How to start using OKRs as guardrails

Using a goal-setting framework like OKRs should be done for 2 reasons:

• Defining a North Star
• Providing guardrails

It might take a bit of trial and error to write good OKRs but everyone now understands the North Star metaphor. It’s about defining what success looks like at the end of the quarter.

Things aren’t as clear when it comes to using OKRs as guardrails. That is, how to use the goal setting framework to reduce distractions and make goals an integral part of your weekly routines and prioritisation practices.

Let me explain.

Work creates distractions

There’s a scene from the TV show Malcom in the Middle that is a perfect representation of what it’s like to work on a problem.

You need to fix a lightbulb. You get one from the cupboard, but the shelf is wobbly. So you go to the drawer to get a screwdriver, but the drawer is squeaky. So you get some oil to grease things up, but the oil can is empty. So you take the car to get fresh oil, but the car is clunky…

Then someone asked you wtf you are doing: “can’t you see? I’m fixing the lightbulb”.

We do the same at work when we work on complex projects. There are many unknown unknowns that we discover along the way, and many of them look like small things that would only take a few minutes to fix. It starts with a small design issue, then it becomes a copywriting improvement, then it’s a full UX revamp. It’s really hard to resist the temptation to fix those things, especially when you care deeply about providing a great experience.

But, if you want to achieve the ambitious goals that you’ve set for yourself, then it becomes critical to say no to all the little things that don’t contribute to the bigger picture.

Ex:

• You don’t need to refactor your backend if you don’t have users.
• You don’t need to polish your keynote slides if you haven’t promoted your registration link.
• You don’t need to A/B test your CTA if there isn’t any traffic to your page.

The question is not whether or not these things are valuable. The question is whether or not these things are more valuable than the rest of the work that you’re not doing.

You need a system to remove distractions

If you don’t have a system in place to control the distraction levels, then it’s going to be really hard for you to prevent them. Tackling hard issues requires 100% of your brain to get it right. And while your brain is focused on figuring out how to solve a particular problem, it’s not considering why you decided to address that issue.

So, the first challenge is that goals get out of your mind as soon as you work on projects.

The second challenge is that when your brain is in problem-solving mode, it becomes a sponge for improvement ideas. Once you've started to fix things, it becomes difficult to resist fixing more stuff that you find along the way.

The solution to both these issues is to adopt practices that will force you to think about the why periodically, and help you understand if you've started to veer off track.

At a project level, this is what daily standups are for. Part of it is to keep your team updated of your progress, but another useful aspect of standups is that they become a daily scoping checkpoint where a group can signal when things are getting out of hands.

Daily standups are too much for goals, but you can achieve similar scoping results with a weekly routine and a few best practices.

5 ways to add safety rails to execution

Here are 5 practices that can help you control distractions around your OKRs. Most of these things can be implemented right away and a lot of it comes down to 2 things:

• Having a dedicated time in the week to interrupt project work to talk about goals
• Making the discussion as informed as possible without making it a reporting chore

1. Adopt a weekly review cycle

The first thing that you need to put in place is the equivalent of the daily standup routine. You won’t need to talk about OKRs on a daily basis, but you should definitely discuss progress on your goals every week, preferably at the beginning of the week.

Talking about goals on a Monday will make sure that everyone has the right context in mind during the rest of the week.

A few tips to make this weekly meeting work:

• Meeting should be 30 mins max and focused on OKR progress review (you can have a longer monthly business review that goes into more detail).
• 10 people max in that meeting
• If there’s a clear issue, book a second meeting to discuss action items. Don’t try to solve everything in a meeting.
• Make sure that you have a clear sense of the top priorities at the end of each meeting.

2. Encourage transparent reporting

The weekly review meeting is only going to be useful if you can get an honest view of progress. There are many reasons why people might be hedging their views and hold on reporting bad news until the very end of the quarter:

• Their company might have a culture of “don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”
• They might fear that it reflects poorly on their performance
• They don’t want to be seen as the person breaking things
• They might really think they can turn things around next week

The point is, you have to actively work on creating a culture that thrives on honest assessments. This means encouraging people to talk about issues early, and engage meaningfully with anyone who does so. Hero culture rarely works, and the earlier concerns are shared, the easier it is to address them to hit your targets at the end of the quarter.

3. No more than 2 yellows in a row

While it may take time to build a culture of trust and honest reporting. There are things that you can do right away to start having a better understanding of progress.

First you can adopt the rule of not having more than 2 yellow statuses in a row (where yellow is the colour for “at risk”). This will force people to make a call on the third update instead of leaving things in suspense for too long.

On the 3rd weekly status update, you should take a clear position. We’ve either:

• Recovered, and we can mark ourselves on track
• Not made any meaningful improvements, and we should acknowledge that we’re now off track

Once again, this isn’t about punishing people that are reporting on goals. This is about building a system that will give us the right sense of urgency and help us prioritise efforts accordingly.

4. Write meaningful check-ins

A good OKR check-in should cover 5 questions. And the good news is that 2 of these questions can be answered with a progress chart. The questions are:

• What has happened since the last update? (progress, can be answered with a chart)
• How did it happen? (contex)
• How confident are you about hitting our goal? (confidence, can be a coloured dot on the chat)
• Any blockers? (requests)
• Should we do things differently (adjustments)

It may seem like a lot, but you don’t need to write a novel, especially if you have weekly review meetings as it will become a continuous conversation.

What you really want to avoid is a progress update that looks like this:

“Last week the number was 642, this week the number is 739, our target is 832”.

An update like this is unhelpful, and I could probably build an AI that pulls numbers from the tools and email me these same numbers. The valuable part of an OKR check-in is the human interpretation on top of the numbers.

• Are we moving at the right pace?
• Are our projects having the impact we expected?
• Is there anything surprising that happened?

You need to tell the story around the numbers. And more importantly, you need to talk about the plan to reach our goals in time.

PS: if things are green - just keep it simple and celebrate the great progress!

5. Keep track of progress trends

Another to get an honest view of progress is to keep track of week-by-week progress trends. Using tables in docs or spreadsheets make it easier to obfuscate a lack of improvements. You only see a single data point and you have to completely rely on the confidence judgement of the person that wrote the update. And, as I pointed out earlier, people might not feel comfortable about marking things at risk or off track – even if that’s what they truly feel.

But, a quick glance at a progress chart will quickly give a different perspective. You’ll be able to identify discrepancies at a glance, giving you another chance to catch issues before it’s too late.

Once again, don’t shoot the messenger if the key result trend chart doesn’t match the reported confidence. You should first look into why your team isn’t feeling safe to match your sentiment.

Tooling that will save you hours (and reduce execution risk)

4 of the tips mentioned above can be implemented with a spreadsheet or a doc. But, getting trends to identify potential issues (like above) will be really costly to do without a tool like Tability.

Tability will not only give you automated dashboards and progress reports for all your OKRs, but it will also provide you with:

• A central place for goals
• A standard way to write, track, and report across all teams
• Data connectors and automated workflows

The platform is great and you should totally use it. It’ll make you happy and will save you hours. I’ll stop the pitch here.

It’s all about people

A lot of the advice in this post is about getting transparent and honest reporting. Why? Because without it you won’t have the information you need to make hard decisions on your bets.

But building trust can take time, so I’ve mixed a set of advice on culture that takes time to gel and practical rules that can have an impact today.

The key point is to understand that we’re not machines (yet). It should be expected that our attention drifts, and this is how we can do amazing creative things. But we also need systems in place to keep us focused and accountable.

You can find 11 more best practices and tips for OKRs in our OKR guide for Startups.