Como aplicar OKR em 5 passos

Hello, how are you? In this class you will learn how to implement OKR in 5 basic steps. I'm Mariano Montoni, a consultant for ProMove and this is a class of ProMove Online Coaching.

If you are not yet subscribed to our channel, click the subscribe button and also remember to click on the bell so that you don´t lose any of our content. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. OKR comes from MBO (Management by Objectives) created by Peter Drcker in 1954.

The OKR we know today was developed from the MBO by Andy Grove, one of Intel's co-founders in 1968. In 1974, John Doerr joined Intel and learned everything about OKR. Posteriorly, Doerr joined one of the first major Google investors, becoming one of the advisers of Google since the early days.

It was Doerr who introduced to the founders of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin the OKR. The implementation of OKR in the Google helped the company grow from 40 employees in 1999, to more than 60 thousand employees these days. OKR continues to be used successfully in Google to achieve its goals.

It was the recognition of OKR as one of Google’s success factors that helped popularize this methodology in companies of all sizes, mainly startups. The great success of OKR is in its simplicity. In this class I will show you 5 basics steps for implementing OKR in your company and help you accelerate your business.

The first step is to define the high-level objectives. The resource most important to people is time, and this time is limited. So, don't try to embrace the world and solve all the problems of your company at once.

Try and understand what is most critical, today, for the success of your business and prioritize what you want to achieve. The definition of high-level objectives is the foundation of OKR. So the correct definition of these objectives is decisive for the development of your business.

The planning horizon of high level objectives should always be quarterly. More than that it is very difficult to predict what initiatives are needed to achieve the goals. In addition the delay in reaching goals can be discouraging and demotivating for the team.

The definition and monitoring of the reach of the quarterly objectives will help to assess what worked, what didn't work and also help to define the objectives of the next quarter. Typically, objectives are defined by top management or C-level. This doesn't mean that the opinion of other people should not be considered, but generally there are two at most three people responsible for defining what is critical to be reached in the company in the next quarter.

I'll give you two important tips for you to use in defining high-level objectives. The first tip is to define objectives that help in complementary way to achieve success in your business. For example, you can set goals using different visions: a vision could be a financial vision of increasing revenue of your company in the quarter.

Another vision could be from the point of view of the customer like increasing customer satisfaction. And a third objective could be an operational view like reducing rework, which means losses and waste related to your business. The second tip is to evaluate the definition of the objectives answering the following questions: Is the objective clear and specific?

Avoid overarching goals that are difficult to be understood by the team. Is the goal measurable? Quantify your goal to know if you have reached total or partially that objective.

Is the goal feasible? Is it realistic? It is important to get your team out of the comfort zone, however, objectives must be viable while challenging, considering the current capabilities of your team.

In this figure, I will show three examples of objectives that could be adopted by any software development company. The first objective is to increase sales at twenty percent, the second goal is to increase the NPS or Net Promoter Score between 75 and 100 and the third goal is to increase the delivery speed of teams by thirty percent. The second step is to unfold the high-level objectives into projects and key results.

After defining the high level objectives, it's time for you to decide how these goals will be achieved. For this, you need to understand and define the work that will need to be completed in the next three months so that at the end of the quarter the high level objectives can be achieved. It is also important to define the people who will be involved in these work, as well as the key results to assess the success of the work in each of the months.

The key results are what you want to achieve with your project. So, when defining the project, try to ensure that the achievement of key results will help achieve the high-level goal. Another important point is to avoid having too many projects.

You have to remember that people will not be dedicated hundred percent of the time on this project because the day-to-day work of the company cannot stop. So, a suggestion is to define a maximum of two projects for each person. It is also important to ensure that the team that will work in these projects have autonomy and the necessary resources to carry out the work.

When defining your projects remember to define a leader, who will be responsible for motivating the team and ensuring that the work gets done. For example, in this figure I present the projects associated with each of the high-level objectives that I showed to you in the previous step. As you can see in the figure, for each objective a project was defined in terms of team and key result For the first objective of increasing sales, the team is formed by Kênia of marketing, Juliana of design and Mariano of sales, who is the leader of this project.

The key result of this objective is to be able to sell 50 new monthly plan subscriptions of the product. For the second objective of increasing the NPS, the team is formed by Kênia from marketing and David from the area of customer success, who will be the project leader. The key result of this goal is to address one hundred percent of feedback of customers considered detractors, passive or neutral.

For the third objective related to increasing the speed of delivery of the team, the leader is Analia who is the head architect of this company, David who is the Scrum Mmaster and Mariano who is the developer. The key result of this goal is to be able to cover eighty per percent of code with automated unit tests. In this example I have defined only one key result for each of the goals, however, it is common to have two, three or even five key results associated with each of the high level objectives.

It is the set of the key results that will help achieve the high-level goals at the end of the quarter. Also remember that OKR is only for new and innovative things, like new products and ideas, so avoid puting your company's daily work in OKR as this may distort the use of the methodology for your business. In order to know if you have defined good key results, answer again the questions that I mentioned in the previous step.

The key results are clear and specific? The results are measurable? Quantifiable?

And the results are challenging but feasible to be achieved in the period by your team? If you answered yes to all these questions, you're ready to go to the third step of implementation of OKR. The third step is to set monthly goals.

Now that you already know what needs to be done to achieve the goals of your business, delegate to your team the responsibility to define results key to be achieved in each of the months. In the example that I showed, let's assume we're in the first quarter of the year. The following image will show the unfolding of key results of the high-level objectives for the months of January, February and March.

For the first objective of increasing sales, the key results of January are: define the profile of the target audience representing the product persona and setup the website page with the product purchase journey. For the month of February, the results are to build customers success cases using the product and create content and images for the monthly plan product subscription. For the month of March the key results are: make a campaign on Google Ads and Instagram, with at least a thousand visitors with a budget of a thousand Reais and being able to sell 50 new subscriptions of the monthly plan of the of the product.

For the second objective of increasing the NPS, the key results of January are: survey all detractors customer feedbacks who scored less than 6 and survey all feedbacks of passive and neutral customers who scored 7 and 8. The key results of February are: analyze the root cause of problems reported in customer feedback and take actions to remove the root causes of the problems. For the month of March the key results are: reply customer feedback informing the result of the actions performed to address reported problems and manage to address 100 percent of feedbacks of detractor, passive and neutral customer.

For the third objective of increasing the teams' delivery speed, the key results for the month of January are: conduct teams training in automated testing and configure the Sonar Qube with rules, to assess automated unit test coverage. The key result of February is to implement unit tests in existing codes and the keys results of March are to implement automated unit tests in new codes and achieve coverage of eighty percent of the code with automated unit tests. When you reach your monthly goals, you will greatly increase the chance of reaching the high-level goals at the end of the quarter.

Having monthly goals helps you motivate the team to achieve the goals of the quarter and also to create a sense of urgency in carrying out the project. The idea behind the monthly goals is to set a workable deadline for achieving the defined goals, but without disrupting the day-to-day business. Now that you've already set your monthly OKR goals, remember to spread the word for the company.

You can make a presentation to everyone involved showing the high-level objectives defined by quarter, as well as the monthly projects and key results. The fourth step is to weekly follow up of the projects. It’s not enough to define the projects and goals to be achieved in the months and expect that in the quarter you will have your goals achieved.

It is very important to do weekly follow up of the projects through meetings of 15 minutes maximum to verify that the teams are having the necessary resources to perform the work to achieve the monthly goals. In these meetings it is important to involve management so that they can act quickly in making decisions to help resolve problems found. Only then will you will be able to eliminate these problems and move towards achieving the objectives of the quarter.

Now that you have your defined projects and are being followed up weekly, we go to the last step of implementing OKR. The fifth and final step is the evaluation and dissemination of project results. At the end of each quarter, each team should assess whether the key results of the projects that they were involved in have been achieved.

The team can do this assessment in various ways, for example, you can assign a value of a scale from 0 to 10. A simpler way is to use levels of smiles or faces, for example, a cheerful face, a sad face or a neutral face. Each team, then, put a smile next to the key result indicating whether the result has been achieved totally, partially or has not been achieved.

To exemplify this step, I will show you an example of evaluation of key results for one of the goals that I showed you in the previous step. For the purpose of sales increase by twenty percent, the key January results were define the profile of the target audience and configure the page on the website with customer's purchase journey. The first result was evaluated with a neutral face, because there was a delay in defining the profile of the target audience, product persona.

Due to this delay in defining the profile of the target audience, it was not possible to configure the page on the website with the purchase journey of the product and, therefore, this result was was assessed with a sad face. For February, the key results was to build customers success cases and create content and images for the monthly product subscription plan. The key results achieved were: the previous month's goal, which was the page setup on the website with product purchase journey and, therefore, this result was assessed as a cheerful face, and the second goal or result key of building customers success cases with the use of the product was evaluated with a neutral face, as it was only one success case was built.

And the third result, was the creation of image content of the monthly plan of product subscription that was carried out successfully and so it had a evaluation with a smiley face. For the month of March, the key results were to create a campaign on Google Ads and Instagram with at least a thousand visitors with a budget of one thousand Reais and sell 50 new monthly plan subscriptions. The first result was evaluated with a neutral face, because the campaigns managed to reach only 700 visitors.

The second result was evaluated as a happy face, because despite the goal being 50 sales, it was achieved an expressive number of 40 sales of monthly plan subscriptions of the product. Now that all the projects have been evaluated, you can disclose the key results achieved in the quarter for everyone in the company. Celebrate all the results achieved, even if partially.

Don't try to find culprits for the results not achieved. Use this moment to learn about problems and chart new high-level objectives, projects and key results to be achieved in the next quarter. It is the continuous process of attempts, successes and failures that will make you accelerate your business in the direction you want.

So, in short, these are the 5 basic steps to implement OKR in your company and achieve your goals. If you're getting OKR to work, you will be able to deliver more things and you will be sure to be doing the right things and this is very important to the success of your business. There are several ways to implement OKR.

The way I showed is a simple and practical way to get you started immediately to implement OKR in your company. I will love to hear from you other ideas and suggestions on how to implement OKR. So, leave below your comments and to support our channel, click the subscribe button and remember to click on the bell to avoid losing any of our content.

A big hug and see you next time!