“9 Ways to Improve your OKRs”

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve gotten a lot of questions about OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), including one yesterday whilst writing this post… honestly if this was published I could have just sent them the link.

So let’s avoid another call. In this post I want to equip you with the different hallmarks I look for in effective OKRs so you can self-diagnose and hopefully escape OKR theatre!

Let’s get into them

Coming up with a product strategy should be messy.

It's not some clean fill in the box activity.

Instead it's often big messy Miro boards, multiple white boarding sessions, synthesising loads of data, and documents plastered with comments.

And a lot of back-and-forth.

It's important to not mistake a neat Product Strategy document at the end as the thing.

I don’t like using the term “empowered” because it’s ambiguous.

Empowered to do what?

• Are you empowered to expand your product internationally

• Empowered to build a whole new business within your current org?

• Build a new brand under a parent company?

Of course, empowerment doesn’t mean “do whatever you like” but therein lies the question:

What exactly are you empowered to do?

Your OKRs don’t live in a vacuum.

Yet this is exactly how I see many organizations treat their OKRs.

They jump on the bandwagon and create OKRs void of any context.

Here’s what I see all the time…

From my experience, there are two common reasons why I see product backlogs become long and unmanageable.

​A lack of strategy​ and, therefore, backlogs become a dumping ground for any and every idea.

Working big, breaking down big solutions, rather than breaking down the outcome (refer to ​my last post​)

Quick one from me this week. Instead of a typical post I thought I’d share some of the stuff I’ve been busy with like last week’s Webinar

There are several different ways to price and monetize your PLG products. The most common are free trials and the freemium model, but you also have reverse trials, sandboxes, and proxies.

80% of features are never or rarely used. The best Product Companies known this which is why last year, Spotify announced it would be sunsetting Spotify Live, Medium sunset their Profiles and Themes, and Airbnb has hit paused on Experiences to focus on their core offering.

Expansion can really come from only 1 of 4 places: 1)Growing your existing product in your current market. 2) Expanding your current product into new markets. 3) Creating new products for your current market, and 4) Creating new products for a new market

We’ve all heard the saying, “if you try to please everyone, you please no one.” This is especially true for startups and new products. Focus and being able to find a niche can be a huge unlock for products.

KPIs = measures of health. OKRs = things we want to change.

When I've helped organisations become more outcome/product orientated, more often than not, I've moved them away from 'epics' and 'user stories' and towards things like one-pagers, opportunities, hypotheses, etc. Why? Because they’re are better tools for facilitating outcome thinking and experimentation.

You might have heard of them. Often attributed to Warren Buffett, who is believed to have coined the term 'moat'. A moat is the ability for a product or company to maintain a competitive advantage and fend off competition to maintain profitability into the future.

Did you know that the top-performing CEOs in Fortune 500 companies spend significantly more time thinking strategically and long-term?

If unbalanced, you often see a high-level strategy but nothing connecting it to the day-to-day work.

Perceptual Mapping is perhaps one of my favourite competitive analysis and Product Positioning tools. Product positioning as defining where your product fits in the market relative to its competitors as it is perceived by your customers.

You have a Strategy and a Roadmap. They’re two different things. Often I hear that roadmaps are part of your strategy layer. I’ve for many years struggled with this notion. Rather to me, they are a translation layer that sits between your strategy and your day to…

“Defining value: the most ambiguous word in product development” was the title of a post by Jeff Gothelf at the beginning of last year. If there was the battle for the most ambiguous term in product I’d have ‘value’ take second place to ‘MVP’ but as far as single words go, ‘value’ takes the podium.