430. OKRs (lite) ✳️
A simple system (and template) for tracking your team's goals
Hi there 👋
One of my favorite things to share on this newsletter is artifacts of the documents, spreadsheets, Miro boards, and resources that I use in my day-to-day work. Well now there is a whole SaaS product built around this thanks to Reforge. You can sign up for free and browse a ton of artifacts, including a couple of mine (like our marketing hiring strategy at Oyster).
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
How I do OKRs with my teams
If you only read this far, here is a link to an OKR template in Notion that I’ve found pretty simple and easy to implement. Paying subscribers can get an edit-able version of this in my Notion workspace.
Several years ago, I wrote a blog post for the Trello blog about my process for keeping running OKRs in Trello. The post still exists if you want to check it out.
Rest assured, this newsletter is not a copy-paste from that Trello article.
I’ve evolved!
But a lot of the foundations of that article remain true for me, starting with this definition of Objectives & Key Results (OKRs):
The Objectives are the desired outcomes that you want, and the Key Results are the measurable ways you know you’re on track to reach them.
The biggest knock I hear about OKRs is that they can be “a lot.”
So I’ve tried to make my OKRs as low-maintenance as possible.
The main definition of OKR remains the same: Objectives are your qualitative outcomes, and Key Results are your measurable targets. But the way that you roll it out to your teams can be much more simple than you might think. No OKR mastery needed. Here is my process.
1 - Start with OKRs at the team level, not the company level
Company-level OKRs tend to be where most of the stakeholder angst lives. They’re time-intensive to create, teams differ in their view of measurability, and people don’t feel as much ownership of keeping them updated.
So skip the company-level OKRs at first.
Instead, start at the team level.
Typically, I would propose having three Objectives with three to five Key Results underneath each Objective. But if it’s just your marketing team, then start easy with one Objective and three to five Key Results underneath. Here’s an example:
Objective: Become the #1 product in our category
Key Results:
* Generate 4,500 MQLs
* Increase win rate from 23% to 27%
* Drive 1,500,000 brand impressions across all channels
1b - How to format your OKRs
Keep in mind that an Objective is qualitative and a Key Result is quantitative.
Objectives should be ambitious enough that they don’t really need to change for several quarters. The best Objectives last for a year or so and only change when your overall strategy changes.
Key Results are best when they are aligned to a specific outcome, not an output.
Therefore, you want to avoid Key Results that are purely about shipping stuff — although sometimes this may be necessary, strategically, if you’re trying to build momentum or do something for the first time. Even with shipping, though, you’re typically shipping in order to drive some sort of impact. It’s better to create the Key Result around impact.
For example:
NO: Launch a brand new lifecycle email program
YES: Improve activation rate from 20% to 25% through a new lifecycle email program
2 - For small teams, everyone can own a KR. For large teams, each sub-department should own at least one
One of the beautiful things about OKRs is that you can see how your work directly impacts something important to your team. I like to lean into this motivation, especially with small teams, by giving each person an their own KR.
For example:
Objective: Become the #1 product in our category
Key Results:
* Generate 4,500 MQLs [Alex]
** Generate 2,300 event-influenced MQLs [Brianne]
** Generate 800 content-influenced MQLs [Ashley]
* Increase win rate from 23% to 27% [Mike]
** Increase feature adoption of X feature from 35% to 40% [James]
* Drive 1,500,000 brand impressions across all channels [Veta]
** Get 10 placements in Tier 1 media outlets [Hailey]
You’ll see that sometimes the KRs can nest rather elegantly so that teammates can see how their contributions ladder up to top-level Key Results and Objectives.
Of course, if you have a team of 50, it probably doesn’t make sense to have layers and layers of Key Results! I will typically stop with OKRs at the marketing level and then just make sure that each of marketing’s sub-departments — like product marketing, brand marketing, etc. — have at least one representative Key Result from the list.
3 - Make OKRs easy to update and to see progress
OKRs are no good if you set them at the start of the quarter and never update them again! So it’s important to make the updating easy. It should take no more than five minutes, once per week.
Of course, it’s even better if the updating happens automatically (data viz tools like Looker can help a lot in this case).
My go-to starting point for OKR tracking is a simple Notion database. Here’s what one looks like:
You can take a closer look here. And for paying subscribers to this newsletter, you can find the copy-able, edit-able template in my Notion workspace under Templates > OKRs.
(Here’s a button if you want to start a paid subscription …)
But if Notion isn’t your cup of tea, you can do OKR tracking any number of different ways:
Asana has a goals section built in (we used Asana for OKR tracking at Oyster)
A simple Google Sheet or Google Doc
Knowledgebase tools like Slite or Coda
People team tools like Lattice
4 - Put OKRs in a place that’s highly visible
This means both asynchronously:
Your team wiki (Notion, Slite, Coda)
Your Asana or other project tracking software
And synchronously:
Your team meetings
Your 1:1s
You don’t have to copy-paste the entire OKR framework into every little space in your business, but it is important that you make OKR conversations a regular part of your workday. For instance, when you’re project planning, you can assign each project to a specific KR outcome. When you have 1:1s, you can save time every month to do a quick KR check-in.
Which reminds me …
4b — Talk about OKRs often
It’s one thing to choose OKRs, update OKRs, and make OKRs visible, but it’s another thing entirely to devote time and attention to discussing how things are going, relative to the OKR goals you set. Make sure this happens on a regular basis, either through a monthly check-in, business review, all-hands, or team standup.
Over to you
Do you use OKRs for your team? Are you afraid to? I’d love to hear your experience.
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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