OKR for a New Normal - How to Keep Your Teams Focused and Agile

Transcript

1. The formula for Better OKRs for a New Normal - How to Keep Your Teams Focused and Agile: Felipe Castro OKR TRAINER, SPEAKER, AUTHOR
2. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles • A short presentation on OKR for a New Normal, covering actionable tips and techniques • Lots of time for Q&A • You can find more detailed info at felipecastro.com Our Agenda
3. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Before talking about OKR, we need to talk about people.
4. felipecastro.com Protect Your People
5. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles • Even people who are used to working from home won’t be able to perform normally. Protect Your People
6. The challenge of working with your kids at home is real.
7. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Zoom Fatigue is Real
8. The irony of talking about Zoom Fatigue during a Zoom call is not lost on me… felipecastro.com
9. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles • Orgs need to make people feel safer and reduce their cognitive overload. • Leaders must ask: How can we provide the conditions our employees need to work in this environment? Protect Your People
10. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Now, let’s talk about OKR
11. felipecastro.com OKR is cool felipecastro.com
12. All hot startups are using OKR felipecastro.com
13. felipecastro.com More OKR tools… More OKR consultants… More OKR “content”… felipecastro.com
14. felipecastro.com Abraham Lincoln “If an OKR example is on the internet then it must be true, and you can’t question it. ” felipecastro.com
15. felipecastro.com felipecastro.com Using OKR as a glorified To-Do List OKR Mistake #1:
16. OKR is a tool to help companies adopt outcome-based planning + experimentation. felipecastro.com
17. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Outcome-Based Planning Outcome-based planning is a business philosophy that deliberately focuses on outcomes. It fights our tendency to plan around activities by making everyone in the organization focus on the outcomes they want to achieve.
18. “Begin with the end in mind.” Stephen Covey
19. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Begin With the End in Mind • Start with a clear understanding of your destination, of what you are trying to achieve. • Then work to make it happen.
20. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Outcome-based planning is about making a difference.
21. Outcomes are the measurable beneficial effects on our customers, our organization, or our employees. felipecastro.com
22. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Activity Thinking • When faced with a problem, our natural and instinctive reaction is to think about activities: • What should we do? • Who can do it? • When can we start? • Activity thinking focuses on getting started and not on what we are trying to accomplish.
23. Our Brain Focuses on the Solution felipecastro.com Did it work?
24. Ash Maurya “Love the problem, not your solution. Life is too short to build something nobody wants.”
25. We Are Agile! felipecastro.com Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec Build Jake Knapp Business case ? No measurement, no learning
26. felipecastro.com Did we deliver the promised benefits?
27. A Better Way felipecastro.com Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec Fast Experimentation, Frequent Measurement Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec Build ? Do this instead:
28. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles A Huge Waste • Using OKR as an activity management tool is a huge waste of time and effort. • We have lots of evidence from different companies showing that most ideas fail.
29. “At Google and Bing, only about 10% to 20% of experiments generate positive results.” felipecastro.com
30. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Stefan Thomke, Harvard Business School At Booking.com, only about 10% of experiments generate positive results.
31. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles 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.”
32. felipecastro.com “Half of Netflix’s high-level strategies failed. Half. ” Gibson Biddle, Former VP of Product felipecastro.com
33. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Outcome-based planning reduces the uncertainty on your OKRs and moves it to the experiment level, where it should be.
34. felipecastro.com Buckets The outcomes you want to achieve. OKRs Activities Ideas to achieve our OKRs, they may or may not work
35. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Key Results vs Activities Activities are what you do: Actions, tasks, projects, programs, or initiatives. All the work performed which is intended to make a difference, but may or not may succeed. Key Results are outcomes: The measurable beneficial effects on our customers, our company, or our employees. Key Results describe why we are doing our activities and how we will measure if they are working.
36. “It’s not a Key Result unless it has a number” Marissa Mayer felipecastro.com
37. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Having a number is not enough
38. felipecastro.com “So What?” Key Results should stand the “so-what” test.
39. 10 minutes to present your OKRs to the board. felipecastro.com
40. My Key Result is… Develop a new website. felipecastro.com
41. So What?!? Are we getting more customers? Has conversion improved? What is the benefit? felipecastro.com
42. felipecastro.com • Click to edit Master text styles Good Key Results make a difference.
43. How Can You Set Targets? felipecastro.com
44. Target Setting Techniques felipecastro.com
45. Aspirational Targets felipecastro.com • Given the current level of uncertainty, it will be hard to get teams to commit to a certain number. • Instead, many of your Key Results will be “aspirational,” not in the sense of being very ambitious, but because they will be unpredictable.
46. Relative Targets felipecastro.com • Let’s say a product sees a 20% drop in revenue during this quarter. Terrible, right? • What if the competition sees a 40% drop in revenue, meaning that the product gained market share?
47. Relative Targets felipecastro.com • Try to set targets that are relative to other players in your industry or segment. • Focus on performing better than your comparables instead of against a fixed target.
48. Monthly Target Reviews felipecastro.com • Companies can set quarterly OKRs with monthly target reviews. • Instead of a full OKR setting cycle, teams can simply review their targets based on what they learned about their OKRs and assumptions.
49. Continuous Stretching felipecastro.com
50. Continuous Stretching felipecastro.com • Instead of setting an ambitious target (a “stretch goal”) at the beginning of the quarter, teams can “raise the bar” and increase the target if they get too close to it. • OKRs have to take us out of our comfort zones, and if they are too easy, we can review them.
51. How to avoid perpetual firefighting? felipecastro.com
52. The Four Horizons felipecastro.com • McKinsey’s Three Horizons Model is a classic tool to help companies prioritise longer-term impact. By tweaking the model and including a Horizon zero focused on work dedicated to the pandemic, organizations can balance resources.
53. For more on OKR, please check: felipecastro.com felipecastro.com