The Balancing Act - What is OKR

OKR stands for objectives and key results. It's two parts. The objectives are qualitative statements that tell us where we want to go. They align us as a team on the direction. Maybe we want to internationalize, maybe we want to grow our audience, maybe we want to launch a new product, whatever that is, we would formulate that as our objective. Then the key results are quantitative statements. They tell us that we are actually making progress towards that objective. That's a very simple methodology. It's powerful because it's not only a new syntax in which you're writing your goals, but it is a new way of thinking about your goals.

So those key results shouldn't be task lists, or shouldn't be just lagging indicators like your financials, but they should be something in between those, and they then tell you that you're on the right track. OKR is not necessarily difficult to understand, but they are not necessarily easy to implement because it takes you the ability to focus and to formulate really good key results that help you focus instead of just writing down everything that you can think of as your key results.

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