February 2025
Service Design
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OKRs are pretty standard nowadays across many industries to benchmark progress. Per the recommendation of a mentor, I decided to revisit the evolution of OKRs to better understand how they came to be and why they are one of the definitive ways to benchmark success. I’ve seen OKRs constantly but have rarely come up with my own. Many designers in individual contributor roles don’t seem to be as involved in the brainstorming process of OKRs as those who have migrated to managerial roles. This makes sense. However, I’ve also heard constantly that designers don’t think as business-like as they need to be; in other words, there is a disconnect between designers and measuring their designs/success.
My overall goal is to be able to think like a manager if needed: a highly useful skill for anyone, but especially designers who often need to articulate their own design’s success and value.
John Doerr is the person to learn from when it comes to OKRs. Doerr dedicates this entire book to Andy Grove, a former Intel executive who swore by OKRs as a means of attaining greater. One of Any Grove’s lasting legacies is his “less is more” mindset when it comes to goal setting according to Doerr; it’s far better to have a few well chosen objectives than a longer list of of less focused objectives.
Doerr coins the “OKR Superpowers” as 1) focus 2) alignment 3) tracking and 4) stretching which he elaborates on further with a number of company-specific case studies. The immense success of Google, Remind, Intel, Nuna, MyFitnessPal, Intuit, and The Gates Foundation can be directly attributed to OKRs as a system for goal-setting.
Bill Davidow helped to pair objectives and key results together via the phrase “as measured by” - OBJECTIVE as measured by KEY RESULT
One of my favorite sections of the book was the case study articulating YouTube’s stretch goal of 1 billion hours of watch time per day. I grew up with YouTube (pre-Google) and have watched it explode into what it is now; this can be directly attributed to this specific OKR that Susan Wojcicki, Cristos Goodrow and others helped to make happen:
YouTube met and exceeded it’s stretch (highly ambitious) OKR; Doerr implies that this is because of OKRs as a concept:
“Among experiments in the field, 90 percent confirm that productivity is enhanced by well-defined, challenging goals.”
Doerr goes on to articulate how OKRs are a win on all fronts including culture. They: 1) make everyone’s goals more visible, 2) drive engagement 3) promote internal networking (across teams) and 4) save time, money and frustration (less duplication of efforts because of innate transparency). One of the most interesting parts of this is:
“92% [of employees] said they’d be more motivated to reach their goals if colleagues could see their progress.”
MyFitnessPal has gone as far as to publish their goals on an internal wiki - similar to an employee intranet. I found this concept to be extremely similar to evangelizing design systems (which is the cornerstone of a successful system) and therefore highly transferrable, in theory, to most organizations.
Part history and part modern case study, I thoroughly enjoyed this book: Doerr does an amazing job at tracing the lineage of OKRs while also keeping them fresh with modern examples. I particularly appreciated the last few chapters which discuss culture changes within organizations that adopt OKRs as a strategy and how that positively impacts all of human resources and HR-adjacent practices such as annual reviews. I also loved the last chapter that talked about Bono and the Gates Foundation’s success outside of the tech industry. There are many but one of my biggest takeaways from this book was that:
“companies that “out-behave” their competition will also outperform them.”
This is a short and yet powerful statement on how companies need to first focus on best hiring practices and keeping employees happy in order to achieve immense success. Many of the case studies articulated in this book (and their success) were born out of passion and being appreciated (one of the cornerstones of continuous evaluation) rather than just setting super ambitious goals in a vacuum.
Overall, this book was highly enjoyable and will join the list of books that I will pass along to others! I believe it helped me accomplish my original goal: to be able to think more like a manager while still operating as an individual contributor.
