My eight key takeaways from Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke.
- You need a method of setting and achieving goals, which is what OKRs are. But it's tempting to just try to apply the OKR technique, without giving people the freedom and trust to figure out how to achieve them.
- You can't just set up goals and hope they happen. Willpower is not enough. You have to execute against them as a team. You need a cadence that keeps you on track. A plan to get things done.
- Objective is what you want to do. Key Results are how you know if you have achieved them. They keep the objectives real. You create them by asking, "How would we know if we met our objective?"
- Only have one Objective with three Key Results. Focus is hard, but it's necessary. OKRs don't work if you stuff them full of every single business-as-usual initiative you have going. And don't try to jam years of work into a single quarter.
- But running a business, a product, or a team takes work all by itself. So what about everything else we have to do? They don't need OKRs, as they are not regularly looking for radical improvements. You monitor the OKRs while tracking the things you want to protect while shooting for the moon.
- In a big organization not everyone will lead; some will support. You don't need an OKR for every department. We can't all be the hero of the story. Give respect to supporting folks.
- We value the things we make together. Set your Objectives and pick your Key Results together as a team.
- The farther we predict into the future, the less accurate our predications become. But without a long-term goal, it's hard to make long-term plans and move from reactive to strategic. We solve this by having a specific goal for the near future, and lightweight drafts for the less knowable far future.
A focused goal. Inspiring and measurable. Tracked regularly. That's the core of OKRs.
