Use OKRs to Focus Your Release Strategy

While we’ve talked about prioritization and strategy on this blog a lot, one thing we’ve not spoken about much is the process of determining your release strategies. This is particularly challenging if you’re trying to reduce the scope of each release and get to market more quickly. One way to think about thinning out your releases and launching small slices of value regularly is by using OKRs. Here’s how.?

Who Does What by How Much?

If we’ve set OKRs focused on outcomes, meaningful changes in human behavior, then our goals should easily answer the main OKR question: Who does what by how much??

Specifically we are going to declare the following assumptions:

• Who is the user (or users) we are targeting with this next release??
• What do we want them to do more or less in the immediate future??
• And, by how much do we want to see their behavior change?

A well written OKR statement should clearly answer all of those questions. For example, we want our existing customers [who] to reduce online store visits for recurring product orders [does what] by 50% [by how much] while maintaining [by how much] their average monthly spend [does what] with us.?

This gives us focus for our release strategy. We can clearly say what’s important right now. That’s the power of OKRs. They help us see where we need to work now and what can wait for another time in the future. If we use our example key result above, we know that right now we don’t want our existing customers to have to come back to the store each time they need to buy the same thing. We also don’t want them to reduce their monthly spend with us.?

The key result serves as a filter. Any work that we are considering for the next set of sprints that doesn’t help achieve this behavior change doesn’t make it into our backlogs right now.?

To be clear, this isn’t a “no” forever to that work. It’s a “not now.” We’ll come back to those ideas when the OKRs require it.?

What’s the Least Amount of Work We Need to Do to Achieve That?

Now that we’ve got a clear focus and have reduced the amount of work we’re considering for the next few cycles, we need to create our release strategy. To do that, we modify the standard Lean UX question from Box 8 of the Lean UX Canvas from, “What’s the least amount of work we need to do to learn that?” to “What’s the least amount of work we need to do to achieve that?”

I’m going to assume you’re working in sprints – short, finite time boxes of work. There’s only so much work that can fit in a sprint. So, of the items we’re considering to help us achieve the key result, what can we fit in the sprint that will help us move that needle forward??

We could choose a single feature – set up a repeating order for any product on our site, for example. The case for this feature is strong – recurring purchases are our goal and this should also reduce traffic at the stores. The tech team may raise their hands and say that this feature will take multiple sprints to implement. This is where we get creative. What are some ways we could ship a version of this feature that not only begins to deliver value to customers but also teaches us that we should continue investing in this idea?

There are many ways to implement every feature. In the case of a repeat purchase, we could implement that option on the product page of every product. We could add it to the checkout shopping cart page before the customer pays only on specific items that we know the customer buys every week. We could even just send an email, post-purchase, asking the customer if they want us to send them this product we’ve seen them buy weekly without having to do anything on their end. The options are infinite.?

Our goal is to pick the least amount of work that will help us achieve, or at least move towards, our selected OKR and can fit in our sprint timebox. In doing so we’ve begun to slice out the work into manageable chunks that can be delivered quickly and help us move towards our key result goals.?

OKRs for Focus, User Story Mapping for Slicing

Setting human-centered goals with OKRs gives us a clear sense of what’s important right now. It helps us filter out work we don’t need to focus on at the moment. And, it makes clear how we will measure the success of the next few sprints. Slicing out release strategies based on this direction becomes easier when you’ve outlined the desired future user journey and can see that various ways you might deliver value on a sprint by sprint basis. The latter part of this is powerfully facilitated with user story maps. These are a set of lightweight techniques that can help your team get to market more quickly, deliver meaningful improvements to customers and push the organization forward toward its goals as well.?

Want to learn more about how OKRs and user story mapping work together? Join Jeff Patton and me on Mar 20, 2024 for a live, 2-hour webinar on this exact topic. Details and tickets are here.?