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Week 30, 2019
OKR Pitfalls: Cadence, Outcomes, and Experimentation
Each week I share three ideas for how to make work better. And this week, I’ll return to a topic that keeps on giving: Objectives & Key Results (OKR).
Why am I writing about this? The Netflix Culture Deck famously purports that Netflix is loosely coupled yet highly aligned. OKRs are a great way to achieve that tight alignment. And yet the devil is in the details. Here are three things that a lot of people get wrong when first starting out with OKRs.
1. Cadence
Cadence is a musical term meaning rhythm or tempo. OKRs features a two-layered cadence: a yearly cadence for company OKRs, and a quarterly cadence for everything else. You can think of it as strategic versus tactical OKRs. The latter measures progress made by individual teams. And the former measure the sum-total progress by all teams, ergo the organization as a whole.
Lots of people adopt either yearly or quarterly OKRs. And in doing so, they miss out on the benefits OKRs provide for strategic alignment. For more on this, check out Felipe Castro’s Strategic vs. Tactical OKRs: Nested Cadences
2. Outcomes
OKRs are great because they force us to think in terms of outcomes. Whereas Objectives are qualitative…
