Advice on Google's OKR Framework
I've hard a lot of great results using Google's OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework in my roles leading technical and product teams. I've been tasked with bringing this framework across my organization, including to teams like marketing and business development.
My main issue recently has been around defining the key results of the projects that our teams are going to be pursuing. All of the advice I've gotten in the past has been to ensure that KRs are quantitative, NOT qualitative. This has been at odds with some of the projects the marketing and business teams are planning on working on. These are projects like...
- create a new marketing plan given the new budget constraints
- audit the distribution process to increase our information about the retail sales process
The push back I am getting is along the lines of "when I create the new marketing plan, the project will be complete, and therefore it's just whether or not I finished the plan that matters." i.e. if the objective is finished then the project is a success. My point of view is that ALL projects should have metrics attached to them, and if we can't measure the progress then we cannot show the added value to the business as a result of our effort.
The natural response is: what metrics would you attribute to projects like these? And THAT'S where I could use help. Coming from a product/tech background, my understanding of marketing, biz, and operations leaves something to be desired.
For the marketing plan, I suggested a metric could be to reduce the monthly marketing budget from $current to $future. For the distribution audit, I suggest we track the # of insights/recommendations we produced as a result of the audit. The pushback was that these metrics "didn't really matter" and that "how can we set a goal on insights - even one good insight could be worth a lot, but I could come up with 4 crappy insights just to achieve a numerical goal."
I'm a bit at a loss. I understand their point of view, and I really feel in my heart that we need to be pursuing measurable KRs. Do you have any advice?
It sounds like you might be encountering a cultural pushback from teams that aren't as traditionally metrics driven. Have the teams been given the opportunity to set their own metrics which 'do matter'? If 'good insights' are what they care about, how can they increase those?
If you're only dealing with a manager, think of a way you can include the whole team in the process. Everyone has ideas on how they can make their job easier/better/more productive, leverage those ideas to create those milestones.
It's important to communicate that OKR's should be aspirational in nature, they indicate the direction that the team is growing in. They explicitly should not be viewed as performance metrics, hard deadlines, or quotas.
Thanks for the reply - I have been giving the team leads full authority to set their own metrics, but perhaps I haven't explained in the best way the aspirational nature of OKRs. This may have led them to believe that I would be holding them fully accountable for these metrics and thus the resistance to setting numbers.
Thanks for the inspiration =)