So you have to write OKRs. Some observations and advice from 10 years in SaaS.

The New Year can bring forward a variety of emotions but if you are a breathing ape like me, than there is no doubt that one of those emotions is spine-chilling anxiety the moment the letters O-K-R are mentioned in a meeting. If your team is organized, you have done some of this work for the new year in the prior months and shouldn’t be scrambling, but given you are likely reading this in January, it’s okay, we will get through this, together.

My first time writing Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

My first experience of OKRs was while at a break-neck start-up, Booksy. I had secured a spot on a small growth team working on autonomous DMs on Instagram from Influencers to purchase a $30/month software, in 2018. Wild. I had gone from slinging the same product door to door on the streets of Orlando Florida and Johannesburg South Africa. And now I found myself working in growth marketing, having to write OKRs. Its safe to say that I had close to zero idea what OKR meant but in good confidence I responded with a nod when asked if I had used them before.

A quick google made me realise I had no idea what the fuck OKRs are.

Now I didn’t have this article, so off I went applying first-principles, and here is why I was wrong.

My objectives were listed as

Deliver X by Y to achieve Z

A perfect OKR has the following:

A clear objective is specific, ambitious and has a deadline.

Key Results should have a metric of how you will measure success of the above. This can be a volume goal, but ideally not. (We want to do 10 webinars this quarter- rather go to what the downstream business impact will be related to the above objective, We want to drive 100 sales qualified accounts by 31 March)