Using OKRs to manage your business
How the best businesses drive clarity & focus through effective management practices
Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) define your mission-critical outcomes and bring focus to your top priorities – not be an exhaustive list of everything that your teams are working on. They are meant to be strategic north-stars for your company or organization.
Over the years I’ve seen companies use OKRs (and “SMART” goals) both effectively and ineffectively as a management philosophy. Embracing the methodology or tooling alone is not enough to succeed. To be effective, must also transform your culture so that the OKRs & Goals reflect actual working priorities of your teams.
If you aren’t committed to using OKRs to define, measure and prioritize your actual work, my opinion is you might as well not bother, and just let teams manage things as they do now. The methodologies themselves are not magic, and demanding your team embrace them will not, by itself, transform a disorganized company into a well-oiled machine. But when used right, they do help drive priority, focus, clarity and efficiency – things that I’d correlate with companies that win more often than not.
For the purposes of this article I’m going to focus on OKRs, which were pioneered by Andy Grove at Intel, and spread across Silicon Valley by John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins. OKRs are increasingly common in technology orgs, but if you were using the S.M.A.R.T. Goal (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound) methodology, much of the advice would be the same. If you want to hear one of Andy Grove’s early presentations on OKRs, while at Intel in the 70s, this Youtube video is a great historical record and worth the few minutes to watch:
To be successful with OKRs, companies must also put governance in place that set standards on how people define and manage these goals – otherwise you’ll get such a wide variety of behavior it’s difficult to know whether you’re on the right track. That’s what I’ll cover in this article.
Primary objectives of implementing OKRs
First, you should get clear what the purpose is of OKRs at your company. For me, OKRs serve the following 3 primary purposes:
Accelerating the core priorities and objectives for the business by focusing attention on the subset of efforts that are the most important to the overall success or growth areas of the company
Providing transparency across organizations on what the company’s top priorities are
Driving alignment on shared commitments within and across organizations across a company
Developing effective OKRs requires time, effort, and meaningful discussions, ensuring that they are significant within an organization but aligned with top-level company mission. Leaders within an organization must have a clear understanding of the OKRs’ meaning (and why it is important), tracking methods, and ownership.
How to make sure your OKRs matter
At a high level, the approach I’ve seen work inside a company adopting OKRs involves a “common style guide” and “nesting review” approach.
First, when setting OKRs, companies create a strict style guideline that ensures all OKRs are written in the same way, and adhere to a high standard in terms of clarity, explainability, measurability and so on. I’ll get into specific recommendations a bit further down.
Second, in terms of reviews, at the highest level, the executive leadership (C-suite, SVP) conducts periodic (monthly, quarterly) reviews, which are preceded by mandatory reviews at the next level down (VP/Director level) of management, and so on (as needed, depending on the size of the company). At the lower levels, these reviews ensure that individual teams and their leaders are actually paying attention to the OKRs, they know which ones are on/off track for completion, and are intervening as necessary to bring these OKRs back on track. As well, the nesting review structure also ensures organizations can scale, as the VPs/Directors are expected to be able to speak to the status of the OKRs when they are meeting with the executive leaders compared to requiring endless really large meetings with 100s of people.
In terms of making it effective to create, update and manage your OKRs, you can create your own system using low/no-code tools like AirTable, or use services/software like Workboard or Domo. Honestly I’ve never seen the tooling itself make the difference. Pick whatever you like.
What matters is whether or not OKRs are woven into the fabric of how people set priorities for what gets worked on, and whether all layers of management actually care about the status of the OKRs. But the tooling definitely is an improvement over everyone managing their own spreadsheet or worse, people creating PowerPoints with loads of smart-art and content-free bullets.
Before I get into more details of how to write and manage your OKRs here’s a few notes of caution before you bite off more than you can chew:
1) Watch out for OKR proliferation
The tooling (and the vendors themselves) often encourage you to create company level objectives & KRs, but then many layers of “nested” objectives/KRs down to the individual team (think 5-10 people) level. The thinking goes that this way everyone is using the OKR terminology and the same methodology. But in reality, what happens is that this creates a lot of busy-work, and you get people writing exhaustive lists of all the things they’re working on, which is the opposite of what we want in terms of focus and priority. I don’t really think of OKRs as a method to change the way people work on a daily basis, or at the furthest “leaf nodes” of an organization.
Instead, I’d strongly recommend starting with company-level objectives and a single layer of key-results underneath/aligned to those objectives, and then only focusing on those for a few cycles (several quarters, at least, but ideally a year). Other work down at the team levels can continue to be prioritized and worked on as it is now (whether that’s 1:1, or via a work tracking tool like JIRA) – but what you make clear to teams is that achieving the company-level OKRs trumps other work when there’s a conflict.
Down the road you’ll likely create a “second layer” of OKRs (so you have “company OKRs” and “divisional OKRs”) – along with some filtering inside your tool of choice. This would let you conduct company-level OKR reviews with the exec team only looking at a subset of OKRs, and divisional reviews that go a little deeper and represent more of the work that’s going on across the company. When you get to this stage it needs to be clear to your teams that if there’s a conflict, you’d still drop the “divisional” OKRs in favor of accomplishing the “company” OKRs. I’ve even seen mature orgs add “team-level OKRs”, but this one of those “down the road when you’re operating at speed” kind of things, so I would advise not worrying about this for the first couple of years. You’re not getting paid/measured by the number of OKRs you create.
2) Don’t get overly focused on dependency mapping
Many times, in a big company to achieve some company-level objective or even a key result requires multiple teams to work together (imagine a new product launch that also requires a database backend update and some go-to-market training). Some of the tooling/vendors encourage people to create complex matrices where you have many different KRs tied to each other, so that you “ensure” dependencies prioritize the work. I’ve never once seen a complex matrix of KRs/Goals inside a tool itself accomplish this goal – which is alignment and prioritization across a company.
Instead, what matters is that when you’re setting the initial OKRs, and reviewing them at the executive level, you have to first achieve buy-in from all dependencies. So if your new product launch requires 2 or 3 other teams to do work, you secure that up-front (i.e. by talking to the other teams or having the execs mandate it), before you sign-up to say “we can achieve this key result.” If there’s a prioritization conflict, bring that to the initial OKR-setting review, and have the executives or division leaders of the dependencies weigh in. But once people are signed up, executives hold them accountable and don’t allow anyone to say “that’s not one of my KRs!” This is again the point of starting with only company-level KRs, and making it clear to everyone they will de-prioritize other efforts if needed, to meet these company-level goals. It matters less what the tool/system says, and more what the leaders agree they’re signed up to and what the execs hold people to at every review.
3) Use the tooling to hold people accountable in writing
In order for the review meetings to be an effective use of peoples’ time, you need your OKR owners to write crisp, brief status updates in the tracking system/tooling you’ve chosen. You don’t want many paragraph essays or project plans, you don’t want random email or Slack messages, a number itself isn’t enough, and you’re not just waiting to hear what they have to say (although that matters too) when you probe them. Just a couple of sentences on whether the OKR is on-track, at-risk, or off-track – and if either of the latter, what the team is doing about it to bring it back on-track. What’s the reason I so strongly recommend a written update?
If you have a whole bunch of OKRs, and you can verify most of them are on-track mostly by scanning the recency of the update and a couple sentence summary of the current state, you can focus the bulk of your discussion time on the KRs that are at-risk or off-track. This is a huge time-saver at any large company.
If you allow people to skip out on this written status update step I guarantee you’ll have inefficient meetings where people don’t know the status of their OKRs because they haven’t bothered to check-in/get a written update from their team – who are usually the ones writing the actual update; or talk endlessly on things that where a quick scan would tell more information in less time; or worse – it allows them to give a non-answer to a goal that’s actually yellow or red.
It’s a low-cost method to ensure people are actually auditing (looking at and thinking about) the status of their OKRs, plus it works at any scale. Plus, if you got really disciplined you could even review these status updates asynchronously with no meeting required, with an automated audit of “stale OKRs” (out-of-date) and execs probing the teams directly on a few of the KRs by email/Slack/etc.
Again, the goal isn’t to make people write essays as status updates, nor is the goal of the discussion focus to chastise people for OKRs that aren’t on track. Any organization with sufficient ambition is going to take some stretch goals and fail to achieve everything it sets out to. Written status updates are just the bedrock of an efficient, non-personalized focus on the objectives and results themselves, vs being focused on the speaking ability of the person giving the status update.
With that out of the way, let’s get into how you can write effective objectives & key results (KRs), and how you can manage to them within your company.
How to Write Good Objectives
I’d recommend starting with a very small number of Objectives for the entire company. These are usually qualitative, visionary and connected to your larger mission. As I mentioned above, I don’t recommend starting with layers of OKRs (e.g. exec, division, team). Crafting effective vision and mission statements is beyond the scope of this post, but maybe I’ll come back to it another time. For reference when I was previously at Amazon, with its 1M+ employees and $500B+ in revenue, we only had a couple of layers (effectively “exec” and “division”) of goals (amazon used SMART goals vs OKRs and a homegrown web-based system to manage them).
Assuming you already have this vision/mission outlines, something like 3-5 objectives is probably enough to get started, considering you can have a number of key results tied to each of those objectives. Often times objectives are durable & repeated across years, where the KRs typically change each year.
You could create objectives like “Achieve a leadership position in <industry/market segment>”, “complete the transition of our business model from perpetual to subscription”, “Improve execution and efficiency across the company such that we are no longer a blocker to our own innovation”
These are of course too high-level and you’ll want to create things that are connected with your vision and mission statement, and relevant to the specific time-frame and priorities of your company. You want the objectives to be written such that if you achieved all of them, you’d be positioned for long-term success. So you do have to think a bit about what some aligned KRs might be, but don’t let the KRs drive the objectives. It should be easy for anyone, at any level of the company to understand why these are the company objectives, and then ideally to align their effort to these objectives (or to ask their management how their efforts align).
Writing Good KRs
With objectives out of the way, the bulk of the work is creating crisp KRs that align to these objectives. Clear and consistent formatting is crucial for effective communication of OKRs across teams. Here I have a number of really specific guidelines. It may sound overly pedantic, and if you were a 10 person startup, these would be overkill. But once you hit 100, 500, 1000 people, having a style guideline that ensures every KR is written with the same kind of language, means significantly less “translation” between teams and also makes it easier to write status updates, because the KR itself communicates how it should be measured.
When setting key results, I recommend the following style guidelines (many more examples in the appendix):
Require Metrics: Use specific, quantifiable metrics that are relevant to the objective. For example, if the objective is related to increasing product growth, the key result could be to increase consumption by 20% from the previous quarter, or increasing the number of customers by 100% over the previous year. Use specific units of measurement, such as percentages, dollars, or units.
Utilize From/To: Use the format "from X to Y" to indicate the starting and ending points of a key result. For example, if the objective is to increase customer satisfaction, the key result could be to increase satisfaction ratings from 50% to 90%. From/To is a very powerful way to indicate the magnitude of the key result. For example “Improve system availability from 98.5% to 99.99%” is a significant improvement for anyone that understands system uptime/downtime metrics. If you instead wrote “improve availability by 1.4%” it’s not clear whether you’re starting at 10% or 90%. Even if you write “Improve availability by 150 basis points” it’s less powerful, and doesn’t indicate why it matters.
Discourage “and” Key Results: (Example: “Onboard top 2000 customers increase their consumption of core features from 30% to 80%”). If the second part of this KR has not been met, but the first has been met or even over-achieved, this KR still “failed.” It will be more helpful if we split this KR into 2 KRs
Utilize picklists to allow for in-year flexibility. If you’re doing annual OKR planning one question you might commonly ask is “I don’t always plan those a year in advance, but I still care about launching new features” – I actually think this is a great impulse – you don’t want to lock-in a KR that you can’t change (or that you “fail”) when you get customer feedback that causes you to make an intelligent pivot half-way through the year. So you can use “pick-lists” such as “Launch at least 5 new features that improve enterprise adoption for <product>” – if you’re mature enough, you can go further by adding “such as (feature a, b, c, d, e, f)” when you already have some idea of what those features might be. But even having the picklist without the features defined is an indication that you care about features in this area, while avoiding locking yourself into the KR so far in advance of the actual development work.
Mix Input and output Key Results (KRs) - these serve as complementary metrics for tracking progress and measuring the success of a project or product. There’s no magic ratio here, but these are different ways to look at what’s important for success. Both matter.
Input Metrics KRs focus on functionality and feature delivery (e.g. “deliver new product <x> by H2 2024”, “launch at least 5 new features that improve usability by the end of 2024”, “produce 6 win wires by Q1 2024”)
Output Metrics KRs measure the tangible impact of those features, such as cost reduction, adoption, or revenue growth (e.g. “increase user engagement by 15% by the end of 2024”, “reduce customer churn rate from X% to Y% for <product> by the end of Q2 2024”
Encourage teams to define “how the KR will be measured” – This can usually be done inside the tooling in a supplemental field inside. These “what is the definition of done” statements also promote accountability and transparency, and for the teams to think through where there might be ambiguity. This especially matters for KRs such as “improve customer satisfaction from x to y” or “reduce initial onboarding time from x to y” where it’s not always obvious how you’d know you hit the KR you defined.
Standardize on words - Come up with guidance for how dates, numbers, dollar figures, units of measure, etc are written. Anything else is common language for your business, just tell people there’s one way to write it. This cuts down on visual clutter in the KRs and makes it easy not to guess what someone is writing.
Over time you’ll likely create more style guidelines of your own that cut down on the amount of time you need to spend translating the KR or interpreting it in your head. A good KR is so well written that you could jump to any department from another across even the biggest company, and immediately understand what matters to them even if you don’t understand their business.
The appendix at the end has some more examples of KRs that meet these guidelines as well as even more specific guidance on metrics/acronyms
Managing OKRs Through the Year
Typically I’ve seen objectives sourced from the top-down (via executive offsites, or annual planning processes or similar) and KRs sourced from the “bottom-up” - where a VP and their team works together to define what they think their organization can deliver that matters to achieve the company objectives. I’ve seen successful organizations communicate the objectives and ask for KRs at the beginning of an annual planning cycle, and then review them collectively some weeks later, but before the teams produce their annual plans. This way teams not only get to hear whether or not their KRs meet the bar for a company-level KR, but also hear feedback for the KRs proposed for the other divisions/group. This helps in reinforcing these are company goals and there is no “pocket-veto” where a division later gets to claim they weren’t involved in setting the KRs.
Now that you’ve gotten your KRs crisply written, and you’ve agreed as a company to the company level KRs, you need to review them with your own teams and the executives periodically. Company level OKRs should be reviewed and updated frequently in preparation for executive review which can occur at a regular, but not overly frequent, basis. I’d recommend monthly exec reviews at most, and quarterly reviews at the least.
Reviewing goals weekly is too often, as you don’t make progress on a consistent weekly basis. Again, OKRs are not about micro-managing teams down at the individual work level. Conversely, reviewing goals only half-yearly or yearly provides too much opportunity for things to go astray and you not to have noticed in time. As well, if you’re only doing things once or twice a year, you miss out on the benefit of creating a shared culture around the OKRs and their priority.
The purpose of executive reviews is to assess the progress of all Key Results, but I typically recommend focusing discussion on the KRs that are at-risk or off-track (often referred to as “yellow” or “red” in typical goal-setting terminology). As mentioned earlier, using a common tool/system as the source of truth for tracking provides a centralized platform for up-to-date information and progress reports. Having everyone slap together a Word/PowerPoint/Email update is a huge waste of everyone’s time. It’s 2023, let’s act like it. In preparation for each executive review, it is crucial for each team to update their Key Results in this tool.
How might this look at my company?
Imagine at your company you’ve been growing very rapidly, onboarding 10s or 100s of new staff in the past months, branching out into new business areas. So you’ve decided to do monthly OKR reviews at the executive level. For this example I’ll use colors for KR status: Green for on-track, yellow for “at risk” and red for KRs that are “off-track”. With that, I’d recommend you implement something like the following mechanisms and guidance to your teams:
Team update - Each organization (division, team) should implement a process to update their KRs Bi-weekly. Ideally every 2 weeks, but worst case, ensuring that KRs are updated no more than 2 weeks before the executive reviews.
Divisional Leader pre-review - Either synchronously in a meeting, or asynchronously/offline, divisional leaders discuss their KRs with their staff, prior to exec review - and are prepared to speak to them directly.
Executive review consistent of reviewing and discussing the detailed status updates in the system of record (or a direct export if needed for easier viewing), with the focus being the KRs that are at-risk and off-track. Ideally KRs that are on-track require no discussion or only a brief discussion (this allows for meeting efficiency with a large number of KRs, although often times the first couple of meetings all KRs are reviewed).
Guidance for KR status updates
When providing updates, KR owners shouldn’t just state whether the goal is on-track/at risk/off-track, but provide a clear a concise 1-2 sentence explanation of the status of the KR in complete sentences. “We are at X% of Y goal because of <reasons/work completed>. We are doing <the following work/launches> in the next (week/s, month/s, or quarter/s)”. Stick to the facts. No editorializing is needed as the status (see #3 below) and path-to-green (see #5 below) help provide additional context. The more you can communicate quantitatively the less the person reading the KR has to “guess” whether or not you can support the status.
When determining the “color” for your status, trust that each team will be able to assign the most accurate level to their KRs based on their knowledge and experience within the organization. However, here are some basic guidelines:
Green: If your progress is on track to meet the KR by the defined deadline, and the pace of progress indicates a high likelihood of meeting the goal. For example, this might involve achieving a certain percentage of the goal within a specific time frame, such as 50% completion within the first half of the project timeline.
Yellow: If you are making progress, but at a slower pace than required to achieve the goal by the deadline. For example, this might involve achieving less than the expected percentage of the goal within the specified time frame, such as 25% completion within the first half of the project timeline.
Red: If progress is significantly slower than required to meet the goal, or if there are significant obstacles that are out of the control of the working team/s that make the goal potentially unattainable. For example, this might involve the team encountering obstacles that balloon the scope to deliver the intended functionality.
Use interim milestones in the status update to increase confidence. Break down the timeline into smaller periods as needed (e.g., if it's a full year goal, divide the progress across 4 quarters). Set intermediate targets that, if met, will keep you on track to achieve the full-year/period KR. If you expect linear results growing some metric from 0 to 100, and have achieved 25 by the end of 1/4th of the time period, reporting “green” makes sense. If you have achieved 0 out of 100 by ½ of the time period, you are unlikely to be green. In the case where you do not have a starting point, such as “release x features in y time frame”, use your judgement (i.e. if you’ve released 1 out of 5 features and have 1 month left to go, you’re probably not green). Lastly, in the case where you are expecting a non-linear ramp-up (i.e. 25% in the first half, 75% in the second half), indicate so in the narrative.
Path to Green: In you are yellow (at risk) or red (off-track) in status, include a clear 'path to green' in the narrative update. This can be explicitly called out by writing “ [PATH TO GREEN]: <Remediation/steps being taken go here>.” This should include specific, actionable steps to overcome obstacles and accelerate progress . For Red status, where there's no clear path to green, you should indicate how close you expect to get to the original goal by the end of the KR period. Also, you may request guidance from the leadership team regarding potential interventions that might get the KR back on track, such as de-prioritizing another KR or allocating additional resources (even if this is outside the authority of the team that owns the KR, teams can float this for discussion).
See the appendix for more details on how to write an effective status update
Lather, Rinse, Repeat. That’s really all there is to it. The discussion should drive action on KRs that need attention, and the style/meeting guidance ensures efficiency of overhead.
Takeaways
OKRs and the associated methodology represent a powerful approach to setting and managing priorities, fostering focus within organizations of any size. Beyond the initial startup phase, OKRs facilitate the translation of ideas and informal efforts into easily comprehensible and trackable goals for your company. When utilized effectively, OKRs can cut through the clutter that often arises during rapid organizational growth or when operating at a large scale.
By implementing lightweight combination of common tools, language and mechanisms for OKR implementation, the overhead associated with OKRs can be significantly reduced. While it's crucial to acknowledge the cultural change required to transition from ad-hoc work organization to a more formalized structure, it's equally important for executives to demonstrate commitment by actively setting and reviewing OKRs. Doing so ensures that organizations can fully reap the benefits of this goal-setting approach.
Appendix: Detailed Style Guidelines
A. Some ways to write Key Results based on types of goals:
Launch Goal (Launch <X>): “Launch self-service onboarding feature by the end of Q1”
Completion Goal (Complete <Y> Document): “Complete product specification document by the end of H1 2024”
Increase Metric Goal (Increase <X Metric> from A to B): “Increase coverage for top 2200 customers from 30% to 90% by the end of 2024”
Decrease Problem Goal (Decrease <Problem/Challenge> from C to D): “Decrease production defects from 5% to 2% by the end of H1 2024”
Launch Features Goal (Launch at least <Z> Features): “Launch at least five new features in <product X> by the end of FY24”
Maintain Metric Goal (Maintain <Metric> at/below/above <Z Threshold>): “Maintain customer satisfaction (CSAT) score above 95% throughout 2024
Consumption Goal (Increase consumption of <Product/Service> by X%): Increase the consumption by 25% by the end of FY24 as measured by <metric here>”
Feature Adoption Goal (Increase adoption of <Feature> by X%): Increase adoption of <feature Y> by 30% by the end of Q2 2024 as measured by number of customers using <feature Y> at least once/week”
B. Examples of “How will this be measured”:
KR1: Increase sales specialist coverage for top 2200 customers from 30% to 90% by the end of FY24. How will this be measured: At least 90% of customers identified as in <special strategic segment> have a technical account manager (TAM) and solutions engineer (SE) as reported by <sales operationsl system of record.
KR2: Decrease production defects from 5% to 2% by the end of H1 2024 . How will this be measured: Record the number of defects per production batch and calculate the defect rate as a percentage of total production. Track and report the defect rate on a monthly/quarterly basis, and compare it to the baseline rate of 5%. Ensure that the defect rate has decreased to 2% or lower by the end of H1.
KR3: Maintain customer satisfaction (CSAT) score above 95% throughout 2024 . How will this be measured:Using 3rd party customer satisfaction surveys conducted by <vendor>, calculate the average CSAT score for each survey period. Track and report the CSAT score on a monthly basis, and ensure that it remains above 95% throughout FY24.
C. Units of Measure and acronym standards:
Dates:
Use the following format if KR is set for Monthly/Quarterly/Half Year: M1 2024, Q1 2024, H1 2024.
Use the format YYYY-MM-DD for all specific dates. For example, if the objective is to launch a new product by June 30th, 2023, the date should be written as 2023-06-30.
Make sure to specify the date in the KR itself, even if the tooling provides a “complete by” field (so a KR might be “launch new product <x> by H2 2024”)
Number:
Use "k" for thousands and "m" for millions. For example, 5,000,000 units can be written as 5m units.
For customer counts, use "k" for thousands and "m" for millions. For example, 25,000 customers can be written as 25k customers.
Currency:
Use "$k" for thousands, "$m" for millions, and "$b" for billions. For example, $500,000 can be written as $500k, and $5,000,000,000 can be written as $5b.
Use "EUR" for Euro and "GBP" for British Pound. For example, EUR 500,000 can be written as EUR 500k.
Percentage:
Use "%" to indicate percentage. Leverage the following format when writing KRs updates to remove ambiguity “ has improved from <x%> to <y%> or from to , a <z%> YoY/MoM/QoQ improvement”.
Example KR: Increase the number of active users from 100k to 200k, a 100% YoY increase, by the end of FY24. KR Update: In Q1, we have increased the number of monthly active users from 100k to 180k, an 80% increase, and we are on track to achieving 220k monthly active users by the end of FY24, an increase of 120%, exceeding our goal of 100% YoY monthly active users increase.
Example KR: Reduce the number of open support tickets from 50 to 10, an 80% improvement, by the end of H1FY24. KR Update: In Q1 we have reduced the number of tickets from 50 to 30, a 40% improvement, and we are confident we will reach our goal of 10 by the end of H1FY24
When expressing more minor percentage improvements/changes, leverage basis points (BPs). For example, instead of saying, ‘Increase availability of from 99.9% to 99.95%, an improvement of .05%’, it would be better to say ‘Increase availability of from 99.9% to 99.95%, an improvement of 50 BPs’.
Another example of leveraging BPs would be “Reduce the error rate from 1.5% to 1.3%, an improvement of 20 BPs.”
When measuring changes in metrics (a-c), use the acronyms MoM for Month over Month, QoQ for Quarter over Quarter, YoY for Year over Year to ensure consistency and clarity in communication.
D. Status Update Examples:
Sample KR: Increase sales specialist coverage for the strategic segment customers from 30% to 90% by the end of 2024.
Green: As of Q1, we have successfully expanded our sales specialist coverage for Strategic Segment customers from 30% to 40%. Our increase of 10% aligns with our plan for the year, which anticipates an accelerating increase per quarter to hit the 90% target by FY24 end. The quarterly targets are set as follows: 40% in Q1, 50% in Q2, 70% in Q3, and 90% in Q4. With the current progress and forecast, we have a high level of confidence that we will achieve our FY24 target.
Yellow: We have achieved 40% sales specialist coverage for the Strategic Segment, a 10% increase from 30%. We are behind schedule in Q2, due to delays in hiring the necessary resources. [PATH TO GREEN]: To address this challenge, we are working with a contract recruiting firm to augment our pipeline and throughput and are confident we can catch up to Q2’s target coverage.
Red: We have achieved 35% sales specialist coverage for the Strategic Segment, a 5% increase from 30%. At the current pace we forecast we will end the year at only 55% coverage. The slow progress is due to being 50% below our intended hiring target at this point in the year, as well as the defunding of the recruiting team. At this stage, there is no viable path to achieve the 90% target by the end of FY24. Path to Green: We are seeking guidance from the leadership team to address resourcing concerns, and allocate the necessary resources to move forward - meeting scheduled for 06/18/2023.
Sample KR: Grow average monthly active users from 100k to 130k by the end of 2024, an increase of 30%.
Green: As of the end of Q1, we have successfully increased our average monthly active users to 103k. This represents a YoY growth of 3%, which is in line with our ramp plan for the fiscal year. The quarterly targets are set as follows: 103k in Q1, 110k in Q2, 118k in Q3, and 130k in Q4. Given our current progress, we have a high level of confidence that we are on track to achieve our year-end target.
Yellow: We saw a surge in our average monthly active users to 108k in Q1, demonstrating a promising start with an 8% YoY increase. However, we've since seen a slowdown and our user count currently (Q2) stands at 110k, which indicates only a 10% YoY growth. The slowed growth is attributed to challenges in maintaining user engagement and competitive pressure in the market. With the current growth rate, we are at risk of stalling out and missing our 30% growth goal.[PATH TO GREEN]: To mitigate this, we have initiated targeted marketing campaigns (starting xx/yy/zz date to attract new users and enhance user engagement. We're also doubling down on improving the user experience to increase user retention.
Red: From Q1 until today, Q2, we have only managed to grow our average monthly active users to 105k, 5% YoY increase. The slower than expected growth rate is due to increased competition in our market from <other product here> and decline in retention from existing customers. Path to Green: We are reviewing the proposed targeted marketing campaigns, but need management approve for the funding - meeting is scheduled for 07/01/2023.
Sample KR: Release 5 new product features that drive user engagement for <product> by the end of Q3.
Green: We have successfully developed and released 3 of the 5 planned features by the mid of Q2 including <feature a>, <feature b>, and <feature c>. User feedback has been positive with improvements in <metric here>. We are on track to complete the remaining 2 features (<feature d>, <feature e>) by the end of Q3
Yellow: We have released <feature a> & <feature b> by the mid of Q2, but are facing some delays in <feature c-e> due to unexpected technical challenges. The released features are showing promising initial signs of driving user engagement, but the slower pace puts us at risk of not meeting our target by end of Q3. [PATH TO GREEN]: We are focusing on resolving the technical issues and have allocated additional resources to expedite the development of the remaining features, at the expense of <other initiative>
Red: We have only managed to release <feature a> by mid Q2. Despite the successful launch of this feature, we have encountered significant obstacles. Early user feedback on for <feature b> and <feature c> created confusion amongst beta testers. We believe it’ll take significant time to re-tool and get these features into positive shape for launch, putting us at risk of launching only 3 features this year. No Path to Green: Given that it’s late in Q2 we don’t believe we have a path to launch more than 3 features by the end of Q3.
E. Example of Red Status Update with previous discussions but unable to address the blocker/s to get back to yellow or green
Sample KR: Release 5 new product features by Q4.
Red: We've released 1 feature in Q1, falling short of our plan which had anticipated the release of 2 features in this quarter.The main challenge is a technical dependency issue with our current platform that was not anticipated when the KR was set. Despite our efforts to mitigate this, the problem persists. At this rate, we are likely to release only 3 features by the year-end.Will not Meet Goal/No Path To Green: After detailed discussions with the leadership team, it was decided that the necessary resources needed to achieve our original goal of releasing 5 features will not be allocated due to other prioritized operational improvements. Therefore, although we are confident we can deliver 3 features by the end of the year, there is currently no viable path to meet our initial target. This goal is expected to stay red for the remainder of the year.F. More examples of Green Confidence Narratives for KRs with "ramp" or plan for smaller/more intermediate timeframes, KRs with no exact starting point/baseline, and KRs with expected slow ramp-up progress:
Sample KR: Increase customer satisfaction score from 75 to 85 by the end of 2024.
Green: At the end of Q1, our customer satisfaction score is at 78, 3 points above our quarterly target of 75. This represents a positive increase from our starting point and we are on track to achieve our yearly target of 85. Our plan is to increase the score by 2-3 points each quarter, and our performance in Q1 aligns with this plan.Sample KR: Reduce product defects from 100 to 50 by the end of 2024.
Green: At the close of Q1, we have reduced product defects to 85, meeting our Q1 target. This progress is encouraging and indicates that we are on schedule to meet our FY24 goal of reducing defects to 50. Our roadmap calls for a reduction of approximately 12-15 defects per quarter, and our Q1 performance is consistent with this trajectory.Sample KR (No beginning baseline): Release 20 new features by the end of 2024.
Green: As of the end of Q1, we have successfully released 3 new features (<list here>), meeting our quarterly target. Given the nature of software development cycles, we expected a slower start in Q1 as our development team focused on building the foundation for multiple features. Moving forward, our roadmap predicts an increase in the pace of releases: 4 features in Q2, 6 in Q3, and 7 in Q4. This will allow us to meet our yearly goal of 20 new features. At this rate, we are confident that we are on track to achieve our full-year KR.Sample KR (Slow ramp-up): Secure $5M in government contracts by the end of 2024
Green: As we anticipated a slow start, our Q1 result of securing $500k in government contracts aligns with our projected ramp-up for the fiscal year. We understand that the lengthy procurement processes involved in securing government contracts often result in a slower Q1. However, our pipeline of potential contracts is strong, and we are on track to secure the forecasted $4M by the end of FY24. The ramp plan for the remaining quarters includes a steady increase in contract acquisition, targeting $1M in Q2, $1.5M in Q3, and $2M in Q4, which should culminate in us achieving our full-year target.