What gets measured gets done - Our journey to OKRs implementation

Our insights and mistakes and what can you learn to set goals for your upcoming projects.

Hey, we are Ramón Rodrigá?ez and Andrea Marino, Co-Founders at Nova, the Global Top Talent Network.

Welcome to Talent First, our newsletter where those who believe that talent is the most important resource in the economy get together.

Every week we cover a new topic related to attracting, hiring, developing, and retaining talent, as well as the learnings from our journey building Nova.

Summary:

• ?? What gets measured gets done - Our journey to OKRs implementation. When it comes to team performance in our changing days, we start to see that the way we reach and measure objectives should change with us. Our journey was not without mistakes so we would love to share it with you so hopefully you learn from them when working on your projects.

At Nova, we’ve always believed in the power of goals and clear targets. From the very early days, we had targets for almost everything in the company, new members per week, sales activities, and all the ones you would expect from a well-managed company. However, as our organization grew, we realized that our traditional methods of management by objectives were no longer effective. Our targets started to be too diffused and lacked clear accountability, on top of that individual contributors, while pursuing their goals, could easily forget about the WHY behind those targets.

This let us start with exploring for improvements and this is when in 2021 we embarked on a journey to find a better way to drive our organization forward. This is our story of implementing OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and how it transformed Nova into a more accountable, aligned, and mission-oriented organization.

The problem with traditional objectives

As Nova expanded, the limitations of our traditional management by objectives became apparent.

Our goals were often set at a high level and were not sufficiently broken down into actionable items for individual teams.

For instance, how do revenue targets cascade down to a product and tech team? Or how would a community manager relate to revenue targets if they didn’t know about the levers they controlled to push the organization in that direction? Those links might come naturally to more experienced professionals but they are often not that obvious.

As co-founders, we interrogated ourselves on what makes people motivated, and as you might know, there is a lot of research out there, however, one simple and famous piece of theory comes from the self-determination theory. Self-Determination Theory (SDT), developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, is a broad framework for the study of human motivation and personality. It plays a critical role in understanding individuals' motivation to take action. We reflected a lot on what organizational elements we could introduce to enhance motivation and when reading about this simple framework it resonated with us. Let’s take a short deep-dive into the research as it might lead you to further investigation, we found it fascinating.

SDT is built upon the assumption that three innate and universal psychological needs drive motivation:

• Autonomy: the need to feel in control of one’s behaviors and goals. When people feel that they are the source of their actions, they are more motivated to engage in those actions.
• Competence: The need to gain mastery of tasks and learn different skills. When people feel capable and effective in what they are doing, they experience a boost in motivation.
• Relatedness: The need to feel a sense of belonging and attachment to others. Feeling connected and valued by others enhances motivation through emotional and social support.

With this in mind, when reading about OKRs, we thought it checked all those boxes about motivation and not only that. One key element that steered us towards OKRs had to do with the differentiation between intrinsic motivation (doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable) and extrinsic motivation (doing something because it leads to a separable outcome). Up until that moment at Nova, we had a few extrinsic motivators in place (bonuses, commissions, stock options) while intrinsic factors were simply based on a very inspiring mission of making the world more meritocratic, something top talent could relate to and make it their own.

SDT argues that while both forms are important, intrinsic motivation is often more enduring and self-sustaining because it satisfies the basic psychological needs more fully. We therefore wanted to increase our intrinsic motivators and when reading about OKRs we felt it was an effort worth trying.

Discovering OKRs

Our journey took a significant turn when we came across the book "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr, the father of OKRs. This book provided us with a new framework for setting and achieving goals ??

If you are new to the concept, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), are a simple yet powerful tool for aligning and engaging everyone in an organization around measurable goals. The objective is the goal you want to achieve, and the key results are the specific, measurable steps you need to take to achieve that goal.

The benefits of OKRs we liked were:

• Clarity and alignment: OKRs ensure that everyone in the organization knows what the goals are and how their work contributes to those goals.
• Focus: By setting clear priorities, OKRs help teams focus on what really matters.
• Transparency: OKRs are visible to everyone in the organization, promoting a culture of openness and accountability.
• Engagement: When employees see how their work contributes to the organization’s goals, they are more engaged and motivated.

Implementing OKRs at Nova

Phase 1: Getting buy-in from managers

Our implementation journey began when after the usual summer read, in 2020, we got back to the office inspired by the new methodology. We presented the concept of OKRs to our managers, the related benefits, and how it could improve the teams’ performance by increasing goals clarity and sense of purpose.

As always at Nova, we wanted to test the waters and gather feedback before fully committing, so we started with launching a pilot of a quarter to see how teams would react and what feedback they would give us.

Phase 2: The first iteration

The first short experiment went very well. What teams appreciated the most was their ability to contribute to the goals definition phase with a bottom-up perspective but also that they could finally see the full picture beyond their department. Given the first enthusiastic feedback, we started the full year 2021 with full-fledged OKRs, all tracked on a company-shared Google sheet.

Our first implementation started off with setting annual OKRs for the entire company and after that invite each team to define their own quarterly OKRs by linking them to the company’s objectives but focusing on areas they could directly impact.

In our experience, it was key to present the company OKRs as a top-down perimeter within which any team could navigate freely. We just made sure the yearly goals were clarified but then let total freedom in which projects and levers each team could play with to get there. This allowed all individuals to have a feeling of influence and decision on their objectives, creating a stronger sense of responsibility and commitment.

This first implementation started to give tremendous results and benefits, which we will compile at the end of the article, convincing us that we made the right choice.

Phase 3: Iterating based on the learning and company’s needs

After 3 years of running OKRs in the way presented above, we realized some of its limitations when navigating times of uncertainty and rapid adaptation.

This is why at the end of 2023, after the changes in the operating model and a few other structural decisions, we tweaked our OKRs framework to better fit our organization and its objectives.

In 2024 we decided to implement quarterly OKRs for the company instead of yearly ones. This decision was the result of the operating model changes (read here if you want to learn more) which increased the focus of certain teams making them more aligned with the company’s targets from the get-go. As an example, the fact that each POD has its P&L, it’s already a very comprehensive way of tracking progress and linking your effort to the company’s results.

Today, only our Tech and Marketing teams continue with their team-specific OKRs as they need more granular objectives given the wide range of activities and projects they could potentially prioritize.

This new approach provided the flexibility we needed and allowed us to adapt our goals more frequently based on changing priorities and market conditions.

Bringing it all together…

Implementing OKRs brought several significant benefits to our organization and we would do it all over again. We were able to see the theory turning into practice as we noticed:

1. Better alignment: OKRs provided clear direction and aligned all teams towards common goals. The thing we loved the most was how cross-team cooperation increased dramatically as people spotted key results where they could join forces. In order to reach this outcome, we encourage that in company-wide meetings you make sure to display OKRs and comment on the progress across teams. While you can expect people to spontaneously go and check all teams’ OKRs, it doesn’t happen.
2. Higher accountability and transparency: each department had specific, measurable objectives, leading to increased accountability. This applied to both the team level and the individual level. A good practice has always been to assign a key result ownership to a specific team member who would be in charge of pulling the resources together or delivering a certain key result. The more specific you can be at the individual level the higher the accountability and completion.
3. Sense of Purpose: teams understood how their efforts contributed to the company’s progress, fostering a higher sense of purpose, which translated into high motivation. We often noticed junior team members taking pride in tasks that without OKRs were hard to relate to a higher goal, for instance how launching a client testimonial video could interlink with the increased revenue of the company. It just helped the organization play like a band where each instrument has its role.
4. Autonomy: clear company objectives provided the infrastructure but granted teams the autonomy to decide which levers they wanted to play with to get to the goals. This allowed teams to feel both the freedom but also the responsibility that comes with it. When you are the one committing to a certain result, you are more likely to work hard to reach it compared to when that goal was assigned to you from above.

Our journey with OKRs was not without mistakes some of the most common ones that we hope can be a source of learning for you as a reader:

• Skipping structured reviews: we often skipped structured quarterly OKR reviews, missing opportunities for managers to challenge each other on unmet objectives and learn from the outcomes. Out of time pressure, we would think that just letting everyone look through the Google sheet and leave comments was enough. Over time we learned that those review sessions were an important opportunity to discuss in a qualitative matter what we were doing right or wrong and maximize the learning that OKRs can bring. So in case you decide to implement OKRs in your company, mark already in the calendar for the quarterly review session for managers, among themselves and with their teams. (keep in mind that our cadence was a quarter but you can have the one you think is the most relevant for your organization).
• Being overly optimistic: the ideal stretch objectives should be so you think that achieving 80% of it is doable. During some quarters we had to deal with low motivation because, at a certain moment, goals seemed unreachable. So make sure you don’t set too high and too optimistic targets because you might negatively affect motivation.
• Adding too many key results: we had quarters where certain teams had 7 key results for one objective, which was not productive at all. It’s usually a sign of a lack of focus and the tendency to do too many things at the same time. We would advise to be strict on a maximum of 5 key results per objective.

The list could go on but in hindsight, these are the ones we feel had the most negative impact and generated the most friction during the implementation process.

To finalize, as co-founders, we believe OKRs have had a tremendous impact on our ability to focus on what matters, ask ourselves the right questions, and involve the teams in a much more holistic way than just via traditional targets. Today OKRs are a natural part of the company and they don’t feel like a burden or something you need to carry, however, it takes time until it becomes part of your routines. At the start it requires more effort because everybody has to adapt and learn, however, the long-term benefits compensate for the initial investment.

We do acknowledge that we still have a lot to learn on how to best utilize this tool and we are aware that things might keep evolving to adapt to our company’s direction, but for now, we hope you could, as usual, get some insights and reflections applicable to your teams and organizations. If you want to share any lessons on the topic happy to connect on LinkedIn or in Nova ??

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