Introduction to OKRs

Chapter 4. Improve Weekly Status Emails with OKRs

I remember the first time I had to write a status email. I had just been promoted to manager at Yahoo! back in 2000 and was running a small team. I was told to “write a status email covering what your team has done that week, due Friday.” Well, you can easily imagine how I felt. I had to prove my team was getting things done! Not only to justify our existence, but to prove we needed more people. Because, you know, more people, amiright?

So I did what everyone does: I listed every single thing my reports did, and made a truly unreadable report. Then, I began managing managers, and had them send me the same, which I collated into an even longer more horrible report. This I sent to my design manager, Irene Au, and my general manager, Jeff Weiner (who sensibly requested that I put a summary at the beginning).

And so it went, as I moved from job to job, writing long, tedious reports that, at best, were skimmed. At one job, I stopped authoring them. I had my managers send them to my project manager, who collated them, and then sent it to me for review. After checking for anything embarrassing, I forwarded it on to my boss. One week I forgot to read it, and didn’t hear anything about it. It was a waste of everybody’s time.

Then, in 2010, I got to Zynga. Now, say what you want about Zynga, but it was really good at some critical things that make an organization run well. One was the status report. All reports were sent to the entire management ...