OKRs for All

CHAPTER 9Writing OKRs: An Interactive Team Workshop

If this is your first pass at writing OKRs with your team, it can feel a bit daunting. Where do you start? How do you organize the work?

This chapter provides an interactive workshop framework meant to help alleviate common challenges and missteps when writing OKRs as a team, by providing step‐by‐step direction on how to develop meaningful and impactful objectives and the key results that will contribute to the quantitative success of those objectives.

TIP: Setting OKRs requires a bidirectional approach that starts with high‐level company objectives (or team objectives distilled from company priorities), then cascades down to the rest of the organization. From there, each employee works with you as their manager, providing input on how to best define their individual OKRs.

Pre‐Workshop Checklist

• Identify the OKR Champion: Much like a scrum master and owner, it's crucial to identify who will be responsible for leading the initiative in your team. With a smaller team, this might be you. This person will mentor and coach the people on your team, ensuring that everyone is engaged and participates. This person will also be responsible for making sure there is a system in place to track and measure the team's OKRs. I share more on the OKR Champion role in Chapter 22.
• Team input: Before beginning the workshop, ask your team to come prepared to share ideas on which objectives and supporting key results they feel the team ...