Are you Product Managing or Challenge Managing?
Since first working with Targets and Key Outcomes over 4 years in the past, I’ve seen first-hand how they’ve gone from the “secret weapon” of Silicon Valley unicorns to rising mainstream adoption.
Though initially used completely in tech merchandise, they’ve now been adopted throughout almost each product class, from aerospace, monetary companies, to healthcare and hospitality.
However over time, with that enthusiasm, I’ve seen a rising refrain of backlash.
“OKRs don’t work right here”
As we’ve seen with Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe in product improvement, OKRs may be misused, and create extra dysfunction than profit.
I imagine there’s a central motive for these issues that’s truly upstream from the framework itself that’s inflicting OKRs to fail:
You possibly can’t set targets in isolation. You must begin from a transparent product technique.
The place the hole actually lies
And I imagine one good thing about the widespread adoption of OKRs and the related pushback is that it exposes some elementary technique gaps frequent throughout many product organizations.
Listed below are two elementary product technique issues I’ve seen that spell at finest, mediocrity, and worst, failure for any OKR implementation:
- Not being clear about your product technique earlier than setting your OKRs
- Utilizing OKRs to plan out duties
Objectives vs. Technique
Regardless of what you’ve heard, there’s nothing “magic” about OKRs — they characterize nothing greater than a goal-setting and measurement framework, a type of “Enabling Administration System.”
When grounded in considerate strategic choice-making, OKRs can push groups to intention excessive and break by means of boundaries in striving to resolve client-centric issues.
