Don't Waste Your Time with OKRs Until You're Clear on Your Strategy

Everyone wants to do the "cool" stuff, but there's work to do, first

“..one benefit of the widespread adoption of OKRs and the associated pushback is that it exposes some fundamental strategy gaps common across many product organizations.”

Welcome back to the latest edition of the Upstream Full-Stack Journal, helping you go upstream and be more effective across the full Value Delivery stack.

Hope everyone’s able to get in their last few must-have summer experiences. Beach time? Pool? Hiking? Cookouts?

In this edition:

• Two ways to avoid product strategy mistakes that can sabotage your OKRs

• The Relationship of OKRs & Strategy from Jeff Gothelf

• How to Connect Strategy and OKRs to reduce quarterly OKR-setting stress via Nacho Bassino

Let’s jump in!

Achieve Breakthrough OKR Results by Overcoming These Two Product Strategy Mistakes

Are you Product Managing or Project Managing?

The Product Strategy Samurai. Image via Midjourney.

Since first working with Objectives and Key Results over 4 years ago, I’ve seen first-hand how they’ve gone from the “secret weapon” of Silicon Valley unicorns to increasing mainstream adoption.

Although initially used exclusively in tech products, they’ve now been adopted across nearly every product category, from aerospace, financial services, to healthcare and hospitality.

But over time, with that enthusiasm, I’ve seen a growing chorus of backlash.

“OKRs don’t work here”

As we’ve seen with Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe in product development, OKRs can be misused, and create more dysfunction than benefit.

I believe there’s a central reason for these problems that’s actually upstream from the framework itself that’s causing OKRs to fail:

You can’t set goals in isolation. You need to start from a clear product strategy.

Where the gap really lies

And I believe one benefit of the widespread adoption of OKRs and the associated pushback is that it exposes some fundamental strategy gaps common across many product organizations.

Here are two fundamental product strategy problems I’ve seen that spell at best, mediocrity, and worst, failure for any OKR implementation:

1. Not being clear about your product strategy before setting your OKRs

2. Using OKRs to plan out tasks

Read the full story on Medium here.

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The Relationship Between OKRs and Strategy

Jeff Gothelf shares his perspective on companies trying to do OKRs in the absence of strategy:

“As we sat down for one of our first meetings I asked, “Ok, what’s the company’s strategy for the next year?” The blank stares and delayed responses was a dead giveaway that there either wasn’t one or they didn’t know it. “Isn’t that what OKRs do?” they asked me. 

I wish this was a unique conversation. Many organizations believe that rethinking their goal-setting framework will somehow magically deliver the right strategy.”

Jeff sums up with this great quote:

The OKRs the teams determine for themselves serve the corporate strategy. They do not determine it.

Read the full piece on Jeff’s blog here.

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How to connect strategy with OKRs

Over on the MindTheProduct blog, Nacho Bassino shares some straightforward approaches for connecting OKRs and strategy.

For Nacho, there’s a simple reason every OKR cycle is stressful:

This is a signal in companies that don’t have a strategy or fail to connect it to OKRs and team execution.

He offers some helpful tips for conceptualizing product strategy, and aligning OKRs.

What I really like about Nacho’s approach is his emphasis on prioritizing Opportunities.

You may also find his “KPI Tree” helpful to lay out the relationships of different metrics in choosing the right candidates for Key Results.

Read the full piece on the MindTheProduct blog here.

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That wraps things up for this edition!

Join me next time as we continue to go upstream and use strategy, goal-setting, and product management to make you more effective.