Goge: The iron-headed goge gives up his date on Christmas Eve and starts studying JVM instead. He is greeted violently by his wife. Christmas day, is a must to eat out (dui).

Time is precious. Today is not about technology, but about performance.

Many of our teams, including our company, are engaged in OKR, and probably more people are confused like me: how can I assign KR to the top leader after deciding O? The article shared today focuses on KR — “Key Result”.

This article comes from the public number: Hook hook Java universe (wechat: Javagogo), mo to promote, all dry goods!

The original link: mp.weixin.qq.com/s/OE1zTMUBm… Author: Lisa

Key outcome: Describes the necessary conditions for achieving a goal. It is concrete and measurable. By tracking the progress of key outcomes, we can know the progress of our goals.

How to understand this correctly? Start by distinguishing between “key results” and “tasks.”

Key results vs. tasks

A common misconception about a “key outcome” is to confuse it with a “task.”

The key outcome is a feedback mechanism that tells you whether or not you are getting closer to your goal, and tasks don’t necessarily do that.

For example, you’re out of shape during Spring Festival from overeating and you desperately need to get back in shape before the holiday ends. The OKR that many people make might look something like this.

O: Get back in shape after the holidays

  • KR1: Run 5km a week
  • KR2: Cut your daily intake by 300 calories
  • KR3: Do 200 sit-ups a day
  • KR4: Do plank for 3 minutes every day

This type of critical result is task-like critical result and is the most common mistake in writing critical result. And the right key result would be this.

O: Get back in shape after the holidays

  • KR1: Reduce body fat by 5%

    • Task 1: Run 5km a week
    • Task 2: Cut 300 calories a day

  • KR2: Waist circumference reduced by 4 cm

    • Task 1: Do planks for 3 minutes a day
    • Task 2: Do 200 sit-ups a day

The key outcome in the first example, by contrast, is not a result, it’s just a set of tasks, and completion of these tasks does not guarantee achievement of the goal. The key outcome in the second example is the outcome, and if we can do both, we can confirm that our goal was achieved.

Another example is the K12 organization, whose goal is to “become one of the most influential platforms for K12 education and mentoring.”

One of their previous KPI was “40 teaching and research projects for junior and senior high schools”, which could not accurately tell whether the institution was approaching the target.

Revise it to OKR, and select course visits, sales, and the number of cooperation with highly reputable partners in the industry as the key results. The achievement of the key results can obviously better reflect the progress of the target.

So, the key outcome shows progress towards the goal. The task and the progress of the task, in fact, can not accurately reflect the progress of the target.

If the goal is the final value we want to capture, the key outcome is a subset of the value. Each key outcome should mean that you have achieved a portion of the value of the goal, and that the value of the goal has been achieved by completing all the key outcomes.

Goals and key outcomes are the destination we want to reach, and tasks are the means to get there. The right distinction between key results and tasks is key to making OKR work.

Once you understand the key results, you need to focus on two other issues when using the key results, the quality of the key results and the quantity of the key results.

Quality of key results

A good key result should meet the following criteria.

1. Have a direct cause-and-effect relationship with goal achievement

As I mentioned in the previous example, running 5km a week will result in 5% body fat loss and return to pre-holiday shape. Returning to pre-holiday body shape was directly associated with a 5% fat loss. Running 5km a week was indirectly related.

So when we write the key outcome, we need to look back and see, does the completion of the key outcome also mean a direct change in the progress of the goal? If in doubt, then the key result is not a good key result and needs to be refined.

So when creating key outcomes for your goals, keep these two questions in mind:

  • How will I know that I am achieving my goals?
  • How do I know I’m not wasting my time on the wrong things?

2. It’s challenging

A key outcome should be challenging.

Be able to meet team or individual ambitions appropriately and encourage people to try new things and think creatively.

At the same time, the challenge should not be too big.

The right challenge is one that makes the team or individual feel slightly difficult, but confident that they can overcome it. It should not discourage people from giving up because the challenge is too great.

There are books that say that challenging key results should be about 30% higher than what is normally achievable, and books that say that 70% of a team’s or individual’s effort is appropriate. These are essentially the same.

But as I’ve observed in coaching teams, the “just-right challenge” varies dramatically from team to team, depending on the nature of the work, the team members, the culture, and a host of other factors. It takes several rounds of observation and tweaking to find the “right challenge” for your team based on your experience.

Finally, don’t put pressure on employees in the name of setting challenging goals.

Psychologically speaking, “proper challenge” stimulates people’s inner driving force and brings initiative and enthusiasm. And “pressure in disguise” means, it brings passive acceptance and passive resistance. The results of two emotions acting on the same goal are obviously quite different.

3. Be measurable and preferably include quantitative metrics

Quantitative metrics make it easier to track progress on key results.

If the key outcome simply says “increase sales of online courses,” it’s hard to directly evaluate progress. If the key result is written as “sold 1000 online courses” and 700 classes have been sold so far, it is easy to know that the key result is 70% complete.

Here are some examples of key outcomes with ambiguous metrics that we need to avoid in practice.

  • KR: Give priority to existing customers and partners before new products are released
  • KR: Assist product marketing team in reviewing product specification documents
  • KR: Add a nice jump page
  • KR: Talk to users about the new course

Here are some measurable examples of key outcomes that you can compare to the wrong examples above and experience the difference.

  • KR: Increase average weekly visits per active user from X to Y
  • KR: Keep the cost per customer acquisition below Y
  • KR: Increases engagement (the number of users who complete the profile) from X to Y
  • KR: Increase customer repurchase rate from X to Y

Number of key results

A lot of times our team uses OKR to improve focus. To stay focused, try to avoid multitasking.

Achieving one key outcome per week is a reasonable and sustainable pace for the team. So, for a team’s quarterly OKR, it’s best to have no more than 12 key results.

To put it another way, if you have two quarterly goals, there should be no more than six key outcomes for each goal; If there are three goals, there should be no more than four key outcomes for each goal. Both cases make sense in practice.

If the total number of key results in a quarterly OKR exceeds 12, you can either try to juggle too much work, making it hard for the team to concentrate, which ultimately undermines productivity. Or it’s not a lot of work, but the key results are broken down so much that the number seems large.

But this will only take time to decompose and track key results, with no obvious benefit.

It is not easy to narrow the key results down to a limited number of points in order to achieve focus.

When I coach the team on quarterly OKR, I often find that the team lists too many key results, and each key result seems to have a reason to achieve it.

However, when time and resources are limited, over-blaming can be the enemy of focus and productivity. To focus means saying “no” to something.

I recommend the MoSCoW Prioritization method if the team finds it difficult to discard any of the key results.

  • I Must have. If not, the goal will definitely not be accomplished.

  • -Leonard: Should have. These results are important, but time and resource constraints can also be abandoned.

  • -Serena: I Could have. The importance is not that high, but achieving it adds luster to the goal.

  • Won’t have: Not this time. Consider moving to the next stage or beyond.

This method is used to sort key results. An appropriate number of key results are captured from top to bottom based on their priorities. The remaining key results are used as backup results.

By doing so, we were able to maximize the team’s focus and consistently deliver what was most important, leading to increased efficiency.

Once you’ve mastered the “quantity” and “quality” techniques mentioned earlier, you can write pretty good key results. In addition to these common questions, I am often asked the following two questions when coaching organizations to implement OKR.

Who sets the key outcomes?

The goals in OKR are derived from the company’s strategy, but key outcomes are best negotiated by managers, team members, and everyone else involved with the goals.

Consultation has two benefits. On the one hand, we don’t miss key outcomes.

For example, to develop a mobile App, it should be able to meet certain user needs, user experience is friendly, and functions are stable. These three aspects are the Must have conditions to measure its success, so these necessary conditions need to be defined jointly by product manager, designer and technical personnel.

On the other hand, the process of negotiating an OKR can enhance people’s sense of involvement, which is one of the ways OKR motivates its employees.

How are key results different from KPI indicators?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) and key results are quantifiable indicators. Many organizations used KPIs before, but after the introduction of OKR, they found that many key results were similar to the original KPI indicators, so there was confusion.

Key results may sometimes coincide with some of the kpIs, but they are fundamentally different.

  • The key outcome must be the achievement of an outcome that is valuable and can be used to verify progress towards the goal, and people can formulate and adjust tasks in order to achieve the key outcome.

  • The indicators of KPI are more similar to tasks, and once the indicators are established, they cannot be changed easily. In this system, people are responsible for tasks and aim to complete them. But people rarely think about whether the results of the task have ultimate value to the company, they think that is the responsibility of the person who set the task.

In essence, KPI is a kind of static thinking. KPI was born in an era when the industry was mature and demand was relatively stable, and business logic and business results were predictable. Management is all about planning and controlling. People need to operate according to the requirements of the organization.

OKR is dynamic thinking. The context of OKR is dynamic, with relatively clear goals. However, the methods and results in the implementation process can not be accurately predicted sometimes, and need to be verified and adjusted through practice.

This is the fundamental difference.

In fact, it is a normal phenomenon that the higher the certainty of business requirements, the smaller the difference between using KPIs and using OKR. But when the uncertainty of business requirements is high, it is completely wrong to make an OKR look like a KPI.

Welcome big guys to pay attention to the public account of the Java universe (wechat: Javagogo), refuse hydrology, harvest dry goods!