How to set good goals (OKRs) for 2023

Confession: I love OKRs.

"OKRs" means "Objectives and Key Results" and is a popular goal-setting framework heavily used in Visma.

I love OKRs because I have found them to be an effective way to discuss, plan, prioritize, communicate, align and track the evolution and impact of an organization (which could be a company, department or team).

Simply put, objectives?are what you want to achieve and key results?are metrics that will tell you whether you are achiveing the objective or not.

Objectives

My advice for making good objectives is to describe a future target state you would like to see happen. Objectives don't have to be measurable, timeboxed or even fully under your control. Examples:

• Make our company an inspiring and engaging place to work
• Become the market leader
• We are an innovative tech company that excels at product development
• Mitigate the threat of climate change

Key results

My advice for making good key results is to imagine how you can measure that you are making progress towards the objective and when it has been achieved. The best key results are not tasks ("do X"), but instead measure the impact of many contributing initatives. Examples:

• O1: Make our company an inspiring and engaging place to work
• KR1.1: Increase our?eNPS?survey participation rate to 87%
• KR1.2:?Increase our eNPS score to 61
• O2: Become the market leader
• KR2.1: Increase our?pNPS?score to 34
• KR2.2:?Improve product scalability and performance to successfully handle 20,000 customers by end of Q2
• O3: We are an innovative tech company that excels at product development
• KR3.1:?10 new features that originates from internal?hackathons?are implemented in our product and shipped to users
• KR3.2:?Start measuring our?Software Delivery and Operational Performance?by Q2
• KR3.3:?Increase our Deployment Frequency to 30 per month
• KR3.4:?Reduce our average Delivery Lead Time to less than 1 day
• O4: Mitigate the threat of climate change
• KR4.1: Reduce our?carbon footprint?by 10 tons CO2e

Note that one initiative can contribute to different key results: Migrating your product from a traditional hosting vendor to a public cloud platform like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud may allow you to improve your pNPS, eNPS, delivery lead time, scalability and performance while also reducing your CO2e emissions all at the same time!

If you find yourself making key results that are tasks, ask yourself what the world will look like if you achieve the task perfectly. What is the value, outcome or impact of the task and how can you measure that instead?

Make sure to discuss and align on your OKRs internally in your organization, but also with other organizations that are required or can be helpful in achieving your goals. As an example, if one of my Key Results for 2023 were to increase the percentage of total Visma Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) coming from products hosted on public cloud platforms to 50%, I should ensure that many Visma companies have public cloud migration as part of their OKRs for 2023!