building measurable outcomes with okrs · delivery agile felipecastro.com strategy tactics...

Building Measurable Outcomes with OKRs

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Agile as a delivery

mechanism

Delivery Agile

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Strategy

Tactics

Operations

Culture

Big Bets, Long Feedback Cycles

Project-based, Static Annual Planning

Top-Down, Command & Control

Waterfall development/ project management

Operations + scattered experiments

Kanban / Scrum

unagile

Companies today need end-to-end agility

End-to-End Agility

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Strategy

Tactics

Operations

Culture

Waterfall development/ project management

Operations Kanban / Scrum

Tactics Safe-to-fail Experiments, Short Feedback Cycles

StrategyData Driven, Iterative, Hypotheses Validation

Culture Aligned Autonomy Around Outcomes

To move to end-to-end agility,

we have to reinvent how we plan

and align.

Static Annual Planning

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Strategic Objectives

Strategic Initiatives

?

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Progress is measured by outputs,

not outcomes.

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Marty Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group

“Teams today are often feature factories, with little regard for whether

the features actually solve business problems.”

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The Forgotten Column: Did It Work?

John Cutler

DoneTo DoIdeas DoingAchieved Desired

Outcome

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What happens when you measure

outcomes?

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Surprise!

Most ideas fail.

Most ideas fail

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In a non-optimized environment:

Most ideas fail: non-optimized environment

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33%

33%

33%1/3 generates positive results

1/3 generates no results

1/3 generates negative results

“At Google and Bing, only about 10% to 20% of

experiments generate positive results.”

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“The vast majority of [ideas] fail in

experiments, and even experts often

misjudge which ones will pay off.”

Ron Kohavi

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The Alternative is OKR

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• Silicon Valley's agile alignment framework.

• Used By Google, Spotify, Twitter, LinkedIn, AirBnB, Dropbox…

• Simple, fast-cadence, bi-directional.

OKR: Objectives and Key Results

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OKR é Difícil…

Core Concepts

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•Objective: A memorable and qualitative description of what we want to achieve.

•Key Results: How we keep score. Describe the outcomes we want to achieve: “We will know that we are successful if those metrics improve.”

The OKR Components

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Key Results are measurable.

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“If it does not have a number,

it is not a Key Result”Marissa Mayer

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Example: OKR

•Improve Net Promoter Score from X to Y.•Increase Repurchase Rate from X to Y.•Maintain Customer Acquisition Cost under Y.

Objective: Create an Awesome Customer Experience

Key Results:

“Key Results must be results.”

Christina Wodtke, author, Radical Focus

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“Defining outcomes is hard for people because they only worked in companies where they had to define outputs.” Barry O’Reilly, author, Lean Enterprise

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Outcomes Thinking is hard.

Having a place to park ideas helps with the

transition. felipecastro.com

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Two Buckets

The outcomes you want to achieve.

OKRs

ActivitiesThings you are going

to do.(Outputs)

Activities: What we believe we are going to do to reach our OKR: projects, tasks, programs…

Objective: A memorable and qualitative description of what we want to achieve.

Key Results: How we keep score. Describe the outcomes we want to achieve: “We will know that we are successful if those metrics improve.”

Separating OKRs from Activities

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Park ideas here

Key ResultsMeasure outcomes: the value and the benefits you deliver to your customers or your company. They are measurable on a sliding scale.

Activities

Are outputs. Everything you deliver: tasks, projects, programs, deliverables, features, epics and initiatives associated with achieving team or company-level OKRs. They are usually binary.

Key Results vs. Activities

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Treat activities as experiments.

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Example: OKR + Activities

•Improve Net Promoter Score from X to Y.•Increase Repurchase Rate from X to Y.•Maintain Customer Acquisition Cost under Y.

Objective: Create an Awesome Customer Experience

Key Results:

•Launch feature X.•Redes ign the cus tomer journey.•Run 3 new experiments.•Develop a new customer engagement metric.

Activities:

Not a copy of your roadmap

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How to Be Successful with OKR

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The OKR Cycle

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Set

Achieve

Align

Setting OKRs

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Achieve

Align

Set

Begin with the end in mind

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Key Results: How we keep score. We will know that we are successful if those metrics improve.

Objective: What we want to achieve.

Your intuition tells you to start here.

But you should start here instead.

Begin with the end in mind

• Work backward.

• Start with the outcomes you want to achieve and write your Key Results first.

• Then create an Objective that will make your OKR engaging and memorable.

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Don’t wait for the perfect metric

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OKRs can be raw,

imperfect

Baby steps towards better measurement

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Aligning OKRs

Achieve

Align

Set

Align Around Outcomes, Not Structures

• “Focus on goals that you can control” is a terrible advice.

• It creates silos as every problem that requires cross-team coordination is stranded.

• Create alignment around the outcomes you want to achieve using shared OKRs.

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Achieving OKRs

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Achieve

Align

Set

Create a Follow-through Cadence

• Don’t treat your OKRs as New Year’s Resolutions.

•The Check-in is a weekly ceremony for measuring OKRs and adjusting the corresponding activities.

•Adopting it is crucial to success.

•It can be merged with existing ceremonies.

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Roles

AboutSallySallyElatta,CEOAgileTransformationInc.

Developer>Architect>Trainer&Coach>EntrepreneurEnterpriseBusinessAgilityStrategist

PublicSpeaker|ThoughtLeader|BusyMom☺Sally@agiletransformation.com

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AgilityHealth|OutcomeAlignmentDashboard

Questions?

Connect with Felipe: info@felipecastro.com

Connect with Sally: info@agilityhealthradar.com

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