OKR: Achieving a higher level of alignment by the Vidio Product team in less than 6 weeks using Objectives and Key Results

Beginning in this quarter (Q4 2019), the Product group of Vidio.com has started to implement Objectives and Key Results (OKR). The idea is to better align each individual within the Product team with the company goals or targets.

The team is engaged with Product Narrative, through its learning program, to adopt OKR as part of its execution discipline.

This writeup is intended to briefly describe the adoption process during the past 6 weeks, including what the team has learned and the (impressive) progress the team has made.

A. Kickoff

In the 4-hour kickoff meeting, we well covered:

1. OKR fundamentals

We discussed a variety of topics, ranging from conceptual to implementation-specific inquiries, such as:

• Why it is highly important to have your OKR written down or recorded, instead of communicated verbally
• Differences between a task and an outcome (and why it’s important to aim for an outcome)
• Alignment between a company or top-line OKR, departmental or team OKR, and individual OKR; and, how to link them all together

2. Cadence setup

Cadence in OKR essentially refers to the check-ins or conversations that should happen regularly to discuss the state of your OKR. We decided on a weekly cadence. Thus, every week, at the same time slot, the respective participants will:

• Review and self-score their previous week OKRs, and
• Declare the OKRs they’re committed to achieving this week

We also covered the items to prepare and discuss in the weekly cadence, how and where to maintain the OKR dashboard, and so on.

3. Another round of review of Product OKR (Q4 2019)

Prior to this kickoff meeting, the Product leadership had prepared the Product OKR beforehand. Hence, in this meeting, all other Product Managers contributed their thoughts and feedback to re-sharpen the Product OKR.

For Q4 2019, the Product team agreed to aim for n Objectives, supported by x Key Results. (The real numbers for n and x are undisclosed to protect confidentiality.) This set of OKRs essentially represents what the Product team believes in and is committed to, in order to support Vidio.com achieve its goals this year.

B. What We Learned in the Past 6 Weeks (Oct & Nov 2019)

It is easy to notice that the Product team has demonstrated a lot of progress throughout this program. In this writeup, we’ll focus on the following two (2):

1. Cadence and Transparency

The team has built a respectable level of discipline, in which each participant's OKR is written down, self-scored, and discussed. 6 weeks, without fail.

Even when a participant was not present (e.g. sick leave), the team could refer to her OKR because it's written down.

And, perhaps the best thing is that all of these weekly individual OKR and learning points are properly recorded in the OKR Dashboard.

2. Outcome-based Thinking or Planning

A Key Result measures outcomes, instead of outputs. An output is something you do (i.e. a task), an outcome is something that happens as a consequence of what you do.

The team has been practicing to think and plan in terms of outcome. We noticed the team had to exert a lot of effort to get familiar with this shift in the first two weeks. However, after a few passes of trial and error, the team’s ability to spot the difference between outcome and task has started to develop.

Thus, rather than writing a KR like "I will have a meeting with [partner A] to discuss hard-bundling” (an output), one started to move towards “A go or no-go decision about hard-bundling with [partner A] is communicated to the Chief Commercial Officer” (an outcome).

Other real examples we noticed to illustrate this learning point:

Outcome-based planning is one of the most important skills everyone must keep practicing to let OKR run effectively. Besides the good progress in this area, Product Narrative will continue to guide and coach the team to stay focused on this particular learning point for a few more weeks until each individual really gets the hang of it (disclaimer: because it’s hard).

Closing Thoughts

I'm delighted to witness the high level of enthusiasm shown by the Product team. This should explain the noticeable progress collected within this relatively short period of group learning.

(How high is the enthusiasm? We ever spent 3.5 hours to complete our weekly cadence! It was exceptionally long because of the unexpectedly high number of learning points that came up from the discussion. And, all participants stayed around until the end of it.)

In addition, we’re also happy to hear some positive feedback from one Human Resources (HR) personnel about how efficient OKR has structured the coordination amongst the team members. This HR person attended one of our OKR cadences as an observer.