Review

The second edition of Radical Focus is one of the better books on implementing OKRs. OKRs are really powerful in the right context. It’s refreshing for a proponent of OKRs to come out and say they’re not useful everywhere. Christina doesn’t recommend their use in operations teams and proposes subtle adaptations of them for exploratory or long-lead-time work. There are many good OKR explainer books, but I feel this one does a great job of describing some of the rough edges and challenges.

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Book Review and Summary: Measure What Matters by John Doerr

Get a comprehensive review and summary of the best-selling book "Measure What Matters" by John Doerr, the business leader and venture capitalist. Learn about the key principles and practices for setting and achieving measurable goals using the OKR framework.

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Most product managers believe they're focused on impact, but Matt demonstrates there's actually a spectrum, and you're probably not obsessing enough over your team's true impact. This book identifies common pitfalls many organisations fall into and provides tangible questions to help extract yourself when you're stuck. A good read for Product aficionados.

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Outcomes Over Output Book Summary

In Outcomes Over Output, Josh Seiden emphasizes that true business success comes from changing customer behavior, not just delivering features. Seiden advocates for outcome-based product management, where teams focus on achieving specific, measurable changes in user behavior that drive business results. Instead of managing outputs or vague goals, teams are given the freedom to experiment and find solutions that influence desired behaviors. By setting clear outcome goals and tracking leading indicators, organizations can better align efforts with business success. Perfect for product managers and leaders seeking to shift from output-driven to outcome-driven practices for lasting impact.

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Key Takeaways

The 20% that gave me 80% of the value.

• A system for getting things done →
• Pick a goal that is important and inspiring
• Clarify that goal so it is measurable and well understood
• Repeat it regularly so everyone continues to pursue the goal
• Be clear about how you’re working toward the goal each week
• Dedicate your time to accomplishing it
• Hold each other accountable
• Measure progress along the way
• Adapt if plans if they aren’t working
• Be ready for failure, ready to learn, and ready to try again

What are OKRs?

• OKRs are a way of setting focused goals that are inspiring and measurable. Combined with a system to keep them top-of-mind they can be used to create focus around a bold goal and achieve it.
• OKRs stands for Objective and Key Results.
• The objective is what you want to do → e.g. launch a killer game!
• The key results are how you know if you’ve achieved them → e.g. downloads of 25K/day, revenue £50K/day
• The Objective is a goal for a set period of time. An objective should be…
• framed in a single sentence
• qualitative
• inspirational (get you out of bed in the morning)
• time bound (usually a quarter)
• actionable by the team independently (no dependencies)
• is hard but not impossible in the time frame
• The Key Results are how you know if you’ve achieved your objective at the end. Key results should be
• Quantitative
• Roughly 3 per objective (min 1, max 5)
• Balancing measures (e.g. user growth, conversion)
• Difficult not impossible (5/10 confidence, a 50/50 shot of achieving it)
• How do you generate KRs?…
• Look for words in the objective sentence that could be quantified
• Try ‘free listing’ (group, rearrange, de-duplicate) and stack ranking by trustworthiness, ease of measuring, available baselines?
• Think through implications and list anti-goals
• Use a reference baseline if you can
• Don’t make the mistake of using a project or task
• We use KRs because they allow you to change approach and tactics if they don’t work
• How to convert tasks into KRs…
• Why this project? Why is it important?
• What will it accomplish / change?
• How do you know if it’s successful?
• What numbers will move if it works?
• How does that tie into the company’s objective?
• Using OKRs helps you move the team from output thinking to outcome thinking
• You’re time-constraining things that are important but not urgent, thus making them urgent
• OKRs are great for bringing about change, don’t use them for business as usual work. Many service departments evolve rather than innovate. Operations teams like these don’t need OKRs. Instead they should use Health Metrics protect what you’ve already accomplished.

• OKRs should help you work out what to do each week
• Make commitments to each other at the start of the week.
• Celebrate what you’ve achieved at the end of the week.
• If what you’re doing doesn’t move forward any of your OKRs it’s a waste of time
• OKRs should give you permission to say no and push back on low impact work
• The enemy of timely execution is distraction
• You’ll need to use weekly check-ins to keep the OKRs real
• Listing OKRs keeps them top of mind
• Start the Q with a 50% chance of hitting each KR. Check your confidence as a team each week. Have a conversation about how you’re tracking and why the change?
• Listing your weekly intentions, the 5 or so things you’re doing to help OKR progress helps you focus on the right things
• Listing health metrics stops you gaming the system (sacrificing something important just to hit your OKRs)
• Listing a 4 week forecast of the most important activities that need to happen, helps you and others coordinate a plan of action
• Here’s a template…

OKRs	Intentions for the week
Objective: 1 KR 1 · Confidence % KR 2 · Confidence % KR 3 · Confidence % Objective: 2 KR 1 · Confidence % KR 2 · Confidence % KR 3 · Confidence %	P1: Task 1 P1: Task 2 P2: Task 3 P2: Task 4 P3: Task 5
Health Metrics	Next 4 weeks Forecast / Heads up
H.Metric 1 H.Metric 2 H.Metric 3	Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Item 4

• Prerequisites to implementing OKRs

Pipelines over roadmaps?

• The author suggests pipelines are a better format than roadmaps to store potential initiatives. Roadmaps have dates, Pipelines support the flexibility of OKRs and use impact / effort / confidence for prioritisation.

Check-ins and status updates

• The cadence of check-ins is the magic behind OKRs. You end up repeating your goals and adapting what you do to hit them a lot!
• Use the check-ins and check-in document as a conversation starter and treat the conversation as a chance to iterate and get feedback.
• Have the check-ins on Monday, have a Friday session to celebrate work done
• You can improve weekly status emails with OKRs

• Do the hard work to decide on a single company objective
• Avoid having too many OKRs. You can’t focus on company, team, department and personal OKRs all at once.

• Be careful when first introducing OKR cycles. Don’t implement OKRs across the entire company at once, your first OKR cycle is likely to fail, which can cause disillusionment

OKR setting meeting format

• In advance:
• In the session:
• This meeting format was for executives to set the single OKR, but can be adapted for use at team level too.

• What the entire 2 week process for setting OKRs across the company can look like

Approaches to managing and scoring OKRs