How to Create Objectives and Key Results

Objective and Key Results

Examples of Outputs vs Outcomes

Output vs Outcome Key Results

Cascading Objectives (Connecting, Visualizing & Best Practices)

OKRS, Teams & RAG Status

Objectives and Opportunities

The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework has become more popular in recent years. While it has many applications, we’ve specifically seen how this framework helps product organizations transform from feature factories to purpose-driven teams. Recognizing the impact the framework has, we’ve built an OKR solution in ProductPlan. It helps your organization map the initiatives outlined on your product roadmap to the outcomes that you’re striving to achieve.

Below we'll review how to think about using the OKR framework for your product team along with some examples of OKRs for inspiration.

Objectives and Key Results

There are two parts to an OKR – the objective (i.e. the outcome) and the key results. The key results are the measurements you can take that will help you measure how close you are to achieving the outcome.

In ProductPlan, you can begin creating objectives from the Strategy product area. Click New Objective to start capturing your OKRs:

As you get started, keep in mind OKRs can be tricky to implement. Done right, they can accelerate your company’s success. However, if done poorly they can be a distraction, or at their worst, even deteriorate the culture of your organization.

Implementing OKRs well requires a shift in mindset from being output-driven to outcome-driven. For product teams, this means finding the right balance in measuring not just what gets delivered, but what impact the deliveries ultimately have on your business.

That's why in our solution we've created space to keep track of both. You can associate planned roadmap initiatives with objectives to see your outputs, and you can set unique key results for objectives to track the outcomes you're hoping to achieve:

It can be tempting to only celebrate and reward outputs (like shipping a new feature). However, this tendency can often mislead us from focusing on meaningful change. An outcome-based approach can give your team a sense of purpose by emphasizing the impact of their work, and ultimately what it means for the lives of your customers.

This doesn't erase the importance of your team's activities and outputs. Without delivering them, you can't achieve your OKRs. Think of the outputs as bets meant to improve your key results. If they aren't doing that, then you know it's time to change.

Tracking a combination of outcome-based key results alongside the delivery goals you've set can help you communicate the real impact that your team is making.
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Examples of Outputs vs. Outcomes

Felipe Castro, a leading OKR trainer, helps us to find a good working definition of an outcome. In his book, Beginner’s Guide to OKRs, he offers:

“[An] outcome is the measurable beneficial effect on your customers, your company, or your employees.”

The wording of your outcome should be concise, purposeful and motivational –

“I know I’ve got a good Objective when I leap out of bed in the morning eager to make it happen”, says Christina Wodtke in her book, Radical Focus.

Your company objectives should drive at the heart of your company vision and mission.

Let’s compare some output driven vs. outcome driven objectives.

Helpful Tip: output-based objectives often start with verbs such as launch, create, develop, deliver, build, etc... outcome-based ones use words like improve, increase, maintain, reduce, achieve, etc...

To accompany the outcome driven objectives you’ll need to find measures, key results that similarly indicate progress on the outcome. The recommended approach is to set key results about 30 percent higher than what you believe your organization can achieve in the allotted time. This helps your organization stretch themselves toward greatness. As Christina Wodtke put it, “I know I’ve got the right Key Results when I am also a little scared we can’t make them.”

Output vs Outcome Key Results

Let’s look at some examples of key results based on the objectives in the previous example:

In ProductPlan you can associate your bars and containers directly with your Objectives and see the progress of those activities side-by-side with your Key Results. Seeing your deliverables alongside the measurements you've set for success can be a valuable tool for communicating strategic decision making.

Cascading Objectives

ProductPlan offers the ability to cascade Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) throughout different levels of your organization. This feature allows you to connect high-level company objectives with team-specific goals, ensuring alignment across your entire organization. Cascading is only available to professional and enterprise customers.

Connecting Objectives

Cascading OKRs in ProductPlan is achieved through parent-child relationships between objectives. You can establish these connections when creating a new objective or by editing an existing one. To create or modify these connections, you must be the editor of the objective being modified or an account admin. It's important to note that while an objective can have multiple child objectives, it can only have one parent objective. This structure helps maintain clear lines of alignment and accountability. Child relationships do not impact calculations in their parent’s metrics.

When managing connections between objectives, you have the flexibility to remove a parent connection if needed. This can be done by opening the edit mode on the child objective and removing the connection. In cases where a parent objective is deleted, its children automatically become parents of their own lineages, preserving the overall structure of your OKRs. Archived objectives maintain their existing relationships but are not available as options when selecting new parent objectives, ensuring that only active objectives are used in ongoing planning.

Visualizing Related Objectives

ProductPlan provides a clear and intuitive way to visualize the relationships between objectives. On the objective details page, you'll find parent objectives displayed prominently above the Opportunities section. Child objectives are conveniently located below the Key Results section, providing a comprehensive view of how objectives are interconnected.

Each objective card within these sections offers valuable information at a glance. You'll see the objective's title, associated team(s), progress on correlated key results and roadmap items. To dive deeper into any connected objective, simply click on its card to view its full details. Additionally, the Strategy index provides an easy way to gauge the scope of each objective by indicating the number of children associated with it.

Best Practices

When implementing cascading OKRs, it's recommended to start with high-level, company-wide objectives. These should provide clear direction for the entire organization and serve as the foundation for more specific goals. As you connect objectives across different levels, ensure that all efforts contribute to these broader goals, creating a cohesive strategy throughout your organization.

A balanced approach to creating and connecting objectives is key. Combine top-down direction with bottom-up input to ensure that objectives are both aligned with overall strategy and realistically achievable by teams. While establishing these connections, be mindful of avoiding over-cascading. Too many levels of objectives can dilute focus and create unnecessary complexity. Strive for clear alignment between levels while keeping the structure simple and actionable.

By leveraging cascading OKRs in ProductPlan, you can significantly improve strategic alignment across your organization. This feature enhances transparency, allowing team members at all levels to understand how their work contributes to broader company goals. It also increases accountability by creating clear links between team objectives and overarching organizational targets. With these tools at your disposal, you can foster a more cohesive, focused and effective approach to achieving your company's strategic goals.

OKRs, Teams & RAG Status

Team associations and filters will allow your users to stay focused on what’s most relevant for them and enable multiple groups to coexist within a single account.

Customers can associate and filter their OKRs with teams from their account. You're able to filter the objectives overview page by either the company or team level. The strategy overview page will now have a filter, and it will also display team names on OKR cards.

Within a roadmap, users will be able to see associated teams when selecting objectives for a bar. You can assign multiple teams to a single objective as needed.

In addition to filtering by teams, you'll be able to filter by RAG status (red, amber, green). Each objective can be associated with a low, medium or high risk status. The statuses help your audience see a more complete strategic picture. At a glance, you're able to see how an objective is tracking alongside key results and roadmap items progress.

Objectives & Opportunities

Editors can connect Opportunities to Objectives from either direction. This can occur in both our Strategy and Discovery spaces, from individual opportunities or objectives. You will see the opportunity count displayed on objective cards in the objectives overview. Similarly, you'll notice the objective count and list are displayed on opportunity cards in the Opportunities overview.

Within each objective, there will be a blue action button titled + Add (or + if an opportunity is already attached the objective). Once you click the Add button, a pop up will appear where you can select an existing opportunity or create a new opportunity.

Within each opportunity, there will be a field titled Objectives. You will be able to select from the dropdown of all existing objectives. You will be able to connect an opportunity to multiple objectives.

Overall, the goal is to help with initiative planning and ensuring there's a story being told from start to finish with your opportunities and objectives.

Objectives will be displayed in alphabetical order on the opportunity. Archived opportunities cannot be connected to objectives, but they will remain on the objective detail if connected while active (identified as archived) for historical purposes. You are not able to filter opportunities by objective or objective by opportunity.

This connection feature will be available to editors on the professional and enterprise plans.