OKR and Scrum
Jeff Gothelf
Teaching executives to simplify prioritization and decision-making by putting the customer first.
Most product teams today are practicing some form of Scrum. An increasing number of organizations are implementing their goals using Objectives and Key Results. It’s just a matter of time before someone in the organization raises their hand to ask how we connect these two processes. The good news is that OKRs are the key to organizational agility which means that Scrum is a perfect place for teams that use OKRs to start.?
OKRs Require an Agile Process
If done correctly?OKRs target positive changes in human behavior. This means that teams aren’t targeting the deployment of features. In an OKR-driven world the team’s definition of done is a sufficient amount of behavior change in your target audience. The way the team achieves this behavior change is by shipping light versions of features they believe will achieve the key result. As these experiments are deployed the team learns how valid their feature hypothesis is and whether they should kill, pivot or persevere.?
As they learn new information the teams adjust course. Adjusting course based on evidence is the definition of agility. Without the ability to change course easily teams will optimize for the delivery of a committed set of features regardless of their impact on the target audience. Agility enables OKR-driven teams to continuously learn and improve.?
领英推荐
Scrum Provides a Good Framework for OKR-Driven Teams
The fundamental practices of scrum – backlogs, sprints, retrospectives – provide just enough scaffolding for OKR-driven teams to do the kind of work required to achieve your new goals. The backlog is filtered with the team’s primary key result. Any item in consideration has to first pass through this filter: do we believe this idea will help us achieve our key result? Anything that comes back a “yes” makes it into consideration for the backlog. Anything that comes back a “no” is relegated to the “not now” bucket.?
Once the team decides which of the “yes” items they’re going to work on and in which priority, they begin the process of experimentation. The sprint provides a deadline for the team to review their progress, determine how well their ideas worked and decide, using evidence, what to do in the next sprint. Short blocks of time ensure the team isn’t investing too heavily in unproven ideas. Reducing that investment makes it much easier for the team to pivot from or let go of ideas that didn’t turn out to be successful.?
OKR and Scrum Are Two Sides of the Same Process
It’s not a coincidence that OKRs are becoming so popular these days. Along with the continuous learning infrastructure now available to most teams, modern processes also make it easier to do the kind of work needed on OKR-driven teams. Teams need the ability to make small bets, assess their results and decide how best to proceed. Given scrum’s ubiquity in most organizations, adding in a set of human-centered goals with Objectives and Key Results is not only painless but makes the most sense.?
Strategy & OKR | Leadership Advisor | Interdisciplinary Organisational Development | Author | Speaker
2 年Writing down the product goal mentioned in the Scrum guide as OKR is already a huge help for many Scrum teams to focus
| 2 Million+ Trained | Helping BAs Navigate AI | BA-Cube.com Founder & Host | LinkedIn Learning Instructor
2 年User behavior focused OKRs should be the starting point to a new initiative (work effort, project, problem to solve, opportunity, or feature) a team works on. There is still a lot of discovery work and planning (user value based plans like product roadmaps, and release plans, hypothesis mapping and experiment definition) planning that needs to happen to build the product backlog, and this planning can happen very fast and while the team is working. Creating a meaningful, OKR filtered and driven backlog is still a missing piece in Scrum. I love to hear about connecting OKRs (especially user behavior ones) in combination with Scrum! This is a game changer for many Scum teams if implemented well!
?? I coach technically talent leaders on how to make the right new product/feature decisions to deliver business and customer value | Program Manager | Project Manager | Product Manager | Scrum Master | Agile Coach
2 年Now we just need to make sure the objectives are customer centric outcomes and we have ourselves a really great complimentary set of tools ??
I think these two frameworks are almost designed to go together if you've got them running properly. However, if you're just going through the motions with either of them, you're still going to be in trouble. One challenge I've seen with these two is that 'OKRs are for the leaders to define' and 'SCRUM is how the DEV teams work'. Pointing out the connection between the two is one of the key jobs of the product manager.
Agile Coach - Innovation Coach - Product Coach - Startup Advisor (Freelance)
2 年I saw and see so many organizations where "#scrum like" teams have well defined features to deliver as objectives and can neither experiment nor learn! Change role names and edit meeting names is not sufficient to say an organization is agile! Thank you for that article Jeff Gothelf. It gives us the courage to continue to support organizations towards agility, that you define as "Adjusting course based on evidence". #OKR #productmanagement #scrumteams