Setting Objectives and Key Results: A Comprehensive Guide

Setting objectives and key results (OKRs) is a collaborative goal-setting methodology used by teams and individuals to set ambitious and challenging goals with measurable results. It is a powerful tool to track progress, create alignments, and encourage participation around measurable goals. This guide will explain how to set objectives and key results, how to measure success, and how to show progress when you can't measure your key result to the end. When setting key objectives and results, it is important to focus on goals that you know you can achieve within a given time frame. Divide key results into smaller goals that are easier to track.

Google's scoring method provides the most details, using a percentage scale (0.0 - 1.0) to give each key result a numerical score at the end of the cycle. If you use Perdoo, you gain total flexibility in measuring success and are able to quickly diagnose problems related to long-term goals. The most important function of key results is that they force you to specify what you mean by a particular objective. All team members should know exactly how their key results contribute to the company's goal, making it easy for that key result to remain a priority during the OKR quarter. The roadmap should show not only the progress of the objective's key results, but also the progress of its aligned objectives. When setting ambitious goals, it is important to keep in mind that if the key result indicates a quarter-on-quarter growth of 50%, it may be quite ambitious.

When a goal can be durable, extended for a year or more, the key results evolve as the work progresses. Once you've established your KPIs and set the desired target values for the KPIs, you can see which KPIs are healthy and which are not. The framework of key objectives and results did not appear suddenly, and other objective management techniques, such as MBOs, SMART goals and KPIs, had been used before. When a key objective or result (or any other objective) contains a metric, it is the metric that will define your progress.