In this series of articles, based on real experiences, I report transcripts of my OKR Coaching sessions on recurring themes that may be useful for the whole community. The goal is to demonstrate the power of the implementation and OKR Coaching method “MAKE PROGRESS” of STRTGY and to provide insight into the results that can be achieved together.
If you find what you read interesting, schedule a free OKR coaching session to find out how OKRs can help your organization achieve similar results of clarity and strategic effectiveness.
Background of the company
All information has been anonymized for privacy issues.
Location: Copenhagen
Size: 250 employees
Sector: Sports Technology
Background: Their story began in the fall of 2015 when one of the co-founders arrived late to his son’s soccer game and missed an important goal. This event led to reflection on why not all soccer matches are recorded, despite the evolution of video technology and the presence of high-performance cameras in smartphones. From that afternoon, the idea for the company was born, and today, their products can be found in more than 80 countries around the world.
Coachee: Senior Product Manager
A senior product manager in a sports technology company has several responsibilities.
- Product Vision and Strategy: A senior product manager defines the vision and strategy for the product(s) he or she manages. This involves understanding market needs, identifying opportunities, and setting clear goals for the product.
- Product Development and Management: Is responsible for planning, developing, and launching new products or features. This involves working closely with teams such as engineering, design, marketing, and sales.
- Stakeholder Interaction: Collaborates with various stakeholders inside and outside the organization, including customers, partners, and other teams, to ensure that the product meets market needs.
- Analysis and Research: Use data and analysis to make informed product decisions. This could include conducting market research, analyzing competitors, and understanding industry trends.
- Product Life Cycle Management: Oversees the entire product life cycle, from conception to decommissioning, ensuring that the product remains relevant and competitive in the marketplace.
- Leadership and Mentoring: is responsible for leading and mentoring other members of the product management team.
- Agile and Scrum: Recently assumed the role of Product Owner in an agile environment, working closely with development teams and ensuring that priorities are clear and work is done efficiently.
Transcript of OKR Coaching session
Coachee: I need to get some suggestions on what OKRs might look like for Product Operations people who are trying to implement the OKR framework for product teams. I seem to keep coming back to KRs like “x% team utilization rate” or “x% of teams updating their KRs on time.” But they don’t really indicate or show the impact. Have others found a good way to do these Operations-related OKRs?
Coach: Happy to help you. Would you be able to provide some context? What area of the company are you not satisfied with and do you think could be improved with OKRs?
Coachee: Here’s some context. With OKRs, empowerment is one of the drivers: we want teams to set themselves up for success. Now, operations staff have to make sure the framework is implemented correctly, but what does that mean? In this case, it is difficult to establish an OKR for the Ops team on how successful they are at implementing it.
Coach: Thank you for specifying the context better, without that any proposal may or may not make sense.
I think the most important question is in the answer you just gave, “What does it mean to implement the framework correctly?”
If you were a training institution, measuring compliance on the use of all parts of the framework such as “# of teams using the framework” or “% of KRs updated on time” and so on, for you all that might be a good definition of success.
However, I understand that you are not!
It is different for you. You should investigate your motivations for deciding to adopt this framework in the beginning. Because I imagine you must be devoting significant resources in terms of time and budget. So: what improvement do you hope to achieve? And how can you measure that you are achieving it?
Here is a trick I learned in hundreds of hours of OKR Coaching.
Instead of racking your brains imagining what could be better, write down what dissatisfactions are in the various areas where this team can have an impact, for example:
- tool overload
- data management / analytics
- prioritization
- resource contrai
- … and so on
For each of this dissatisfaction ask yourself “what metric makes me realize that I’m really that dissatisfied”…without numbers it’s just a feeling, you have to find numerical evidence of this phenomenon, otherwise it will always remain your opinion against theirs and this will undermine the adoption of both the frameworkd and the okr themselves…
Ex. “Hey guys we need to improve the ability to allocate resources. Look at this number that shows the gap between budget and actual cost of each feature, we are always above 30%. Do you agree that we need to bring it down to zero?”
This sentence has it all.
There is a common goal, a key outcome to be achieved, and the downhill road to negotiation
O: Improve ability to allocate resources
KR1: % average gap between budget and actual cost of each feature < 30%
KR2: …
KR3: …
Achieving this goal is what matters to the business. Adopting the Framework is just one of many tactics you might deploy.
Unless you are a Product Ops school. But we said no 🙂
