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How to combine Objectives and Key Results OKR and Agile Product Management
Physics (KNUR 215)
KAAF University College
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How to combine Objectives and Key
Results (OKR) and Agile Product
Management
Objectives and Key Results (OKR) are a powerful way to enable autonomous (product) teams while keeping a company-wide focus on building what matters. And while there are few 'hard' rules around how to implement OKR, there certainly are some best practices to follow when you want to see it unfold its true potential.
But when you introduce a progressive tool like OKR to an organization which is already working using Agile methodologies, you can run into some challenges: How do OKR and Epics relate? Which impact has OKR on my product roadmap? In which way can I integrate OKR into my existing SCRUM routines? And what are actual good OKR for Product Managers?
So, let's take a closer look at the challenges of combining OKR and Agile Product Management - From theory to best practices, up to integrating it into your daily life.
A big thanks at this point to Sonja Mewes, Founder and OKR Coach at Beautiful Future for the opportunity to collaborate on this topic.
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
What’s in this guide
OKR - Agile Goals for your Organisation More focus More autonomy More alignment Layers of Product Execution Planning with Roadmaps Setting up a Product Discovery Process Iterating through the Product Delivery Cycle Playing together - Dual Track Agile Connecting the Dots Combining OKR and SCRUM Routines Integrating OKR into your Product Roadmap Process Utilizing OKR in Product Discovery OKR Examples for Product Managers OKR for Remote Teams Key Takeaways What to do next
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
The 'invention' of OKR is often-times credited to Andy Grove during his time at Intel. Later on, it got popularized through the widespread implementation by Silicon Valley companies like Google. And while many admire the improvements Google was able to generate for the performance management of their employees, OKR have evolved to become much more. The attraction of OKR for agile product teams lies nowadays in its core promise for changing the way we work:
- More focus
- More autonomy
- More alignment
But what does this mean, exactly?
More focus
A common cycle for OKR is a quarter. Smaller companies could combine that with a yearly OKR to let every aim at something beyond the next three months. And while it's common (and ok) to set up to three OKR for a team per quarter, this already poses a drastic improvement in terms of being able to focus on a few key initiatives. While some stakeholders confuse 'Agile' with changing their mind every two weeks just in time for the Sprint Planning, OKR provide a continuous path to pursue throughout the entire quarter.
And even though OKR don't necessarily need to cover ALL of your work (everybody knows some maintenance work can be critical), they sure should reflect what's most important for your team.
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
More autonomy
On purpose, good OKR don't talk about features. Instead, they shift the conversation to the impact a team should seek to make, opposed to being measured by the number of released features. For your stakeholder environment this means to delay their urge to talk with you about their feature wish list, but instead agree on a set of outcome metrics first.
For the teams, it means to focus on the (most critical) problems first for a higher chance to find a bigger lever to reach their (ambitious) Key Results.
"On purpose, good OKR don't talk about features. Instead, they shift the conversation to the impact a team should seek to make, opposed to being measured by the number of released features."
More alignment
The process of defining OKR should involve all levels of a company. While it's natural that the company level OKR are defined by a leadership team, the next step is to get the rest of the company on board.
Only through that, it's possible that a single team gets inspired by the overall direction of the company to define their own contribution in form of a matching OKR. By making the OKR definition and review a focused effort for the entire company at the beginning/end of a quarter, misunderstandings about interdependencies and priorities across teams get reduced significantly.
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
Layers of Product Execution
The execution of building digital products can often-times be mistaken as the simple pushing of tickets and releasing code. Instead, I want to broaden your horizon for the three levels of a sustainable agile product execution process:
Planning - Working with Themes instead of time-based roadmaps
Discovery - Determining what to actually build in order to solve a customer problem
Delivery - The actual process of building the product, which focusses on the iterative development based on tasks and user stories
Let's take a closer look at what's behind every one of these steps to understand the touch points of implementing Objectives and Key Results into your Agile Product Management process.
Planning with Roadmaps
Sadly, most businesses still rely on time-based roadmaps following a Gantt chart style visualization for planning product development up to 12 months into the future. While this approach may have worked for the static waterfall planning we used to do 'back in the days', it's hardly suited for agile and iterative approaches, which embrace uncertainty instead of trying to fight it with deadlines.
Comparing static time-based roadmaps and truly agile theme-based roadmaps
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
A more fitting approach for planning your efforts is based on so-called theme-based roadmaps. They enable you to prioritize broader initiatives, rather than fixed feature sets and acknowledge increasing uncertainty the further you look into the future.
You can also compare themes as the parent element of specific epics. A theme simply represents a bigger user or business problem you want to discover a solution (aka Epic) for in order to reach your goals.
The three categories of a typical theme-based roadmap can be differentiated like that:
- Now: Stuff that you are currently working on.
- Next: Stuff that’s coming up soon.
- Later: Stuff that you’d like to work on in the future, but need to do a bit more research before you move on.
Examples of a theme could be things like 'User Growth', 'Revenue', 'Churn' or 'Enterprise'. Corresponding epics could then be 'Referral Mechanism', 'Free Trial' or 'Single Sign On'.
C. Todd Lombardo delivered a great presentation on this modern approach of building roadmaps at the Mind the Product San Francisco Conference in 2018:
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
Research & User Problems - This is the phase where you work through existing qualitative and quantitative data to discover patterns about potential user problems or run your own studies to get to the bottom of things.
Ideation - In this phase, it's about becoming creative on how to potentially solve the identified problems within your user group. Ideation works best in a diverse group of people to avoid existing bias as much as possible and to stay open-minded.
Creation - Now it's time to make the most promising ideas more tangible. By creating scrappy high or low fidelity prototypes based on the results of your ideation session, you get a sense for how your solution(s) could look and feel like.
Validation - Before any code is written, it's about finding out how valid the created solutions are by putting them (somehow) back into the hands of your users. By using tools like usability interviews or fake landing pages, you have to determine how valuable your ideas really are.
Refinement - When the core value proposition of an idea has been validated, it needs to be broken down for the upcoming development. What so far has looked shiny in a design file now needs to be sliced into small and ideally independent releasable pieces. A great tool for achieving just that is User Story Mapping.
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
Iterating through the Product Delivery Cycle
Ideas are worth nothing if you don't execute them properly. This is where the part of Product Delivery comes into play. Using agile frameworks like SCRUM or Kanban, you now need to orchestrate the execution of identified and validated idea as part of a cross-functional team.
If you're e. using SCRUM for organizing your work, the development cycle you want to set up might looks like this:
'Typical' SCRUM product delivery cycle
All routines of a typical SCRUM cycle can essentially be divided into two parts: Organizing the work of the current cycle and preparing what to work on next.
While the Sprint Planning is about committing the work for the next 2 weeks, the Review and Retrospective focus on what has been accomplished respectively what the team could improve. The Backlog Refinement and Feedback & Estimation meeting, on the other hand, discuss the potential issues for the next sprint and ensure that there's clarity about what needs to be done and how complex these issues might be.
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
How OKR and Agile product execution levels play together
Let's compare the different layers of product execution and their respective time horizon with the granularity OKR as an agile goal system offer us. It becomes clear that in order to adopt both frameworks successfully, we need to integrate them into all regular decision-making processes.
Linking OKR and User Stories in your Product Backlog
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
Tracking the success of a User Story with Key Results
On the highest level, your defined and committed Objectives and Key Results can be connected with your Agile Product Management processes when creating the alignment for a specific initiative. A great framework to achieve that is the mission briefing framework, developed by the strategy consultant Stephen Bungay. By adopting an outcome-first mindset when outlining the key tasks for your Product Discovery, you don't get ahead of yourself and instead focus on the qualitative goal defined in your existing OKR and the corresponding success criteria.
The mission briefing is a simple document, which focusses on the five essential aspects of a project:
First, write down the context your team works in - Here you should describe the situation your product and/or your market is in, in an objective way. Gather all the facts which would make an external observer understand the status quo and what change led to an initiative like yours.
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
When it comes to Product Execution, you need to make sure that as many items in your product backlog can be associated with an OKR. Only through that, you enable the connection of everyday tasks with the higher goals of the organization. If you're using JIRA for managing your user stories and agile processes, you can easily integrate this OKR connection through a set of custom fields. The built-in dashboards then give you a concise overview of how much work of a team has been dedicated to reaching an OKR:
Custom OKR impact field in JIRA issue
OKR impact dashboard in JIRA Source: die kartenmacherei
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
Combining OKR and SCRUM Routines
Next, to the previously mentioned links of your OKR from every single backlog item, you can also link each of your Agile routines to your goals by tying your activities to questions which check their relevance:
Bi-weekly Sprint Planning: What are the next priorities, to make progress with our OKR?
Bi-weekly Review: Which output AND outcome did we achieve?
Bi-weekly Retrospective: How did our collaboration hold up to our norms?
Integrating OKR into your Product Roadmap Process
When your company is still stuck in static yearly roadmap processes, you will soon encounter a (common) conflict between the introduction of an Agile goal system like OKR and this type of planning. When OKR (typically) 'only' focus on one quarter, what on earth should you then put on the requested roadmap for the other nine months of the year?
One answer to this conflict is the introduction of a yearly OKR to share an overarching direction for the coming 12 months. While you keep your quarterly focus for the execution of solutions, a yearly OKR can certainly help stakeholders to relax. Even though they might not get the (perceived) security and level of detail from it like a feature-based roadmap for the entire year, you still have a rough (but more reliable) understanding of when this year will be successful.
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
Because you have a rough understanding of which areas your team wants and needs to work on 'Later', you can define a Product Discovery OKR for the existing quarter. This might include Key Results like 'Understand the key needs of 10 Enterprise product prospects' as one of your themes for the following quarter is called 'Enterprise'.
This way, the Dual Track efforts of an Agile team can both be organized using OKR and the Product Manager has clarity about what to focus her Product Discovery efforts on.
OKR and Product Discovery Cadence compared
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
OKR Examples for Product Managers
Whether your organization decides to cascade OKR down to the individual level or to 'stop' at the team level, here are some specific OKR examples for Product Managers to give you a starting point for your own OKR definition process.
● Objective: Successfully launch version 3 of our main product
● Key Result 1: Get published product reviews in over 15 publications
● Key Result 2: Get over 10000 new signups
● Key Result 3: Achieve trial to paid ratio of over 50%
● Key Result 4: Achieve sign-up to trial ratio of over 25%
● Objective: Understand what our users and non-users really think
● Key Result 1: Support team to conduct 50 phone interviews with churned accounts
● Key Result 2: Design team conduct 30 web-based user testing sessions on new and old users
● Key Result 3: Product management to interview 25 external team leaders (non-users)
● Key Result 4: Sales team to conduct 50 phone interviews with key accounts
● Objective: Become the most user-centered product department in the industry
● Key Result 1: Conduct at least 21 face to face user testing & interview sessions
● Key Result 2: Receive at least 15 video interviews from Usertesting
Source: okrexamples
How to combine OKR and Agile Product Management
How to combine Objectives and Key Results OKR and Agile Product Management
Course: Physics (KNUR 215)
University: KAAF University College
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