Product managers are the ones responsible for developing top-notch products in their industry. They have to work hand in hand with various departments and, more often than not, share goals with them in terms of customer satisfaction, user experience, etc. Setting and implementing the right OKRs is crucial to align product managers with stakeholders and the overall company goals.
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a collaborative goal-setting process used to set ambitious goals that have measurable results. With OKRs, you can track the progress of your team, align them towards the same objective, and even drive engagement.
OKRs continue to be a hot topic, now more than ever given the current climate of remote work. Organizations continue to look for the best way to use OKRs to improve their employees’ performance and execute their strategies successfully.
The OKR framework is simple once you understand how it works, and if used correctly, it will help your product management team with high output management, better communication, and alignment to achieve all of your business goals.
The usual length of an OKR cycle is one quarter, but there isn’t a specific rule about it. Your OKR cycle depends on how your organization operates, but you can still make adaptations to your cycle depending on what works best for your product team. Keep in mind that Key Results should be challenging and aggressive, but realistically time-bound.
During your OKR cycle, it’s recommended that you have frequent check-in meetings with your product team so you can analyze how the execution is going, especially when you’re just starting to use this methodology, this way you’ll find your own beat and setting future OKRs will get easier each time.
These meetings should ideally be held biweekly, and while in them you won’t just “check” what’s done, you need to assess your team’s actions and progress to determine whether changes need to be made. You can learn more about this process here.
To create great and efficient product management OKRs, you need to follow one simple formula:
“We will [Objective] as measured by [Key Results]”.
Since OKRs are designed to fit the needs of any organization regardless of its size, they can help with goal setting at every company level and can be used either by teams or individually.
Your objectives should be clear, actionable, and time-bound. The common time period to achieve them is a quarter, but depending on the objective you can set a longer or shorter period. Key results are the ones that determine whether an Objective has been achieved or not, not necessarily relying on your usual performance metrics. They are quantifiable, time-bound, and measurable results making it easier for the team to track progress. Contributors on the KRs should measure progress regularly, and then at the end of the OKR period that’s been set, there’s usually an OKR meeting to determine how well the team did, to assess and discuss if there should be a change in the strategy.
To start crafting your product management OKRs you can hold a meeting to make this process in collaboration with the ones that have to achieve them. Meeting with your product team and having a brainstorming session provides a sense of ownership, engagement, and accountability. You want to empower your team to create their own challenges and motivate them into really feeling capable of achieving what they set out to.
Nothing makes things clearer than examples, so here we want to show you some product management OKRs examples that follow the formula we mentioned above and provide you with some ideas to create your own set of OKRs.
* Develop [#] new integrations with popular 3rd party tools.
* Reduce average page loading time from 2.5 secs to 2.
* Implement desktop notifications.
* Conduct 50 customer development interviews by Q1.
* Run 3 training sessions on the new product for the marketing, sales, and customer satisfaction team.
* Review 10 customer requirements from Product Marketing.
* Review 10 recordings and notes from website usability testing by Q2.
* Reduce bugs found after release by 45%
* Improve NPS from 7.5 to 8.
* Reduce signup churn from 40% to 15%.
We hope this article helps you in creating the proper prompts to give your product team a nudge in the right direction and achieve your organizational goals. Remember that Hirebook’s software helps remote and on-site teams link their day-to-day actions to strategic organizational outcomes by implementing OKRs!
Photo - Anna Shvets