Strategy & OKRs: In practice

There are lots of great books and blog posts about how to communicate mission and purpose, set strategy and measure performance. The more times I’ve gone through this process, the better appreciation I have of how interrelated these elements are. People may say ‘we need a strategy for x’, but that strategy should set out a clear path towards a future vision, and if that vision is not defined then it’s impossible to know if the strategy is taking you in the right direction. A good strategy should also set out how the impact of this work will be measured.

Maybe it’s my logical, left brained nature but I think this approach and set of principles can be applied to anything; running a business, building a product, deciding that you want to get fit, or decorating a house (all things I’ve attempted to do over the last few years).

Disclaimer — There is no original thought here, just reflections on generally accepted management principles in the context of my own experience.

Purpose, Mission, Vision, Strategy, OKRs

• Purpose: Defines why you exists. Fuels passion and defines culture. Something aspirational that is never reached. 100+ years.
• Mission: Defines what you are setting out to achieve; providing direction and focus. Something that feels achievable within the foreseeable future/our lifetime.
• Vision: An ambitious, future oriented view of how the world has changed because of what you will do. Far enough away to feel aspirational, but close enough to feel tangible. Probably 2–5 years.
• Strategy: A concrete plan to take steps towards the vision, probably setting out activities across a number of different workstreams. Long enough to deliver an impact, but not too long that it feels hypothetical. Typically 6–12 months.
• OKRs: A clear goal/objective and way(s) to measure outcomes so you can monitor progress and adjust plans or expectations accordingly. In commercial / operational situations it makes sense to manage these periodically. For software projects these work best at a project/initiative level.

Put simply, your vision, mission and purpose are all forward looking views of the world and the impact you’re going to have. Your strategy and how you measure this (OKRs) are all about execution.

Connecting activities to an overarching vision/mission through OKRs

OKRs are a great framework for building a sense of shared understanding within a team around a business/consumer goal and how progress towards this will be measured. It’s important to consider OKRs in conjunction with the other elements of building a strategy (whether for a business or a product), and not as a planning task that happens in isolation.

Below are a few learnings from implementing OKRs within different teams.

• OKRs do not replace a vision or strategy: OKRs are a great framework for maintaining focus on the goals you and your team are working towards, but when created in isolation from an overall vision/strategy it can result in teams optimising the wrong metrics or for marginal returns. The cascade from vision, to strategy, to OKRs is really important and it’s the job of the Business/Product leader to do this.
• The value is in the conversation, not the artefact: Your OKRs will make their way into dashboards and exec updates, but the real value is the process that the team goes through to align on the business/consumer outcomes they are working towards and how the impact of this will be measured. This creates a sense of shared understanding and ownership of the problem which is important for building empowered, autonomous teams.
• Quarterly vs individual project OKRs: Using OKRs as part of a quarterly planning process works really well for commercial and operational teams where you have specific metrics you’re looking to focus on and improve. The nature of building software products means that a project may last a few days, or multiple months, and therefore setting OKRs quarterly can feel a bit imposed — often it’s hard to measure the impact until you’ve shipped the thing. Therefore, I try and use OKRs as a framework when kicking off a project — to get the team aligned around the goal and talking about how we’ll measure impact.
• Celebrate outcomes, not features: OKRs are helpful in getting a team into the right mindset and cadence for talking about the impact they are having, not the activities they are doing or features they are shipping. It’s all too easy to consider a piece of work as done once a task has been completed or software been released to 100%, but if you set measurable KRs when you start a project (like making £££ revenue, achieving xxx volume of sign ups or moving a metric from a to b), then these are they achievements that are celebrated rather than the completion of a task.

Whilst this may sound like a lot of management theory, it will come naturally to a brilliant entrepreneur or leader. They won’t reference frameworks or models, they will be able to crisply articulate all of the above in a succinct pitch, probably saying something like:

• We exists to (make x impact in the world).
• In the future (our users/customers)will be able to (do something amazing that they can’t do today) because of (this ambitious product/service we’re going to build).
• We will get there by (executing this plan),
• And we will know we have been successful when (we achieve these results).