00:00:15 We're her today to talk about Objectives and Key Results. This was and is critical to Google's DNA. 00:03:50 John Doerr brought OKR's to Google. It made goals visible and measurable. 00:07:36 Example OKR's. 00:15:14 Why use OKR's? Disciplines thinking. Communicates accurately. Establishes indicators for measuring progress. Focuses effort.

Almost 10 years later: Thank you! Awesome talk, really helped me! You are a great guy!

Look at all of these captains and hero's highlighting what's essential, Hats off to all of you ladies and gentlemen thank you...

Awesome talk! The most useful thing I was ever told about writing effective OKRs is "Key Results must describe outcomes, not activities. If your KRs include words like 'analyze', 'help', 'participate', they’re describing activities. Instead, describe the end-user impact of these activities. 'Publish latency measurements from ADR ad serving study by March 7th; is better than 'assess ADR latency'."

The transparency of setting and sharing individual OKR's for all levels within an organization is brilliant for driving accountability and clarity at all levels. It's a practical method of forging deliberate cross-functional as well as down/upstream collaboration, so no one has any doubt about their contribution to the organization's success, and I've seen it at work firsthand. Worthwhile for any midsize (50+ people) or larger organization.

This is one of the most useful videos I've seen on KZfaq. OKRs have helped us to focus our efforts and make more rapid improvements.

@Mike: We typically do a mid-quarter check-in where you assess how much progress you've made, ID any potential big misses, and ensure that you're more or less on track. Grades are officially captured/shared at the end of each quarter, and archived so that you can easily access past quarters if you want to.

Helped me in shaping my OKRS . Thank you

Thanks Rick Klau: I've never used such a miserable system to set my goals. You've been persuasive enough to make me get that OKRs could be dramatically important to monitor and increase my results. I will set 5 OKRs exactly today.

OKRs are going to be very useful for me. Thank you!

This is amazing, after 10 years and the content is still relevant. i just got to know about OKR and will sure implement it in our company to drive growth. I hope i will be assisted from time to time when I need your assistance. Thank youuuuuuuu

@Ty, I think starting out including everyone helps set the expectation from day one that this is not a top-down effort. It's fine to give guidance about what the company's priorities are, but I think it's critical that each employee feel ownership to their OKRs from the beginning. Good luck!

Here thanks to the Mosaic Fellowship job description! Awesome❤

00:00 Intro 06:58 John Doerr's original pitch for OKR 15:14 Benefits of OKR acc. to John Doerr 18:35 Typical process, communication & cycle 23:14 Basic hygiene for working with OKR 30:17 Keys to good OKRs in terms of rythm & process 32:06 Objective vs Key Result 33:58 Personal vs Team vs Company OKRs 35:16 Sample of personal OKRs 51:44 Grading process 57:31 How to implement 1:02:56 Timeline and first steps 1:07:45 Q&A

@Chris: Hoping to do the performance review workshop later this month. Stay tuned!

Very interesting topic. I can easily see how this could help a team succeed.

Excellent insight and a great learning . It is 8 on 10 . If every company follows it I think success will never be difficult for anyone . Thankyou .

Thank you very much for this video. Very helpful.

Excellent. Thanks. We've built almost all of this into our beacon software already (using different terminology unfortunately), without any inside knowledge about Google, so grading is a new insight. Now I know what needs to hit the burn-down list.;) Thanks again.

Thanks for sharing. Great talk!

@Zach, no, I don't think it's that linear. You should be able to see the connection between the two, but I think it's rare that the CEO's OKRs would be directly derived from her direct reports' OKRs. In most cases I think the CEO will have broader responsibilities, and they may span several departments.

@Pete: 1) Yes, that sounds right to me. 2) OKRs just help you prioritize where you should spend your time. If that means you spend more time influencing other teams to ensure you hit your goals, so be it. 3) I didn't understand Zach's question that way. Individual/team/leadership OKRs should relate to each other, but there's not a 1:1 mapping. You'll see evidence of each in the other's OKRs, but not reflections. Hope that helps.

Hi Rick. Thanks again for the video. Are your "grades" captured and presented when complete? Periodically at certain check points? Or does the grade get updated frequently until completed?

This talk has better bite and more actionable points than John Doerr's book. Great talk

@Wt from my point of view, it's so that the employee isn't penalized for setting incredibly ambitious goals. If your performance evaluation is tied to your OKR score, and you shot for the moon and missed, you could get punished. Note: as a result of several questions on this from our portfolio companies, we're going to do a workshop specifically on employee performance reviews. We'll make that one public too; stay tuned!

[1:48] The date on the presentation is Oct 24, 2012 [47:25] Grading .6 - .7 out of 1.0 is your target

Genuinely interesting.

I'm clapping my hands even if you can't hear me. Thanks!

Thanks for Sharing...Worth Knowing the idea and strategy behind Google's OKR's..))

This guy nailed it. * bows *

thank you, this is truly brilliant. Is this deck on Slideshare or somewhere available publicly?

Thanks--officially launching our OKRs this coming week at our company offsite, going effective 6/1. Better late than never. Curious if you recommend a top-down "suggested version" for the initial exercise, and iterate from there, or strictly do the harder but more authentic "bubble up" approach and let people get lost a bit, but avoid a prescriptive approach.

Fantastic!!!!

Hey Rick, is it true that you could align all objectives into a tree or graph, where individual objectives are the leaves? If it's true, where do you place those key results or objectives which has impact to more than one branch?

Hello Rick, I manage my company's OKR process and we do things quarterly as in your example. Usually we can't define a new quarter's objectives until we understand the results from the current quarter. It has traditionally been very difficult to define new OKRs in the last 2 weeks of the current quarter when we are still waiting for the results of the current quarter. We are rarely able to do this by the 2nd week of the new quarter top present to the company. What are your recommendations?

Rick - OKRs seem focused on employee objectives. Is it possible to also use this methodology for projects?

The key take away here is have a process, do something, and make it regular. OKRs is a great methodology but it's not the methodology itself, but that you stick to it!

Thank You for your sharing

#startup Lab Life at Google venture thank you for sharing OKR strategy. It is like scrum master setting goals, execute, and go back plan for other goals/objectives and follow up over a given period of time. Are there new entrepreneur's School or course or Workshop at +Google like Scrum? +Start-up University at Google!!! That would get so popular, isn't it?

That's a helpful talk and presentation. Thankyou. I have a question. What if we have a dependency with other functions to fulfill the Objective we have defined?

Great stuff will implement it, I'm curious how you translate this into a week to week, day to day rhythm personally and with direct team mates

@Rick - 3 quick questions: 1) in your personal samples, it seems that Os are USUALLY qualitative and KRs are measurable. True? 2) you often talk about "securing eng allocation".. can you elaborate on how OKRs address dependencies that are outside of your control (like the availability of eng resources)? 3) In your 49ers example, you talk about team goals as thought they were analogous to managers goals, but in your response to @zach below you say thats not the case. can you elaborate? Thanks

Go to Rick's blog which summarizes OKRs. Google 'Rick Klau okr'

Hi Rick, Are the key results for the CEO typically the objectives for that person's direct reports?

Rick, is there anywhere that I can get a copy of the Keynote presentation?

Hey Rick, I recently got hired at a large start-up and noticed how this structure could could drastically improve the entire company. I presented it and my managers they loved it and will now be trying to sell it to the top executives. Problem is their current goal tracking system is completely integrated with performance evaluation/bonus's. When will you be posting a workshop on performance reviews, or is there a way I could get some more info on how you do it?

Great Video - thank you! My question is about the decoupling of OKRs from the employee evaluation process. What is the rationale behind this? Quantifiable results and accountability for them seem like a pretty clear way to evaluate an employee.

I understand that Quarterly OKRs are needed for all levels : Company, Team and Individual. But one thing is not clear. Is yearly OKR needed for Team? Is yearly OKR needed for Individual?

I have a question, Rick - do you write up an objective for each individual, too - or do you use the team objective and just add Key Results?

Nice they share this, it is interesting...but isn't this mainly about management by objectives and KPIs?

@Wt, probably worth revisiting when we make the employee evaluation workshop public. (Haven't held that one yet, but will.) I don't think it's disingenuous at all.

GOLD!!!!!

Does anyone have a link to those text slides of John Doerr's Deck? Cheers

Hi, probably a bit too late for comments, but if OKRs are not used in annual performance evaluation, how else do you measure performance? Do you have OKR's and then another separate set of metrics to measure performance?

I think it is because OKR performance is only partially dependent on the employee. The OKR might've been too ambitious, the project understaffed, etc.

My notes from this video → "it's important to note that everyone's OKRs, from Larry and Sergey on down, are public within the company. Everyone ... not only can you see what they're working on this quarter but you can see what they were working on last quarter quarter before you can see their grades" // example where football teams GM has objective of making money for owners and key results of winning superbowl and 88% of tickets sold; the coach has the objective of winning the superbowl, but NOT anything to do with sold tickets (that's another dept head's issue). Coach's key results are 200 yards of passing per game, 2 recovered fumbles per, etc.; Defensive & Offensive coords EACH have own completely different OKRs // most key result targets should be .6 or .7 (not 1 or succeeding on all of them, which would mean aiming too low - " target should be 0.6 to 0.7 on a zero to one scale. If you consistently get ones you're not crushing it you're sandbagging") // BENEFITS of OKR's: absolutely amazing for imposing discipline on the organization it helps me individually understand what I'm working on and why it also helps me make conscious decisions about what I'm not working on which is often just as important make sure that by making these okay ours public everyone on my team anybody in the company that cares can see exactly what I'm working on can see what my priorities are why is that helpful - key results that are inherently measurable you're establishing how you're going to measure what it is you're working on - everyone understands at a pretty basic level what is it we're trying to do and more importantly how to measure whether we're there or not and how close we are // MAXIMUM of 5 objectives (ideally less) // 50 to 60% of objectives should be from the bottom up // OKRs are not a performance evaluation tool // alignment benefit - everyone is working towards the same results; focuses effort & coodination // OKRs cannot be siloed.It is critical for everyone in the OP and the organization to know what everyone else is working on that's true from the CEO on down // objectives should feel uncomfortable. Going into a quarter you should be uncertain as to whether or not you can deliver on the thing that you've just said you will deliver if you are certain you will nail it you're not pushing hard enough you're not thinking broadly enough you're not thinking big // Team OKRs are the priorities for the team not just the bucket of all of the personal OKRs // don't assume you have the answers do lots of experiments get into a normal rhythm of launching something to test whether it has an impact and if it does great do more of if it doesn't well file that away know that it doesn't have an impact and don't do more like that // grades don't matter except as directional indicators of how you're doing if you're spending more than a few minutes at the end of a quarter summarizing your grades you're doing something wrong the work should go into doing delivering on the okay ours not not grading them // (With grading) simplicity is key grade each key result then average them up to give yourself an objective grade and then average your objective grades to give yourself an overall grade for the quarter // probably more important to focus on which is the low scores right 0.4 below it's not failure right one of the reasons when when Steven Levy talked about how this became so embraced so early at Google was that this was data the point for the point three the point to the zero it's not a failure it's figure out what to stop doing or what did you learn what did you not know when you said you would do that thing that prevented you from delivering it well do you have any control over removing that obstacle in the quarter ahead or is it a moveable if it's immovable go around it figure out either don't focus on that objective anymore or figure out different ways of achieving it the scores ultimately benefit everyone in the process more by what they help you know what not to do what to change what to continue to do more of that that is ultimately where they're most helpful // it's important to explain to everyone in the company why you got the grade you did and what you're going to do differently in the quarter ahead this calibration ends up being extremely useful for keeping everybody honest insuring the company's as transparent as it can be but then also saying ok what did what did we learn for me that was always the most important part // at Google we've and we eventually built our own system it's not a complex system it's a bunch of text fields with text boxes next to the text fields where you can enter in your grades and then the most sophisticated that it gets is there's a button you can push that says average my scores and it does an immediate roll up of your key results and gives that objective a score and if you want to get even fancier then you can average your objective scores to get your overall score for the court that's not something we make available to the public so that's obviously not a tool you have at your disposal // at least as important as the tool you use is the communication you do about the commitment itself what I mean by that is this needs to not be a half-hearted effort it needs to be clear to everyone in the company that for at least a three month trial period ideally longer that everyone in the company is behind this idea at Google it was always clear not only because you could see leering Serge's okay ours it was always clear that from senior management all the way down okay ours mattered (Google's then Head of Product publicly shamed thoses who hadn't set their OKRs) // deciding how you are going to capture what the okay ours are and how they're going to be shareable inside the company this process will fail unless everyone in the company has a way to see what everybody else is working on // do I need to stop doing certain things so that I can deliver on the objectives I set… // I think this is the sort of thing you could over engineer pretty quickly the keys are not in my opinion are not the tool it's the commitment to being measurable the transparency that everything is available internally to everyone in the company and the grading process itself // if I were if I were implementing this at my own company tomorrow I want this to be a relatively lightweight process I don't think it necessarily needs to be in a meeting // in terms of grading I think it's important that people have that mid-quarter check-in so they have a sense of where they're at I think there's probably some I think diligence maybe an hour towards the end of the quarter and then a final meeting at the very beginning of the following quarter to come up with a grade // sort of virtuous cycle and I really do is not just I believe it I've seen it work the way we ensure is used to be Eric when I was when I first joined Google now Larry is the CEO there is a quarterly meeting and it is given by Larry and Larry says these are the most important things the company is working on these are the grades for what we did last quarter and now I'm going to have Vic and Orson and Susan and Jeff and each individual group head get up and explain how they did last quarter and what they're working on next quarter now that has a really important clarifying point I think most people particularly in startups want to be working on the most important things it was always very helpful for me as I was going through the process of drafting my OKRs that I would I would draft them at least in draft form and then I would attend the company OKRs meeting and I would do a reality check against the company OKRs and would want to know can I see in my OKRs the company OKRs you know is what I'm focused on reflected in what the company is most focused on … if I couldn't see the company OKRs in my individual OKRs then I would you know that's when you take the the red pen to your personal OKRs and revise // I think it's probably realistic that each individual is going to have to own the discipline of managing themselves and and maybe having only one or two check-ins and a quarter with their manager specifically against OKRs // ** At what point in a company's evolution should the management team Institute ok ours is it five people ten people fifteen more easy answer as soon as possible > the sooner this is part of the DNA of the company the sooner this is accepted as soon as this is part of the normal rhythm that the company gets in the better off you'll be … the longer you wait the longer you are going to have habits form within the company about how things are done and the more inertia you're going to have to overcome so even if it feels a little artificial if you're a company of five the discipline that it brings is immeasurable //

I'm on the train listening and having a nice nap zzz

Interesting and I think is good for startup Indonesia to be better company and employee...thanks

Excellent

🤯🤯🤯🤯 INSANE!!

You can integrate OKR if done properly.

Loved the insights shared. One question:- How the KRs are graded? Who grade KRs? I mean how it is decided that KR1 is 0.3, KR2 is 0.7...etc? If KR grades are decided by individuals, isn't it possible that the individuals will award themselves with best grades?

thank

good learning

Dear Friends, We always see positive OKR means always growing. So is there any case where OKR has a negative value?. If yes, please give an example?. Thank you.

Nice

i heard about that,google doesnt appraise staff's performance on OKR,if it's true,how does google assess staff's performance?and how does google distrabute the VALUE(salary,bonus,etc.)?

@Andrew Without translating the OKRs to individual ownership, I'm not sure how you hold people accountable in the process. I agree that there can be high-level goals within the context of a project, but this process is specifically about giving individuals the ability to set ambitious goals and then grading themselves at the end of the time period. @Szabolcs: Sorry but I don't really follow the question.

you look so much like Jared from SIlicon valley.

@Rick I'm still not convinced that an OKR-type program should NOT be an explicit element in performance evals. My reasoning: trust. If I were an employee, I would find it near impossible to believe that my performance metrics under OKRs would NOT be used in evals. For one, it is a logical assumption that evals would correlate with OKR grades, (minus the sandbaggers) thus becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. Doesn't it appear disingenuous to the employee to suggest otherwise?

Do the team objectives automatically become the managers objectives?

How about initiatives, I believe they are crucial to give clarity and progress measurements of the required tasks for all the departments and department people

Why are OKRs not considered for an individual's performance? I am curious to know. Don't you think that if they are not considered for annual appraisals, individuals will NOT pay attention to their OKR performance? Please let me know the logic behind not including OKRs for measuring individual performance. Thanks!

Alguien tendra el video con traducción a español?

Dear Google Ventures! Thanks a lot for uploading this video, it impressed me a lot. And I wanted to share it with my Russian speaking friends. So I've created Russian subtitles for this video. Is there any chanse to add this subs to video?

Hai..My name is Rachel, and I'm working on an agriculture application company. My company is about to start on implementing OKR, but in the development division they already monitoring their daily progress on Jira Software, which is more often than OKR. In this case, is it still necessary for development division to implement OKR? If it is, what's the different between OKR and Jira Software? Thank you

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥💯🏁

Interesting, a bit long but interesting to watch.

This is super useful, but enough with the 49'r's. Ugh.

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: Made with HARPA AI

Is there a short wrap up of the workshop that a could share with my colleagues. They most likely won't watch the whole video.

URL is here: tins.rklau.com/2013/05/how-google-sets-goals-okrs.html

What is Blogger anyway??

구글 내가 원하는 기업이다.. 나랑 잘어울리는 자유로운 분위기.. 난 딲 한번 문듯생각이나면 누가 말릴때까지 자신만의 세계로 빠지며 신기한 생각을 많이 한다.. 구글 내 미래의 기업 IT컨설턴트로 구글에 입사할것이다.. 구글이 날 키워주면 훨신 좋고요

#Innovation

@GV Your logo doesn't align with Google's logo. We expect Google to be a combination of Blue, Green, Red and Yellow.

TBH, John Doerr's OKRs for his presentations were not good. Although *some* of them are measurable, it's not a guarantee that they will bring any value. I've read quite a lot that this happens in businesses adopting OKRs and it just causes frustrations in many levels, because measuring output doesn't not guarantee or proof that value was added. You set the objective as "Develop X" where the Key Results are about getting X done, but then the company doesn't observe any value out of X even after achieving the KRs. Key results must measure things that bring value to the business, the customers, a department or to the individuals. It's crucial that you look at the KR and think: an increase in this metric means an increase in value, and will it undoubtedly contribute to achieving the objective?

OKR=ok result.yes or no.

Does anyone note that the speaker was using an Apple laptop? 😅

01:01:00 public OKR shaming.. :)

34:28 compaña okrs

24:00:00

The approach with those emails wont work in scandinavian countries, there you should address the team itself and make clear that you expect them to do it, so as always - addressing cultural challenges are key here. :-)

Is that Clark Kent presenting?

Pretty interesting comments about how this video should be updated: medium.com/@meetfelipe/googles-okr-video-should-be-retired-here-s-why-3c1cbe3c563d

Minuto 15:54 benefits 26:16 28:54

He should get a new OKR to not bore the viewer to death. An example of a KR could be "I will not read from the slide"...

startup-go

Reasonably good content even though it was nothing earth-shattering or novel. The topic was similar to what I have seen at almost every company I have worked for or with (e.g., Oracle, PriceWaterHouseCoopers, Netsuite). On the positive side what I believe may be effective is how well the OKR concept is practiced at the specific company. Another negative - the video was way too long. 80 minutes ????

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