OKRs for Transformation Efforts

An interesting conversation happened last week in our monthly OKR office hours (learn more here in our OKR book community on LinkedIn ). The topic was transformation efforts in large companies and the questions that arose fell into two categories:

1. What do OKRs look like for transformation teams?
2. Who should own those OKRs?

Let’s take a look at each one.

What Do Transformation OKRs Look Like?

If you divide this question into its two component parts we can get to a well-structured OKR statement relatively quickly. Let’s start with the objective. What’s our qualitative goal for the transformation effort? Every company has its reasons but, at a high level, most transformation efforts have objectives that fall around the themes of:

• Improve our ability to respond to increasingly complex and fast changing market conditions
• Become a more customer-focused organization
• Ensure we’re always able to compete in our industry
• Create a highly desirable, modern workplace

There are definitely more objectives for transformation than that, but you can see how these themes are qualitative, inspirational, create clear value and, though lacking above, should have a deadline attached to them (e.g., by the end of 2024).?

Now, when it comes to adding in key results we fall back to the key question, who does what by how much ? Let’s start with the first objective above. If we “Improve our ability to respond to increasingly complex and fast changing market conditions” who’s behavior are we trying to change? We might be trying to improve the way our product development teams work. We may instead push to modernize our financial, legal and risk organizations. Maybe we need to start with the teams who support our technical infrastructure. In all of these cases we have specific humans who work for the company (we are transforming the company after all) who we are trying to influence.?

Let’s assume we’re changing the product development teams. What do we want to see them doing differently than they are today? (the “does what” part of our template question). Today, these teams choose what to work on based on executive directive. In the future we know we’re responding to continuous change by having each team justify their work and prioritization choices with customer and market data they collected first hand. Finally, we want to decide by how much we want to see this behavior change. Today, these teams make about 10% of their prioritization decisions with customer and market data. We want to see that grow to at least 75%.?

We now have all the pieces to put together a well structured OKR for transformation:

Objective: Improve our ability to respond to increasingly complex and fast changing market conditions by the end of 2024.?

Key Result: At least 75% of all product team prioritization decisions are made with self-sourced customer and market data

The template and the approach is the same here as it is to writing an externally facing OKR. The only difference is that, in a transformation effort, the people whose behavior you’re trying to change is usually going to be other folks on staff in your organization.?

Who Owns Transformation OKRs?

The person who brought up the questions about transformation OKRs in our office hours last week mentioned that the product teams themselves were asked to own the transformation OKRs. This was driven by two things:

1. No one else stepped up to own them
2. The product teams were already using OKRs so why not add one more?

Both of these reasons are OKR anti-patterns to be avoided. Transformation OKRs should be owned by the transformation team. If there isn’t a specific transformation team then whoever the executive in charge of the transformation effort is should own these OKRs. Transformation is organizational design, culture, policy and incentive work. It is not product development work. In fact, it is the product development teams who are going to benefit from the transformation. If the transformation OKRs don’t have an explicit owner they will fail. They should sit with a transformation leader and team.?

Second, the product team should not own a second set of OKRs apart from their product goals. Why? Because now they’re charged with chasing two goals. The first is the focus of their day to day work. The second is an OKR whose success criteria is based on their own behavior change. Having two goals divides their attention and takes their eye off product success. In addition, managing OKRs where the behavior change is your own risks the teams gaming the system or simply just saying they hit the goal without any actual change. I don’t think most teams would do this with any bad intent but rather to get these transformation OKR distractions off their plate so they can focus on product work.?

Transformation OKRs Are Important and High-Level

Every company should be continuously improving. Someone needs to own that effort. That someone should work at a high level of the company and look for meaningful changes in staff and team behavior to tell them the changes they’re making are working. The measures of success for transformation OKRs are internal. We want to see our colleagues working differently (and hopefully for the better). To choose the best goal we focus on who we want to impact and what they’ll be doing differently from the way they’re working today. Who does what by how much ? If you fall back to that key question, your transformation OKRs will be off to a strong start.?