Course 1: Understanding OKRs

OKRs are a consistent way to set and track goals in two piece: Objective and Key Results.

Objectives are big goals— not business as usual or maintaining our numbers. This is what we're trying to do. Objectives shouldn't have numbers— they're big ideas that would have a few different metrics go into it.

Objectives should be actionable and time-bound. Actionable means it's something that we could do or accomplish. It should fit into the sentence "We will [objective]."

Time-bound means that it's a goal that's able to be accomplished within a certain timeframe. If we're working with quarterly goals, this means that we are able to accomplish the objective by the end of the quarter (not just make progress towards it)

Key Results are how we measure whether we've accomplished our Objective. This means each key result should be a metric that is tracked. All of these metrics must measure whether we've accomplished the objective, so they need to be directly related. This should fit into the sentence "We will [objective] as measured by [key results]."

Underneath your Key Results, you may have Tasks. Tasks are the tactical work that you do to help specific metrics. Tasks are not key results themselves— they don't measure whether we've accomplished the objective (we can do tasks that end up not being useful at all, so we don't want to use them as a metric).