From Features to Outcomes with OKR

It's time to respectfully unlearn the Agile Manifesto and move from features to outcomes with OKR.

Transcript

1. From Features to Outcomes with OKR Felipe Castro
2. The “Tinker Bell approach” to OKR
3. OKR Fairy Dust Traditional Management (Culture + Practices)
4. OKR Fairy Dust Traditional Management (Culture + Practices) Fail!
5. How to be successful with OKR 1. Commitment and consistency from leaders 2. Learn how to use it in practice, avoid pitfalls 3. Unlearn the old model
6. Unlearn Move away from mindsets and behaviors that were effective in the past, but now limit our success Barry O'Reilly
7. Waiter vs Doctor Adapted from Jeff Patton What are the key differences in the way they work? May I take your order? Diagnostic Proposes solutions Tests different approaches
8. Unlearn the “waiter model” Traditional model Waiter “Silicon Valley” Model Doctor Adapted from Jeff Patton
9. What they have in common? They all had the same coach
10. “If you ever tell an engineer at Intuit which features you want, I’m going to throw you out on the street!” Bill Campbell, talking to a product manager
11. The Playground The magic question:“What are you working on and why??” We’re done when Sam is OKR with it. We are working on X because Sam said it’s important. Adapted from Henrik Kniberg We are working on X because we feel like it. We’re done when we don’t feel like it anymore. Team not using OKR “Waiter” We are working on X because we think it’s going to move Y, which is important to our customers because of Z. It is also important to our company because of W. We’re done when the metrics have moved. Team using OKR “Doctor”
12. What do you assign to teams? Solutions to deliver Adapted from Dan Olsen Problems to solve A specific design or implementation A customer or business need to address As a ___, I want to ___, so I can ___
13. What do we need to unlearn? “Bring me solutions, not problems!”
14. Ash Maurya “Love the problem, not your solution. Life is too short to build something nobody wants.”
15. “Land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth before the decade was out.” John F. Kennedy Vs Build a three-stage rocket Problem to solve
16. Problem to solve “We need a train capable of going 120 miles per hour.”
17. We need to respectfully unlearn the Agile Manifesto
18. Agile Manifesto ≠ How high-performance teams work
19. “Value” is vague Measured by what?
20. The Evolution: Measured by What? The schedule is the measure of progress. Assumption If we follow the plan, we will deliver value.
21. The Evolution: Measured by What? The schedule is the measure of progress. Assumption If we follow the plan, we will deliver value. “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” Assumption If we follow the stakeholders, we will deliver value. ❓
22. Ron Jeffries, co-author of the Agile Manifesto “Choosing the right things to make is of course massively important. Agile is, intentionally, about the making, not the choosing.”
23. Traditional Agile intentionally follows the “waiter model” May I take your order?
24. Mary Poppendieck “Perhaps the biggest shortcoming of Agile is the way in which teams decide what to do. For the longest time, answering these questions have not been considered the responsibility of the team.”
25. felipecastro.com Value is Like a Joke
27. What do we need to unlearn? “I have 20 years of experience in this industry!” “Where is the evidence?”
28. Stakeholders’ opinion ≠ Reliable indicator of success
29. But they did a business case!
30. “For every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome.” Scott Cook, founder of Intuit
31. Excel Projections ≠ Reliable indicators of success
32. We Are Agile! Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec Build Business case ? No measurement at the project level Adapted from Jake Knapp
33. felipecastro.com Did we deliver the promised benefits?
34. felipecastro.com What happens when you measure outcomes?
35. Most ideas fail (Microsoft data) 1/3 generates positive results 1/3 generates no results 1/3 generates negative results Source: Harvard Business Review - The Surprising Power of Online Experiments 1/3 1/3 1/3
36. “At Google, only about 10% to 20% of experiments generate positive results.”
37. Fareed Mosavat, Former Director of Product, Slack “If you are on an experiment-driven team, get used to, at best, 70% of your work being thrown away.”
38. Stefan Thomke, Harvard Business School At Booking.com, only about 10% of experiments generate positive results.
39. “Half of Netflix’s high-level strategies failed. Half. ” Gibson Biddle, Former VP of Product
40. The Evolution: Measured by What? The schedule is the measure of progress. Assumption If we follow the plan, we will deliver value. Working software is the primary measure of progress. Assumption If we follow the stakeholders, we will deliver value. Outcomes are the real measure of progress. Outcome-Based Planning Assumption If we follow the evidence, we will deliver value.
41. Outcomes are measurable benefits for our customers, our organization, or our employees
42. “Begin with the end in mind.” Stephen Covey
43. “We start with the customer and work backward” Jeff Bezos
44. I will improve ________ as measured by _________ As Measured By Adapted from Intel I will improve (Objective) as measured by (those Key Results)
45. Example: OKR Create an Awesome Customer Experience Objective: What do you want to improve? •Increase Repurchase Rate from X to Y. •Improve Customer Satisfaction from X to Y. •Maintain Customer Acquisition Cost under Y. Key Results: Measured by what?
46. Activities vs. Key Results Activities What you do Key Results (outcomes) Measurable Benefits
47. Different Buckets The outcomes (benefits) you want to achieve Key Results Activities Things you could do to achieve your OKR
48. Example: OKR + Activities •Increase Repurchase Rate from X to Y. •Improve Customer Satisfaction from X to Y. •Maintain Customer Acquisition Cost under Y. Objective: Create an Awesome Customer Experience Key Results: •Launch project X. •Redesign the customer journey. •Interview 10 customers. •Run 3 new experiments. •Develop a new customer engagement metric. Activities:
49. “It’s not a Key Result unless it has a number” Marissa Mayer
50. All Key Results have numbers. But not everything that has a number is a Key Result.
51. Having a number is not enough Bad Key Results: • Publish 5 posts • Increase the number of times I clean my desk from 2 to 5
52. Activities, Outputs, Key Results What you do Outputs Throughput metrics Key Results (outcomes) Measurable Benefits Activities Activities How many items have you delivered?
53. Key Results must pass the “So What?” Test
54. 10 minutes to present OKRs to the board
55. My Key Result is… Create an engagement program
56. So What?!? Have we been able to actually increase engagement? What is the benefit?
57. My Key Result is… Launch a new feature
58. So What?!? What is the benefit? What changed for our customers or our company?
59. What do we need to unlearn? “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” Agile Manifesto
60. What do we need to unlearn? “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” Agile Manifesto Outcomes are
61. “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” Peter Drucker
62. Velocity in the wrong direction is waste
63. Our goal is to be a more efficient waiter? The goal was never to deliver more software
64. Ron Jeffries, co-author of the Agile Manifesto “I like to say that I may have invented story points, and if I did, I’m sorry now.”
65. Felipe Castro OKR Trainer, Partner @ OutcomeEdge felipecastro.com linkedin.com/in/meetfelipe @meetfelipe