View the current and previous OKRs here: OKRs

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results and is a framework for setting goals within organizations. At Medusa we use OKRs to align everyone in the team towards delivering on our core strategy. OKRs are open and transparent by default which means that everyone within Medusa can view and comment on the OKRs of other teams. The transparency allow us to align on goals and hold each other accountable and also ensures that any dependencies between teams can be identified and sorted early on so we all work efficiently and in the correct direction.

How OKRs work

OKRs work by setting an objective that is important and relevant to a team and then specifying 3-5 key results that have to be accomplished in order to fulfill the objective. The objective is the what we are going to do and the key results are the how we are going to do it. An example for a football team might be this:

Objective: Win the Champions League

Key result 1: Average >60% ball possession in matches played.

Key result 2: Score at least 2 goals per match.

Key result 3: Have 10 clean sheets during the season.

Notice that the Objective is a big and audacious goal while the Key Results are very specific and measurable. OKRs are stretch goals by default.

Aligning vs. Cascading

A feature of OKRs is that they in many circumstances easily cascade vertically and horizontally within an organization. An example of a cascading OKR could be this: a company level KR is “Increase sales by 10%”; the sales department adopts the KR as their objective and writes supporting KRs. This is not always possible and we don’t want to shoehorn each OKR into fitting perfectly from top to bottom. However, we do want to see all OKRs align well with the company-level OKRs. What this means is that after the company-level OKRs are set the OKRs of each team should align to feed into reaching the objectives.

For more on this read this article: https://www.tability.io/okrs/cascading-vs-aligning-okrs

Identifying dependencies