Excellent high quality video! Rare to find! 💎 Especially since you don't try to explain everything from scratch but actually point out at which topic user might want dig in! ❤️
Thanks, great example! What do you mean with "set this for a quarter" at +/- 13:23? Is that an English expression or do you mean as a target for a quarter?
Hey Gertjan! That's it, I'm basically saying don't *use* it as a target if you can't measure it. You'll generally "Set" or "Choose" an OKR at the start of each quarter. Let me know if I'm not making sense!
Please, when you said pull user stories from the backlogs, does that mean that they might have been thought about. Can I use the OKRs to create the user stories?
Absolutely! The part I skip over is story origin. Generally you'll approach your next quarter with a few ideas around problems you want to solve and capabilities you'd like to build to address a market gap. This informs what your OKR should be for the quarter. It's your measure of success and captures the purpose behind the work for the quarter ahead. Based on this OKR, you'll want to generate a list of items you think you'll need to do to deliver on this OKR. It could be big chunks of work (initiatives, projects etc) which your team wants to work on, or could be smaller user stories or ideas. At some point during the quarter, you'll want to break that work down. It may be best to do this at the start or mid way through. This will really depend on your team, dependencies and ways of working. In terms of how, sometimes you can do this just by breaking the idea into small chunks. For bigger ideas, check out Story Mapping. It's a powerful technique to go from big idea to a clear customer flow based backlog of prioritised stories. Just make sure you're measuring your progress on the customer outcome each sprint. Don't let "delivering all of the stories" become the focus.
Extremely well articulated Jim, however if you could kindly help answer a question. Why do organisations still fail to align OKRs appropriately with agile, I mean most companies go either with OKRs and partial agile or complete agile with KPIs. Also there's still this myth that OKRs dont sit well in agile. Thank you again
Hi Arnab, Great question! To be honest, OKR or any outcome based goal setting framework for that matter generally works well with Agile ways of working. The reason being is we can break our work down into small chunks, deliver value and see how that's impacting our Key Results. The can change the plan if the outcome is not being achieved. From my personal experience (which is certainly not universal), it's where OKR is poorly implemented that it conflicts with agile. First common anti-pattern is where an OKR is enforced on the team. Autonomy is critical. The team should really should be setting their own OKR, ideally to align to the company OKR. Another common anti-pattern is where the Key Results are just a list of deliverables or features, rather than a metric based goal. Another question I come across a lot which is deeper topic looks something like: "How do we set an OKR if we haven't completed customer / problem Discovery?" The short version is generally customer discovery efforts will need to run slightly in advance of the OKR cadence. Sometimes this is a quarter ahead, sometimes less. It does necessitate a mature product capability with direct access to customers and senior leaders alike. Does that answer your question?
Thank you so much Jim, it absolutely does 100 percent. My takeaways for okrs 1. Make it measurable/quantifiable 2. Get the individual teams to set them as a team 3. Make it time bounded.
Could you please explain KR3 a little bit more? I know it it just an example, but I would like to understand what you are saying with this example. The other key results were immediately clear to me (even without the accompanying examples) ;) Thanks!
Great question! I'm using Value Add a generic term used for upselling in a checkout flow. Good examples with Apple where during their check out they try to sell you a bunch of related products. In this case, they have a small number of customers adding additional products during the checkout (only 2%) so they're hoping with some improvements to the checkout flow they'll be able to increase that to 10%. Here's a good article on the topic: neilpatel.com/blog/the-art-of-ecommerce-upselling/
@@okrquickstart Thanks for the clarification and article! ((What occurred to me is that KR3 might conflict with KR2. But of course it is just an example. ))
Excellent high quality video! Rare to find! 💎 Especially since you don't try to explain everything from scratch but actually point out at which topic user might want dig in! ❤️
Thanks Patrick! Love the feedback!
Really nice connection you made mate!
Thanks mate! LMK if you have any questions!
Nice video man - really clear and one of the best I've seen on YT!
Thanks mate. Genuinely appreciate it!
Amazing content! Thanks for clarifying how to link OKR to Scrum, it helped me a lot 🚀🙌
Thanks Batista!
Nice and crisp. Thanks for sharing 👍
Thanks so much for the feedback Disha 😃
Great stuff you're teaching here!
Thanks so much! Glad to hear it's helping!
great stuff and very well laid out
Thanks James!
Thanks. Great video!
Amazing work! Thanks.
Thanks Ramin! I hope it helps!
Thanks, great example! What do you mean with "set this for a quarter" at +/- 13:23? Is that an English expression or do you mean as a target for a quarter?
Hey Gertjan! That's it, I'm basically saying don't *use* it as a target if you can't measure it. You'll generally "Set" or "Choose" an OKR at the start of each quarter. Let me know if I'm not making sense!
Please, when you said pull user stories from the backlogs, does that mean that they might have been thought about. Can I use the OKRs to create the user stories?
Absolutely! The part I skip over is story origin. Generally you'll approach your next quarter with a few ideas around problems you want to solve and capabilities you'd like to build to address a market gap. This informs what your OKR should be for the quarter. It's your measure of success and captures the purpose behind the work for the quarter ahead.
Based on this OKR, you'll want to generate a list of items you think you'll need to do to deliver on this OKR. It could be big chunks of work (initiatives, projects etc) which your team wants to work on, or could be smaller user stories or ideas. At some point during the quarter, you'll want to break that work down. It may be best to do this at the start or mid way through. This will really depend on your team, dependencies and ways of working.
In terms of how, sometimes you can do this just by breaking the idea into small chunks. For bigger ideas, check out Story Mapping. It's a powerful technique to go from big idea to a clear customer flow based backlog of prioritised stories. Just make sure you're measuring your progress on the customer outcome each sprint. Don't let "delivering all of the stories" become the focus.
@@okrquickstart Thank you very much. This helped a lot
Extremely well articulated Jim, however if you could kindly help answer a question. Why do organisations still fail to align OKRs appropriately with agile, I mean most companies go either with OKRs and partial agile or complete agile with KPIs. Also there's still this myth that OKRs dont sit well in agile. Thank you again
Hi Arnab, Great question! To be honest, OKR or any outcome based goal setting framework for that matter generally works well with Agile ways of working. The reason being is we can break our work down into small chunks, deliver value and see how that's impacting our Key Results. The can change the plan if the outcome is not being achieved.
From my personal experience (which is certainly not universal), it's where OKR is poorly implemented that it conflicts with agile. First common anti-pattern is where an OKR is enforced on the team. Autonomy is critical. The team should really should be setting their own OKR, ideally to align to the company OKR. Another common anti-pattern is where the Key Results are just a list of deliverables or features, rather than a metric based goal.
Another question I come across a lot which is deeper topic looks something like: "How do we set an OKR if we haven't completed customer / problem Discovery?" The short version is generally customer discovery efforts will need to run slightly in advance of the OKR cadence. Sometimes this is a quarter ahead, sometimes less. It does necessitate a mature product capability with direct access to customers and senior leaders alike.
Does that answer your question?
Thank you so much Jim, it absolutely does 100 percent.
My takeaways for okrs
1. Make it measurable/quantifiable
2. Get the individual teams to set them as a team
3. Make it time bounded.
@@abShar0705 Boom 💯
I would love to see your take on roadmap creation and managing stakeholders around conveying roadmaps. Subscribed to your content 😁
Could you please explain KR3 a little bit more? I know it it just an example, but I would like to understand what you are saying with this example. The other key results were immediately clear to me (even without the accompanying examples) ;) Thanks!
Great question! I'm using Value Add a generic term used for upselling in a checkout flow. Good examples with Apple where during their check out they try to sell you a bunch of related products. In this case, they have a small number of customers adding additional products during the checkout (only 2%) so they're hoping with some improvements to the checkout flow they'll be able to increase that to 10%. Here's a good article on the topic: neilpatel.com/blog/the-art-of-ecommerce-upselling/
@@okrquickstart Thanks for the clarification and article! ((What occurred to me is that KR3 might conflict with KR2. But of course it is just an example. ))
Very good video! Easy to understand. Thx a lot!
Glad it was helpful! Appreciate the feedback!
Excelent video!
Thanks so much Elizhama!