Leaders in the company are required to read the whole book, read Measure what matters. This list of quotes were curated by @Borui Wang.
PDF for Chinese translations of Measure What Matters:
Chinese Translation.pdf
The TL:DR summary is the following
What is a good OKR
- Objectives (What)
- Make it understandable by anyone from an external team.
- Aggressive yet realistic. Team should take if seriously on deliver 100% the objective on-schedule, but also understands and accepts the chance of failure is okay. The moment you realize you can't deliver on-schedule due to a KR difficulty, escalate right away to amend the objective, and inform all your dependencies.
- Must be objective and unambiguous. Should be obvious to a rational observer whether objectives have been achieved.
- The objective shouldn't be accomplished under business-as-usual (no change to what we're current doing now).
- To accomplish the objective, it should credibly consume most if not all of your available resources. If you can accomplish this without exhausting all your resource might result in resource moving away to others who can more effectively use them.
- If no one would notice even if you accomplish the objective, means no one cares and it's a very bad objective.
- If there are significant activities you're doing but it's not in your objective, add them or drop that activity you're doing.
- Your objective must be gradable and measurable, and you must be able to provide a 0.0-1.0 score of the objectives before the next cycle. Your grading of the objective should be 0.0-0.3 (red), 0.3-0.7 (yellow), 0.7-1.0 (green). You're expected to have a mix of red, yellow, greens. All greens mean the objective wasn't aggressive enough.
- The expected value for each objective is 0.8 and green. If the OKR fails to meet at 1.0 at due date requires a postmortem. This is not intended to punish team, but to understand what happened in planning and executing the OKR to avoid it again.
- Key Results (How)
- Make it understandable by anyone from an external team.
- Express measurable metrics or milestones, once achieved, will become both sufficient and necessary conditions to accomplish the objectives. Meaning if all your KRs are hit 100%, your objective should automatically hit 100% as sufficient. Avoid the mistake of making your KR only necessary but not sufficient.
- Must describe outcomes in terms of impact, not activities. Avoid verbs such as "help", "analyze", "consult". Describe them as facts in the future.
- If all KRs under an objective is completed, must be able to have concrete evidence proofing the completion, such as easily discoverable and credible documents, notes, internal metric reports, etc.
- Each KR under an objective should must be gradable from 0-1.0. If all KR is graded 1.0, the objective should automatically becomes 1.0.
- Use actual number and real dates. If all KR happens in the last day of a quarter, you likely don't have a real plan to accomplish the KR.
More context from the book (estimate 30 minutes read) but I recommend everyone to read the full-book.
“It’s not a key result unless it has a number.” You either meet a key result’s requirements or you don’t; there is no gray area, no room for doubt. At the end of the designated period, typically a quarter, we declare the key result fulfilled or not.
“When people have conflicting priorities or unclear, meaningless, or arbitrarily shifting goals, they become frustrated, cynical, and demotivated.” An effective goal management system—an OKR system—links goals to a team’s broader mission. It respects targets and deadlines while adapting to circumstances. It promotes feedback and celebrates wins, large and small. Most important, it expands our limits. It moves us to strive for what might seem beyond our reach.
At smaller start-ups, where people absolutely need to be pulling in the same direction, OKRs are a survival tool. In the tech sector, in particular, young companies must grow quickly to get funding before their capital runs dry. Structured goals give backers a yardstick for success: We’re going to build this product, and we’ve proven the market by talking to twenty-five customers, and here’s how much they’re willing to pay. At medium-size, rapidly scaling organizations, OKRs are a shared language for execution. They clarify expectations: What do we need to get done (and fast), and who’s working on it? They keep employees aligned, vertically and horizontally.
Many companies have a “rule of seven,” limiting managers to a maximum of seven direct reports. In some cases, Google has flipped the rule to a minimum of seven. (When Jonathan Rosenberg headed Google’s product team, he had as many as twenty.) The higher the ratio of reports, the flatter the org chart—which means less top-down oversight, greater frontline autonomy, and more fertile soil for the next breakthrough. OKRs help make all of these good things possible.
High-performance organizations home in on work that’s important, and are equally clear on what doesn’t matter. OKRs impel leaders to make hard choices. They’re a precision communication tool for departments, teams, and individual contributors. By dispelling confusion, OKRs give us the focus needed to win.