The OKRs Field Book

Appendix

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS FROM THE INTRODUCTION

Think of the brief answers to the questions from the introduction as a preview of the ongoing discussions we hope to have with you on the OKRs Coach Network discussion board.

1. How can we scale OKRs across a large organization with hundreds of departments? Google is a massive organization and is the most well‐known company that uses OKRs today. However, the success at Google does not help answer this question. Google started using OKRs back when they had just under 40 employees on staff. The real question we want to address is, “Can a large company introduce OKRs, and how best can they deploy the system?” Zalando, FlipKart, and Sears Holding Company are three well‐documented case studies that prove it's possible to deploy OKRs on a massive scale.¹

Mantra: The crawl‐walk‐run mantra is critical when scaling OKRs at large organizations. Take a phased approach by deploying OKRs within a specific area before attempting to scale OKRs. In this way, you apply learnings along the way. You nail it before you scale it.

Analysis: Zalando's phased approach worked well. Zalando, a company of about 7,000 employees at the time, dedicated a full year to get OKRs working within their Brand Solutions group. After completing a successful OKRs program within this one group, Zalando introduced OKRs at the company and business unit levels. Finally, Zalando rolled out OKRs at the team level. My experience with Zalando as their external OKRs coach ...