, organizations can better track progress and make necessary adjustments quickly.

Weekly Conversations and Accountability

The significance of regular check-ins is highlighted. Frequent discussions about OKRs help keep teams focused and accountable. These meetings are vital for addressing any issues early and adapting strategies as needed.

“The chances of you succeeding with a framework like OKRs is highly dependent on your commitment to those weekly conversations.”

Maintaining a regular cadence of OKR discussions ensures that objectives remain relevant and that teams are consistently aligned and focused on their goals. Explore our OKR coaching services to learn how to implement effective weekly check-ins.

Cultural Impact and Learning

The cultural shift required for successful metric implementation is touched upon. It’s not just about replacing milestones with metrics but about changing the culture of a business. This cultural change involves embracing learning and adapting based on what metrics reveal.

“It’s about changing the culture of a business, not just replacing milestones with metrics.”

By fostering a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, organizations can better navigate the complexities of modern business environments. Learn more about this cultural shift through our OKR consulting services.

KPI vs OKR Podcast Transcript

Read & Learn About KPI vs OKR

Hi, Ian. It’s time for us to chew the fat on another popular topic that we get asked all the time. Today, it’s KPIs vs. OKRs.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s certainly one of the topics I get asked about the most, and I seem to have written multiple blog posts about it. I have also engaged in many conversations on LinkedIn, and yet there’s still quite a lot of confusion and misunderstanding about it.

Absolutely. It’s no surprise that, believe it or not, there are twenty to thirty thousand searches a month in Google just for this term alone.

Is it the right question, do you think?

Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking. It’s a reasonable question because organizations often use these terms, but I don’t think it’s the right question. I think a better question is how do we optimize how we use metrics? Yeah, and, okay, awesome KPIs of both metrics. That, to me, is the real heart of the question.

Yep. Absolutely. So let’s let’s go deeper into, you know, sort of metrics.

People will also be familiar with the term KPIs. As the name suggests, KPIs tend to be more strategically linked key performance indicators. Metrics are often used for more operational numbers associated with processes and activities.

But, essentially, we’re talking numbers. Right? Numbers that mean something and are significant and important to the business or the team.

Some of the things that we do in our coaching are really help teams understand that there are different types of metrics, and they fall into the category of different types of analytics as well.

For example, strategy or strategic KPIs are really all about what we want to happen. Of course, we want revenues to increase, your customer-centric KPIs to improve, and you to be able to deliver your strategy. Maybe that’s a view of your strategic North Star.

We want to be able to do something called descriptive analytics, which describes what happens. So, there, we’re looking at things like trends. For example, perhaps customer purchase frequency dropped.

If it did drop, we want to know the cause, so that’s called root cause analytics. So why did that happen? Perhaps the returns rate went up. And maybe, if you dig into that, it’s an item that’s not fitting.

So what is going to happen next? Well, that’s, you know, predictive analytics. So maybe lifetime value would drop or maybe cost acquisition will rise. And then we get into really prescriptive analytics.

What should we do next? And maybe this is where you create hypothesis y hypothesis, or you have actual data to say this is what we would do in that situation. So for example, if we were a fashion brand, it feels like that’s what I was describing there. It might be that we increase the number of, people who see your, fitting information, your sizing charts, etcetera.

So it’s, you know, of course, we want to simplify things, but it’s nuanced. We use them for different reasons. They do different jobs. And all of that data and all those different types of analytics are really there to tell stories.

Yeah. That’s a great description. I think the idea of a narrative is becoming more common, certainly in strategic circles but across business as a whole. I’ve heard business leaders described recently as storytellers. And metrics are a big part of the story.

I think what I’m hearing there as well is, is a clear set of relationships between, you know, metrics is that they don’t exist in isolation. You talked about your hypothesis around, people seeing a sizing chart so that we reduce our, you know, returns rate. And when we think about metrics, Hank, it’s those relationships that we’re we’re trying to identify. Mhmm.

And I don’t know about you, but I think what is also interesting is a dimension to that kind of relationship. There’s, you know, how confident are we that one lever drives another? Yes. And I’d imagine the confidence is relatively low in that example you’ve just used, but we may have some data to check that hypothesis.

Yeah. But there’s also the strength of the influence. You know, would a twenty per cent increase in people looking at the sizing chart lead to a twenty per cent drop in returns? Maybe not.

So those two extra dimensions are worth kinda thinking about. And this whole idea of relationships is really at the heart of metrics.

Yeah. And experimentation and that sort of being able to state things as belief are, as you know, you know, important for, achieving okay, our maturity as well as metric maturity.

Yeah. One other point.

So there are some real core use cases behind KPIs and metrics. So one that we’re obviously familiar with and if you’re used to OKRs, the idea of dashboards or health metrics, that kind of view as, of a team or an org or a cross-functional group as to, how healthy are they at any one point in time and be able to track that, which is also really useful and kind of probably my one of my favourite use cases is for onboarding somebody into a team. Why does this team exist? Why is it here?

How could you help? What are we acting on, and what would success look like? These are really important questions. Of course, groups of metrics or levers can then be used for forecasting.

I mentioned root cause analysis as well, but perhaps, you know, in the context of what we’re here to talk about today, which is OKRs, really good OKRs in a metric mature organization are really often targeting those root causes, those prescriptive metrics, and to predict something. So, for example, if we were confident that acting on a time-to-quote metric, which was the root cause problem and is what we prescriptively want to act on, was gonna influence, for example, a b to b close one ratio.

And we predict that by doing that, we’re gonna, you know, that close one percentage will increase as a driver of revenue. We’re able to both describe in the lever what we’re trying to act upon and what we predict will happen as a result, and that creates that kind of effect of two balancing key results. And that would make what is likely to be an incredibly strong OKR.

In a more mature you know, in an immature organization, I should say, they’re more likely not to be able to do that, and they’re more likely to fall into the trap of describing the work that they’re going to do without even really knowing the outcome.

So it’s important to have those those sorts of use cases in mind because they’re incredibly strong use cases as they relate to performance.

Yeah. I absolutely agree. And this, you know, this idea of maturity and OKRs is something that I think, you know, we’ve talked about a lot. We talked to our clients a lot about, and it’s really interesting that that idea of metrics being at the heart of an organization and the heart of a team, the best teams I’ve seen, as you know, I talk to a lot of product teams, have had metrics at their fingertips.

And, you know, I think back to how many times have I joined an organization and been shown here are the levers that we think we can see. Here are the relationships between our key metrics. Not very often. So that use case you talk about there is bringing on-board new starters and articulating what we’re about as a team. I think it’s Yeah. Fantastic. I love that example.

So, obviously, the headline here is KPIs and OKRs. So I think it’s probably reasonable to do the equal, exercise the equivalent exercise of basically describing what OKRs and what OKRs are to you as a, you know, a renowned expert in the field.

Absolutely. I’d describe OKRs as point-in-time goals. We’re trying to achieve something over a period of time, often quarterly, but that’s flexible.

They can stitch you in parts at the two constituent parts. There’s the qualitative objective, which is a statement of what we’re trying to achieve, paired up with key results, which help us measure progress towards our goal.

And it’s kind of interesting for me because, throughout my career, I’ve asked these two questions: Why are we doing this, and how will we know we’ve succeeded?

At some point a few years back, OKRs came along, and they phrased those questions really nicely for me.

Mhmm.

I think that’s at the most simple level. And what brings into key results a little bit because that’s the metric part of an OKR.

Now, a key result for me is what I describe as a measurable beneficial effect for someone. And that can be, ideally for a customer. So we’re looking to make a customer’s life better because that’s generally how we succeed as a business. But they can be they can be what we call outcomes for the business themselves or even sometimes stakeholders.

Let’s say our teams are charged with improving a supplier’s life or an employee’s life or even, you know, we want to have better, corporate responsibility for the environment. Those those are stakeholders, and we can build OKRs around those. And then the key thing there is this measurability.

That’s absolutely crucial.

As organizations mature, they realize that great OKRs tend to act on what we call leading metrics.

Now we’re referring back to our statements a few moments ago about metric relationships.

Generally speaking, the things that we care about in business in the longer term, revenue, and profit, these are lagging. Great organizations find a kind of metrics connection between those lagging measures and leading measures.

Leading measures are things that we can influence, in a reasonable time frame, the natural conclusion being in the time frame that your OKRs are set for. So that’s where maturity is really starting to come in for OKRs when you start to understand those leading metrics.

And you know what that connects to, it connects to this idea that I talk about a lot, which is kind of short feedback loops because leading metrics are much more amenable to that kind of approach.

Building on your description there, what I really like about them, is that they are able to communicate what you’re committing to achieving and the why and provide you with a stake in the ground as to what success looks like.

Then, you can really engage teams and everyone in the organization, should you want to rally them behind that. It’s an energizing entity as well as a very rational planning entity. It should be able to encapsulate ambition and direction. It should be able to generate some energy and some commitment behind what you’re trying to achieve.

You can also improve culture with transparency, a clear line of sight of impact, and other benefits of the OKR framework.

So I love the idea of this kind of inspiration behind OKRs, and I think it was Sergio Bruno at Google who said the best OKRs make us feel uncomfortably excited, which, in two words, captures quite a lot. It’s policemen we care about. Yeah. It’s something that we feel if we achieve it, it’s going to make a difference.

But we also know it’s not easy. Yep. And great OKRs have though that have that quality, that really nice pithy statement.

Yeah. So I absolutely hundred percent agree with you there.

And what was obvious in you saying that is they’re not business as usual.

They’re not your everyday to-do list. They’re not your everyday processes that you follow to do your job. These things or entities stand out as being the few things that we’re committing to resource and achieve to move the needle on something that’s really important, which is often strategy.

Yeah. Absolutely.

And those metrics—we’re starting to get at the hub of the difference between OKRs and KPIs in terms of what they’re for.

Of course. And those key results, if you’re a metric mature organization, or that method method of tracking progress, providing that real focal point for those weekly conversations.

You and I talk about your chances of succeeding as a company, a team, and an organization. Your success with a framework like OKRs is highly dependent on your capability and your commitment to those weekly conversations.

Yeah. Absolutely.

And sometimes I’d like to think of metrics as a pyramid. Yeah. And at the very top, the smallest amount you have, you have OKRs because they represent your most significant strategic focus. Yep. And by nature, there should be very few of those.

And in terms of in terms of this weekly conversation, I think these things connect really closely. If this is the most important thing your organization’s working on, how can you not find at least a little bit of time every week to talk about it?

Yes.

And it’s and it’s amazing how often teams struggle because, really, they haven’t narrowed it down. They haven’t focused enough, and they haven’t identified the really critical things that are going on.

All I often find is they haven’t resourced it. So the reason why they don’t wanna talk weekly is they’ve not been working on it. And that you know, when you’re signing off or committing to an OKR, one of the key processes behind that is, obviously to, you know, make sure you’ve got the people, time, money, resource. You’ve cleared the decks in terms of you know, you’ve got the people you need available to actually make progress or sufficient progress.

And, without that, these important critical goals can be left to wither on the vine quite happily.

Therefore, your incentive to talk more frequently goes down, and it’s pretty demoralizing. Right? When you’re not making progress on the things that you got excited about in those workshops, your head can drop. And, you know, what always amazes me about the workshops that we run is that you could bottle the energy that’s in that room at the end of the one, two, three days, whatever we’re doing. You could power a whole company for a year.

Not losing that momentum, not losing that commitment and that excitement from the kind of day one post those, those those sessions is incredibly important.

Yeah. Absolutely. And what I think you see in those situations is the conversation quickly goes from OKR conversations about what we’re achieving, and they’re about building confidence that we’re gonna achieve what we need. Yeah. What happens when you haven’t got the right focus is the conversation reverts quite quickly to what we’re doing and a big focus on what I’d call project management Yeah. Rather than outcomes focus.

And that depends on the organization’s starting point. If you already have a cross-functional team and that team is now working with OKRs, it’s easier than if you’re creating a new team. Yeah, from scratch for the OKRs because there’s often a kind of backlog of stuff that people are working on, which doesn’t just go away.

So that can be a challenge as well for organizations.

So you and I have both worked in, product management to name but a few, different jobs.

We’re both familiar with and really like the jobs-to-be-done framework. It’s a lovely way of framing what we’re trying to achieve. In the context of KPIs or metrics, should we just think about some of the jobs that are there to be done to help provide context for this separation between OKRs and KPIs or metrics?

Yeah. I love this framework because when I think about clients we’ve worked with over the years, and I’ve worked with them over the years, there’s this great question I always ask: Okay, what are you doing, what job are you trying to do? And it’s incredibly revealing.

But if you then look at that in the context of metrics generally, what do we what do you use metrics for? I mean, some of the things that spring to mind are, okay, they tell us how healthy our business is. Yes. And a very most obvious, the most simple metric is profit followed closely by revenue.

They also help us understand what levers we have on the other end of the business, which is on the strategy side, to achieve our goals, which is incredibly powerful.

Connecting to your point about onboarding people and communication, they also help us visualize our strategy.

They’re also helping us move away from opinion-based decision-making. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the term HIPPO, which stands for the highest-paid person’s opinion.

Let’s decide what to do based on the evidence at hand. They help us make that journey closely linked to that testing hypothesis.

And then getting more into the o OKR kind of world, they help us set meaningful goals. Yep. So OKR is all about metrics. Yeah.

They help us set goals. What’s our target for the next three months? What are we going to achieve? Metrics are at the heart of that.

If they think deeply, they will get down to the topic I talk about a lot: we want to influence our customers’ behavior. Your example earlier about reviewing sizing charts is a great example.

Metrics help us focus on that.

One of my other favorite things about them is that they help us embrace the idea that most ideas don’t work.

So just going back to our check-ins where they’re going talking about the things they deliver, the outputs rather than the outcomes, the metrics.

When you focus on metrics, you learn pretty quickly that the things you’re trying are not working. Yeah. Whereas if we’re doing six-month projects without looking at metrics, we don’t know that. We don’t find out until the end.

If we ever find out at all, we sometimes just pretend, deliver stuff, and move on to the next thing. Yep. So, those are some of the jobs to be done, as I see. And many more you’d add to that?

Yeah. I think there is. One of the things that is kind of straightforward to do when you’re having these conversations is to see things through the eye of the leadership team, which is often the first team we meet. And, obviously, you know, they have a job to be done, which is grow the company, make it more competitive, guide it towards a place where they’re gonna thrive, not just in the immediate term, but, you know, three, five, ten years down the line and be more visionary.

But what I really like to do is also see all of these things through the lens of the people lower down in the org chart and see them through the eyes of the individual. One of the things that both of these important planning tools allow us to do is generate purpose.

Why are we here? How would we know we’re succeeding? How will you know that you’re making an impact? How can you help the business? How can you help your team? How can you help yourself?

They provide us with an anchor point for that. But there is a flip side to that that we should probably talk about: with measurements comes accountability, and with accountability comes the idea of potential failure.

I know that you see this, and we’ve seen it recently with a customer as well, where you can be either rationally or irrationally fearful of what we’re talking about today. This is a world where metrics, KPIs, and good OKRs, I. E., describe an outcome that is desirable and measurable, which means that we are in a position where we could fail is normalized within a company.

Yeah. That’s a tricky journey for individuals and companies, to be honest. And being empathetic, I can see why.

If we’re measured on the stuff we produce and whether we deliver a feature, you know, whether we delivered a new feature for our product, let’s say we add a new payment system on our website. Pat on the back; you’ve done it.

And if we turn that around and actually say, okay. What we really wanna do is we want to be accountable for results.

Suddenly, there’s a lot more transparency about what you achieve and the chance of failure being known. So I talked about the idea of projects going on for nine months and no one knowing if they achieved anything. And that’s comfortable for people because failure is not represented in time. It’s not failure; it’s not defined in the business’s outcomes.

So, I think this makes people uncomfortable because it’s the unknown, and, you know, we’re moving from a situation where I talk to you. Let’s say I’m your manager, and you tell me I did a, b, and c.

Great. Well done. And next week, you’re going to do d, e, and f. When we turn it around and say, yeah, your job, Matt, is to sell more, to get a website selling more garments, it’s that’s harder.

Business outcomes are harder, so I think that this idea of accountability is uncomfortable for some people, especially if they’ve never been there before. I would love to hear your thoughts on that topic as well. I understand why people find it uncomfortable, but from a business perspective, it’s essential, in my opinion.

This is where you need to bring various stakeholders along for the ride, and I think ambiguity is the enemy of success here.

If we just go away and start an initiative to launch OKRs, we improve metric maturity, introducing this idea of accountability and tracking and all the things that come with that.

Yet we do not provide clarity on how success will be measured. The retrospective process is where we will value learning, not only results, where we can acquire more than just a measurable success because we might have, you know, created a hypothesis and learned how to do something. Or we might have deferred the benefit of something we’ve achieved to further down the track.

And what we’re really valuing is more of an attitude, the ability to innovate, the ability to learn, the ability to collaborate in a team. It’s how we approach the problem. It’s all of the other softer cultural traits, not just the hard numbers. And unless you explain that, unless you lead by example, unless you show how that’s gonna work, people will default to a position of you can only ever assume that this is gonna impact me, my career, my family, my ability to pay my mortgage, and many other things because your human nature is to fill in the gaps. So one of the things that we find ourselves doing is providing clarity on what is normally left to be ambiguous.

And that that that does mean talking about, you know, HR. That does mean education. That does mean answering the questions that are sometimes difficult to answer and working with people to take them on that journey too. And they probably won’t believe it until they experience it as well until you’ve missed an OKR or you need some an experiment has gone wrong, and you realize that, actually, through how we dealt with that and how we then absorb the learning, recalibrated, and kicked on, and we, you know, and you make that a positive experience, you won’t believe it anyway.

So this is why that kind of in-cycle support as you work through this is not just a new way of working. It’s a new way of thinking, learning, and even thinking about what success looks like at all levels down to the individual level for me.

Yeah. You’ve touched on some really great points there about it being a culture. It’s not just replacing milestones on project plans with metrics. It’s about changing a business’s culture, about changing the conversation in the business.

I think one of the things we haven’t touched enough on today is the job of metrics in the scope of learning.
Yes.

It’s about learning together and, Yeah, thinking about the metrics relationships that we talked about earlier. It’s about learning about those relationships, understanding their strengths, and building our confidence in them.

And when you frame, what you’re trying to do is learn, I think that’s a that that helps people understand, how this journey will not necessarily be a bad thing for them. Yep. Take away that fear. But, yeah, also your other point about leading by example.

I think when leaders share their failures and their mistakes, you know, I hate there’s a there’s a great discussion where there is no bad strategy. There is only bad execution, which is, I think, completely nonsense. I think sometimes leaders have to stand up and say, yeah. We thought this strategy would work.

We gave it a good crack, but it just didn’t. Yes. When leaders can lead by example and admit to failing, it becomes a lot easier for people to also embrace this kind of accountability culture and also take bigger risks, which often lead to bigger rewards. I’m not saying you do that all the time.

So it’s a big picture. It’s not just that suddenly numbers are part of business.

And I think that’s again, it’s another version of maturity. When you have leaders that know that the strategy that they formulated and have articulated is nothing more than a reasoned hypothesis on how they’re gonna win a specific group of customers with a specific sort of level of value exchange, and it that is gonna allow them to compete on an unlevel playing field because that’s obviously that idea of advantage is what you’re trying to achieve. And you’re gonna be developing those, you know, essential capabilities that give you that advantage as part of that kind of narrative.

But it’s all very reasoned and very logical, but it is a hypothesis. And that’s where you sort of start to touch on strategy not being that kind of annualized in January two weeks, you know, on an away event idea. And, actually, it is more adaptive. It is more fluid.

We are able to stop our strategy or evolve it. OKRs are that entity, too. In the same way, metrics are also fluid: the relationships, the influence, how we conceive them, what we track, and why. This is all very fluid, agile, and adaptive.

And if we see it as anything other than that, that’s where the issues arise for me.

Yeah. And it’s just one anecdote from when I was a strategist at GlaxoSmithKline many years ago. I did exactly what you’re talking about there. The strategies I produced with my team and colleagues were something that we did once a year, once every six months. And you could almost, you know, you could almost write them in stone because they weren’t adaptive. They didn’t learn.

Didn’t necessarily have metrics to inform them either. Yeah. And we’re moving away. Well, hopefully, long moved away from that kind of thinking, and the type of support we’re trying to give is all around this kind of learning at all levels of the organization.

So, if you’re a business leader or a team manager listening to this, I would like you to take away both of these entities: KPIs, metrics, and OKRs. It’s a journey you must go on.

So what does that journey look like? You’re perhaps you are starting at the lower end where you have no real clarity on the levers that you’re trying to leverage. So you really understand what you need to leverage to influence those lagging indicators. And how that plays out on a goal-setting basis is that you’re less likely to track activities and generate some proper outcomes.

It’s incredibly important if you’re going to be able to say we set goals well. If you can do that, then you can track progress from week to week, probably frequently. That keeps us accountable. It keeps us focused.

It keeps us engaged. And then you can see the impact. You can see the impact of our experiments, projects, and big milestones. We can see the impact of the capabilities that we’ve decided intentionally to develop to give us that advantage.

But I think then the softer stuff that, you know, I’m always a fan of, which is, you know, we’re moving from a position when we can do that of removing internal conflict. Because what I’m seeing more and more, particularly in teams like marketing and their relationship with finance teams and CEOs, for example, is there’s a lot of frustration because of the lack of tracking and metric capabilities, the lack of attribution, the lack of understanding of even what that team does and its complexity creates a conflict that’s not healthy for the business and those relationships and is actually detrimental to all shareholder value.

And it’s not even just limited to marketing. So if we want healthy relationships between leadership, teams, and employees, you’ve gotta go on this journey, and it is a journey.

In the context of OKRs and KPIs, if you want to get really good at OKRs, it really does depend on how good you are willing to get at KPIs and metrics.

And when you come in, yeah. I mean, you must have seen those examples where how do we measure that? Because organizations have no foundation in metrics, they are really struggling.

And there are mechanisms for dealing with all of this. Right? First of all, you’ve gotta have intent and commitment to wanting to mature in both of these areas.

It’s not uncommon for some of your first OKRs, at least, to be geared around achieving some level of metric, maturity, and planning milestones needed to do that.

If it’s seen as strategically critical to the business’s success—and I think I’m hoping if you’re listening to this—you’re going, well, actually, it is fundamental to your level of competitiveness, your culture, how we treat staff, how we engage people, how we develop talent, and how we onboard people. It’s one of those business fundamentals if you want to achieve a level of excellence.

So it’s, you know? And then you’ve obviously got the possibility that you do find your early OKRs lacking the metrics that you want. You can go through exercises like baselining. So coaching provides a lot of different mechanisms and methods of getting to where we’re describing.

So you shouldn’t be put off. It doesn’t take many months or quarters to get there, but it does start with intent.

Yeah. And that’s, and I think about all change in organizations.

Intent comes is is right at the top of the list. If if you don’t have the will to go on a journey, to achieve some different capability, you’re starting with almost zero chance of success. And that that intent needs to come across the leadership team. It’s no good just coming from the CEO or the chief products officer or chief management. Everyone needs to embrace it because it’s a completely different way of thinking.

And, yeah, to make that kind of deep change requires real intent, I believe.

Yeah.

So, if we were to summarize and consider what key points we’d like people to take away from this chat, I think I would start by saying that intending to achieve metric and OKR maturity by investing in both is a prerequisite.

When I think about that, one of the questions I often ask people is, if you were to grade yourself out of ten on how good you are today, it is common to have the answer four, five, or six come out in both of these areas.

In my head, the real plan should be to get to eight, nine, or ten. That’s how good you should aim to become because of the material impact it will have on your business.

Yeah. I agree. This is this kind of idea; you can invest in one and not the other. This doesn’t make sense to me. Know and respect that it is a journey. You won’t get to eight, nine, or ten in two months.

You are gonna see some much better insights. You’re gonna trip up on some hurdles. Mhmm. But slowly, over time, you’ve got to understand the levers in your business.

You’ll understand this bigger picture. You won’t be wandering in the trees with a torch. You’ll have an overview, and you’ll be able to say, well, you know, strategically, it looks like there’s a big opportunity to make an improvement in this area. And the metrics are showing you the levers.

It’s very powerful. And what we see is that it’s very common for there to be variable levels of maturity within an organization. For example, salespeople tend to be better than most teams because of CRM systems, etc.. Marketing can be hit and miss. Product can be hit and miss.

So, I think the idea that we’re all at the same standard even within the company is not true. We should all want to level up that standard throughout the company. Having one team that’s heavily biased towards tracking productivity because you have not forced them to mature their metric capability is probably a bit unfair, and it’s basically saying that’s okay. And I don’t think we are saying that’s okay.

No. And one extra dimension I’d add to that is that the level of maturity can vary over time. As a product team, for example, you can be working in a core area of your product where you know it very well, and you can know the metrics pretty well.

When you work with an organisation, the conversations are always about when feature X will be delivered. But they change to how confident we are in our ability to achieve our business goals.

When you hear that, you realize that that kind of cultural change is happening. It’s amazing when you hear a CEO stop themselves and ask a different question and probe in a different way. It’s so powerful. It’s amazing when you hear that change.

And, you know, a question that goes with that is, what do you need? You know, when you are talking about progress and confidence and risk and, you know, delays, bottlenecks, blockers, whatever we wanna call these things that come up. You need a proactive, positive conversation that can be supported instead of being sandbagged, obfuscated, etcetera. And I think these are, again, all of those behaviours are rooted in culture.

Yeah. And I’m sure it’s a topic for another day, but the idea of leaders setting the context and being servant leaders who are there to help everyone else succeed is a great topic.

What was meant to be a very short chat has gone quite deep into many areas, but I think we probably addressed the KPI versus OKR question. Hopefully, the people listening will have some clarity on that, and they will find that helpful.

Absolutely. Yeah. Enjoyed the chat. Thanks, Matt.

Alright. You take care.
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Glen Westlake
Project Principle

Glen has scaled and exited several companies. He helps customers develop their strategies, use OKRs, and execute their plans.

His deep understanding of sales processes and AI enablement makes him a great fit for customers with challenges in those areas.

  • Create value for customers and improve customer experience as a driver of competitive advantage and sales growth.
  • Increasing productivity of teams and individuals.
  • Evolve roles to leverage what are uniquely human advantages to create a happier, more engaged and more productive workforce.