Why Transparency Is the Superpower of OKRs

OKRs are different in some form to other methodologies. I think one of the most important differences is that they are transparent across the organization.

We are setting OKRs for the leadership team of an organization, and sometimes that's a leadership team of 150,000. A couple of days later we make that public to everyone in the organization. So, we make the OKRs of the leadership team transparent, but then every team, the marketing team, the sales team, the engineering team, they're all setting OKRs and all of those OKRs are transparent. Transparency is a big part of the methodology. It is such a simple hack, but it's such a powerful change in many organizations because, I think transparency builds trust. You start breaking down the silos in an organization. You make sure that marketing knows what sales is doing, maybe you even set cross-functional goals. So, that's something that's very important.

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