OKRs for Personal Goals: 5 Key Takeaways
Five key takeaways in the context of personal goal setting from reading ‘Measure What Matters’ by John Doerr
Running a successful startup or any business is super tough and highly competitive nowadays, and achieving success requires more than just setting goals — it demands a strategic approach to measurement and management. John Doerr’s book “Measure What Matters” delves deep into the world of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) and offers valuable insights into how organizations can drive performance, foster innovation, and cultivate a culture of accountability. In this article, I’ll share some of my key takeaways from reading the book from the context of product teams and how we could apply some concepts to personal goals.
Example of OKRs: Consider a personal goal for the next 7 years, such as learning a new language. To gauge progress and effectiveness, the Objective could be to achieve proficiency in Spanish within 7 years.
Key Results for 2024 might include:
1. Consistently dedicate 10 minutes daily to learning Spanish on Duolingo (or a similar online platform).
2. Attain an A1 level of proficiency on Duolingo.
3. Engage in a continuous 1-minute conversation with a native Spanish speaker.
Top 5 key takeaways:
1. Focus and Prioritize
Product team: At the very core of OKRs is that the tool gives the product team to really prioritize the time and resources to achieve strategic objectives with measurable milestones.
Personal Goal Setting: I’ve wasted hours and hours of my free time with mindless scrolling or playing online blitz chess when I do not plan my after-work hours, at home. The simple act of writing personal goals at the start of the year and at the start of each day keeps me focused. At work, I start each day by writing my top 2-3 goals. Taking 2–3 minutes to reflect and write those two to three things I wanted to accomplish keeps me focused for the rest of the day.
Measuring what matters begins with the question: What is most important for the next three (or six, or twelve) months? What are our main priorities for the coming period? Where should people concentrate their efforts? An effective goal-setting system starts with disciplined thinking at the top, with leaders who invest the time and energy to choose what counts.
“The art of management,” Grove wrote, “lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.”
2. 20% of time on moonshots (10X goals)
Product team:
This specific idea, I find more relevant for big organizations which are thinking about the next Billion dollar revenue ideas.
What if you allocate 20% of your R&D budget to moonshot ideas?
What new products and services can we create 10 times better than the competition?
Personal Goal Setting:
In the context of personal goal setting, what this concept of 10X goals(‘Aspirational goals’) reminded me of is what my current boss used to tell me about ‘work on your core strengths.’ Some questions for reflection on this idea- What can I create in 1 hour which might take 10 hours for other people to produce similar output? What is the one thing that I can do 10 times better than everybody else?
The antithesis of cascading might be Google’s “20 percent time,” which frees engineers to work on side projects for the equivalent of one day per week. By liberating some of the sharpest minds in captivity, Google has changed the world as we know it. In 2001, the young Paul Buchheit initiated a 20 percent project with the code name Caribou . It’s now known as Gmail, the world’s leading web-based email service.
The Gospel of 10x
The way Page sees it, a ten percent improvement means that you’re doing the same thing as everybody else. You probably won’t fail spectacularly, but you are guaranteed not to succeed wildly.
That’s why Page expects Googlers to create products and services that are ten times better than the competition. That means he isn’t satisfied with discovering a couple of hidden efficiencies or tweaking code to achieve modest gains. Thousand percent improvement requires rethinking problems, exploring what’s technically possible and having fun in the process.
There is no one magic number for the “right” stretch. But consider this: How can your team create maximum value? What would amazing look like? If you seek to achieve greatness, stretching for amazing is a great place to start.
3. Align Personal goals with Company goals
Product team:
Any product team that has a good list of potential 10X ideas would find it easy to get their product approved if they can align the project OKRs and potential outcomes to the company OKRs.
Personal Goal Setting:
It’s crucial to sync personal goals with team and manager objectives for success. For instance, proposing a 10X idea with a 70% risk of failure becomes more viable when strategically aligned with the company’s OKRs.
Studies have told us forever that frontline employees thrive when they can see how their work aligns to the company’s overall goals. I’ve found this especially true at our remote sites. I’ve heard it from people in Bangalore: “My objective is directly a key result of my manager’s OKR, which ties directly to the top-level EBS objective, which ties to the company’s shift to the cloud. Now I understand how what I’m doing in India connects to the company mission.” That’s a powerful realization. OKRs have consolidated our far-flung department. Thanks to structured, visible goal setting, our boundaries have melted away.
4. The feeling of progress
Product team:
Measuring the progress of a product team is simplified when evaluated against quarterly Key Results. Additionally, tracking progress against committed objectives, where achieving 100% is the target, and aspirational objectives, such as 10X goals, where reaching 70% achievement signifies success, enhances the team’s performance evaluation framework.
Personal Goal Setting:
Recently, I achieved my 1 year streak on Duolingo. When I think about this, I realize that it’s the mind shift change I had towards learning something new or developing a new hobby a couple of years ago. I have come to appreciate that being ‘consistent’ and developing a ‘habit of learning’ is far more important than mastering a new skill or hobby ‘faster’. One of my two key results for learning Spanish is
1. Keep up the streak on Duolingo
2. Finish X new chapters by the end of 2024.
Truth be told, I had similar key results for myself last year, of which I didn’t achieve my 2nd one. However, I am trying to embrace the importance of consistency and what it can do for me in the long run. If you are reading this, curious to hear your thoughts on this topic.
An optimal OKR system frees contributors to set at least some of their own objectives and most or all of their key results. People are led to stretch above and beyond, to set more ambitious targets and achieve more of those they set: “ The higher the goals, the higher the performance.” People who choose their destination will own a deeper awareness of what it takes to get there.
“The single greatest motivator is ‘making progress in one’s work.’ The days that people make progress are the days they feel most motivated and engaged.”
5. Guide to finding ‘North Star’
Product team:
The key insight for me is that finding the ‘North star’ for any product would take time and analysis/ synthesis of key learnings from customer behavior but OKRs as a tool, would help product team discover the ‘North star’ metric in a short timeframe.
Some questions to reflect:
What is the one metric for which you would optimize your efforts?
What is the one key metric that can meaningfully move our efforts towards achieving our objective faster and the revenue needle for the company?
Personal Goal Setting:
When I think of ‘North star’ metric in the context of personal goal setting, I get reminded of the concept of ‘wildly important goal’ that Carl Newport talks about in his book ‘Deep Work’. There are a lot of ways to interpret ‘wildly important goals’ in the context of personal goal setting(Newport clearly defines this in his book, check my notes). My interpretation of this would be to prioritize the one goal that can bring the most fulfilment to oneself.
When users spend more of their valuable time watching YouTube videos, they must perforce be happier with those videos. It’s a virtuous circle: More satisfied viewership (watch time) begets more advertising, which incentivizes more content creators, which draws more viewership. Our true currency wasn’t views or clicks — it was watch time. The logic was undeniable. YouTube needed a new core metric.
Daily watch time is driven by two factors: the average number of daily active viewers (or DAVs) and the average amount of time those viewers spend watching.
Cristos: Whenever you get new leadership, everything’s up for review. When Susan took over YouTube, she wasn’t obligated to get behind the billion-hour OKR. That was the previous administration’s goal. She could have reverted to a views goal, or one more oriented toward revenue. Or she could have kept the watch-time OKR but added three others of equal or greater priority. Had she done any of those things, we would never have reached the billion hours on time. We’d have gotten distracted and never caught up.
~Rahul Sekar
P.S.: Here are my notes from reading the ‘Measure What Matters’ book.
