You set yourself objectives in January, you read them again in December, and you find that nothing lets you say whether they were reached. The fault almost always lies in the wording: nothing in it said how you would have recognized success.
The OKR method deals with exactly that: separating what motivates from what gets measured.
Objective and key results: two distinct roles
An OKR pairs two statements of a different nature.
The objective says where you're going. It's qualitative, ambitious, phrased to make people want it. "Make our customer service a reason to stay with us" is an objective.
The key results say how you'll know you got there. They carry numbers, they're verifiable, and they leave no room for interpretation. "Bring first response time under two hours", "reach 85% satisfaction after resolution".
An objective with no key results is a statement of intent. Key results with no objective are a dashboard with no heading.
Where the OKR method comes from
It descends from management by objectives, theorized by Peter Drucker in the middle of the 20th century.
It was Andy Grove, at Intel in the 1970s, who turned it into an operational system by attaching measurable key results to each objective. He documented it in High Output Management, published in 1983.
What followed came down to one encounter. In 1975, John Doerr, then a salesman at Intel, took a course taught by Grove. In 1999, by then an investor at Kleiner Perkins, he presented the method to Google, at the time a young company in his portfolio. The full story is told by What Matters, and the Wikipedia entry on the OKR method gives the factual summary.
Task or key result: the most common mistake
Almost everyone starts out writing tasks dressed up as key results.
| Wording | Nature |
|---|---|
| Publish twelve blog posts | A task |
| Double organic traffic | A key result |
| Redo the home page | A task |
| Take the conversion rate to 4% | A key result |
The difference isn't cosmetic. A task gets ticked off even if it served no purpose: the twelve articles are published, and traffic hasn't moved. A key result only gets ticked off if the effect is there.
The test is simple. If you can reach your key result by working hard without anything changing for anyone, it isn't a key result.
Effect obtained, not effort spent
If the wording describes what you're going to do rather than what will have changed, rewrite it.
How many OKRs per quarter: few, and short
Three rules are enough.
One to three objectives per quarter, no more. Seven objectives mean there is no priority, and therefore no objective at all.
Two to five key results per objective: below that, the measurement is fragile; above it, you've written a task list.
The quarter as the horizon, finally. Long enough for an effect to appear, short enough to still remember it. An annual objective gets read again in December; a quarterly objective gets followed.
OKRs for a freelancer or a small team
The method was born in large companies, but it doesn't depend on them. A freelancer or a team of three can use it, as long as they stay frugal: one objective, three key results.
In Flots, the handiest support is a project milestone. A key result becomes a dated milestone, and the tasks leading to it live in the same project. The chain holds: the objective says why, the milestone says what it's measured against, the tasks say what to do this week.
Tracking your OKRs through the quarter
An OKR set at the start of a quarter and opened again at the end serves no purpose. The method assumes a regular check-in.
A quarter of an hour every two weeks is enough: where each key result stands, what's blocking, whether to change direction. That rhythm grafts onto an existing weekly review.
And at the end of the quarter, score honestly. An OKR reached at 100% often signals an objective that was too cautious; aiming high and landing at 70% is how it's meant to work, not a failure.
To place OKRs among the other approaches to getting organized, see choosing your productivity method. And if the notion of a milestone is still vague, start with discovering projects.
Objectives, milestones, and tasks that follow.
