Defining OKR Key Results

Hello and welcome back to Connected Concrete. If you were at The Precast Show last week, I hope it was productive for you. We at Idencia, Inc. attended and enjoyed meeting up with customers, partners and prospects.

In the past two editions, I wrote about OKRs (Objectives & Key Results). In the first, OKRs- A great tool for Google... and you!, I introduced OKRs as a tool for elevating company performance. In the second, The "O" in OKRs, I wrote about the process of setting objectives and related our experience with it.

Today, we will complete the cycle by examining how to define key results and by discussing our experience with this at Idencia.

To start, effective key results need to combine the attributes included in the graphic below:

In our experience, marrying tangible outcomes to the subjective nature of OKR objectives is the art of creating effective OKRs.

For instance, our objective is: "Become known for delighting our customers." Defining measurable results for this requires a lot of reflection about what we need to see from our customers to know that they are delighted.

But that's only half of our objective. We then need to consider what tangible outcomes reflect our "being known for" having delighted customers.

We quickly found how designing great key results will help us maintain a consistent focus on the right activities for achieving our objective.

So, what will you be doing?

I'll run you through our process and end with the key results we chose.

The process...

ONE: The first thing we did was brainstorm key results (without specific metrics included) that would validate success with our objective. For instance, one KR suggested was:

"Reduce time-to-realized-value for new subscribers in 2025 to ____ days from the start of on-boarding."

You can see that this includes all four characteristics listed in the graphic. It is outcome based (time to value), quantifiable (___ days), and time-bound (in 2025). When we fill in the number of days until time to value, we will make it ambitious yet attainable.

TWO: While experienced practitioners of OKRs will tell you that there should be three to five KRs for each objective, we decided to expand to eight because we want to ensure that we have company-wide engagement.

After we produced 24 key result candidates, I grouped them categorically so that we could share responsibility across the company, as follows:

• User Utility: Product Management; Technology Delivery
• Service Delivery: Customer Experience, Customer Support
• Customer Engagement: Customer Experience, Marketing
• Branding success: Marketing, Sales

THREE: We then met again and conducted the stick scoring poll exercise that we used for determining our objective.

Each person was asked to choose two key results out of each category. In the process, we found strong consensus and now have buy-in from all of us about the final choices.

The outcome..

We produced eight strong key results that will present a compelling picture of customer delight and postive branding if executed well.

(Note: all KRs are time-bound to CYE 2025. Specific metrics are withheld for confidentiality.)

These are:

1. Reduce time-to-realized-value for new subscribers to ____ days from the start of on-boarding;
2. ____% of customers cite OneSource as "easy to use";
3. ____% of customer support requests receive a response in 15 minutes or less;
4. New software releases contain no more than ____ bugs each;
5. Achieve ____ customer referrals;
6. Achieve customer churn of less than ____%;
7. Produce ____ case studies of delighted customers; and
8. Produce ____ joint marketing initiatives with customers.

Nice. Now what?

We put them to work for us.

Simply by engaging in the planning exercise, we have already created a theme for this year that we return to in our discussions: "How will what we are considering contribute to customer delight?"

We'll meet monthly (at least) to review our progress against our metrics and discuss new ideas for improving our performance.

In addition to producing better outcomes, I fully expect that our work in executing the KRs will be uplifting for all of us based on the excitement that has resulted from the planning process.

I'll be glad to keep you posted in future posts about how it's working!

Next up... ?

Not sure yet.

This is an easy question when writing a series of posts on one topic (like this). Now that we are through, I will have to give it some more thought.

That said, I look forward to working on the next one and thank you for your interest!

Have a good President's Day weekend, everyone,

Jeff