A Practical Guide to Using OKRs

in Product Management

In this hands-on guide, I will show you how to make the most out of
using OKRs when you’re working in Product Management.

These are the exact techniques that I use to help Product Teams
around the globe to go from setting goals “the Google way” to taking
an individual approach that allows them to focus on Outcomes and
build better products.

In this in-depth guide, you’ll learn:

The fundamentals about using OKRs from a Product Management

perspective
How to collaborate with your Product Team to define meaningful
OKRs that represent the success of your product in the form of
Outcomes and that are easy to measure
How to successfully use OKRs in Product Management practices
like Product Strategy, Product Roadmaps, Product Discovery, and
Scrum.

If you’ve ever wondered how you can connect Product Strategy and
your Product Discovery/Delivery efforts through Outcome-oriented
goals, you’ve come to the right place.

Let’s get started.

by Tim Herbig
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Introduction

In recent years, a growing number of product companies started

adopting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) to set their goals. For
Product Managers, that’s great news because OKRs help you create
more focus and align your efforts with the whole company. At least,
in theory.

But in real life, I have seen companies struggling with issues like:

Preplanned OKR sets that specify features and leave no room for
Product Managers to focus on behavior changes

Product Managers, who ask themselves how OKRs can be

beneficial during Product Discovery and Delivery adding
processes and meetings

Understanding how OKRs, Product Strategy, Product Discovery,

Product Roadmaps, and Scrum influence one another.

Do these challenges sound familiar? If so, you will find answers and
practical examples for overcoming them in this helpful guide to using
OKRs in Product Management.

Finding success through using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

doesn’t depend on just the type, quality, and choice of your chosen
metrics, but even more on how you use them.

Product Teams certainly spend a significant amount of time with

their heads down, focusing on Product Discovery or Delivery. But
when they look up to seek guidance for their next move, they
shouldn’t just be presented with a list of features and release dates.

That’s what differentiates the effective real-life usage of OKRs from

blindly following someone else’s playbook and “best practices.”

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Content Overview

OKR Fundamentals for How to define OKRs in

Product Managers Product Management

Using OKRs for Finding your own Path

everyday decision- to focusing on
making in Product Outcomes

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 CHAPTER 1

The Fundamentals of OKRs

From a Product Management
Perspective

In this chapter, I want to establish a shared understanding of the

importance and role of OKRs in Product Management.

Your Main Takeaways:

The potential benefits OKRs can introduce to Product
Management
How to avoid confusing OKRs for Product Strategy and what to
do instead
The importance of establishing the WHY behind using OKRs
before getting started with defining OKRs

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What are the benefits of using OKRs in

Product Management?
The core benefit of using OKRs can be summarized based on
Christina Wodtke's work in Radical Focus:

"An Objective is like a mission statement, only for a shorter period of

time. A great Objective inspires the team, is hard (but not
impossible) to accomplish in a set time frame, and can be done by
the person or people who have set it, independently.

Key Results take all that inspirational language and quantify it. You
create them by asking a couple of simple questions: How would we
know if we met our Objective? What numbers would change? A
company should have two to five Key Results per Objective. In
general, Key Results (KRs) can be based on anything you can
measure."

OKRs in Product Management Definition

As Christina Wodtke writes further, "If you select your Key Results
wisely, you can balance forces like growth and performance, or
revenue and quality, by making sure you have both the potentially
opposing forces represented."

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Here’s an example of a balanced OKR set:

Objective: We are an integrated and mature platform solution.

Key Result 1: Our Enterprise client satisfaction rate is > 75

percent.

Key Result 2: No sales pitch is lost through “immaturity of the

product.”

Key Result 3: 100 percent of interviewees associate our website

with the terms enterprise, trustworthy, and capable.

But this only describes the technical side of OKRs. What we mean
when we talk about Objectives and Key Results and how they
compare to other goal-setting frameworks like NCTs. But from my
work with product organizations around the globe, I have landed on
three attributes that are much more telling if OKRs are effective–
Beyond the by-the-book definitions.

1. A rooting in proven evidence or explicit explorative goals

OKRs are about focus. And to create focus, teams need a clear line
of reasoning for why a certain OKR is worth their attention over the
everyday business. This reasoning means that great Outcome OKRs
don't automatically appear. Product Teams either need access to
strong evidence about the required changes in behavior in their
target audience (internal or external) OR can use OKRs to structure
and track explorative Product Discovery activities.

We’ll talk more about Outcome versus Output OKRs later. For
Product Teams, it means focusing on the (most critical) problems
first to reach their (ambitious) Key Results.

Outcome OKRs don’t talk about features.

Instead, they shift the conversation to the
impact a team should seek to make, as
opposed to the number of released
features.

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2. High Relevancy for the everyday decision-making

It doesn't matter how perfect of an Outcome your Key Results are or

how well they align with the company OKRs; if the changes (or lack
thereof) of the Key Results don't influence what a team is doing, they
are useless. OKRs that can only change in hindsight or that describe
goals outside of a team's influence don't provide tangible for a
team's way of working.

OKRs don't need to cover ALL of your work (everybody knows some
maintenance work can be critical), but they should reflect what's
most important for your team.

3. A clear connection to Company Priorities through OKRs or Strategy

The process of defining OKRs should involve all levels of a company.

Though it’s natural that a leadership team sets the company-level
OKRs, the next step is to get the rest of the company on board.

Tip for Practice: Anticipating Alignment Periods

Plan for an Alignment Period well before the next quarter to

avoid “rush and commit” behaviors after multiple teams have
drafted their OKRs.

Tweet this

That’s how a single team gets inspired by the company’s overall

direction to define their contribution in the form of a matching OKR.
Making the OKR definition and review a focused effort for the entire
company at the beginning or end of a quarter reduces
misunderstandings across teams significantly.

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Company- and Team-Level OKR Alignment Structure

Having clarity about the expected benefits from OKRs and

connecting them to the specific OKR practices of a product
organization is also one of the most important aspects to avoid OKR
Theater. Next, let's take a closer look at how OKRs connect to other
domains of Product Management.

How are OKRs different from Product

Strategy?

Product Strategy and OKRs share a common attribute: Guide

product teams to help make the right decisions to progress across
the various levels of a company. While Product Strategy outlines the
broader efforts to move closer to the long-term Product Vision,
OKRs implement specific aspects of the Product Strategy
throughout short cycles like a quarter.

A concept I like to call the Product Strategy-Metrics Sandwich

describes the relationship between Product Strategy and OKRs
tangibly:

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The Product Strategy-Metrics Sandwich connecting Long-term North Star

Metrics to Product Strategy and implementation OKRs

Product Strategy articulates the core choices and trade-offs along a

few shared patterns, independent of the framework or canvas you're
using:

The Strategic Narrative creates the WHY around your other

choices. The Strategic Narrative consists of your Vision,
Principles, and mid-to-long-term goals to provide this context.

The Playing Field describes the market you want o focus on,
including internal and external audiences, their most pressing
jobs, and the alternatives they can use today to get these jobs
done.

The Winning Moves outline the choices you need to make to

position your product to the best advantage on this playing field.
It includes distribution channels, value propositions, offerings,
and your best chances to differentiate from your competitors.

The specific choices along these patterns' lines then serve as critical
input for a Product Team's OKR definition. In essence, you try to
answer the question "How would success look like?" for your
choices. These choices then lead to specific Key Results that help
the team assess if their tactics and actions help them understand if
their strategy has worked.

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Below is an example of a fictional mental fitness product area within

a larger digital health company.

How specific Product Strategy Choices can relate to individual Key Results. Check
out this article for more examples on the topic.

A Product Strategy needs to highlight the gaps in the status quo to

set the right priorities for achieving the future vision of the product.
But Product Teams shouldn't blame it on their manager or the C-level
if the Product Strategy isn't clear. Instead, I encourage Product
Teams to create clarity about their strategic direction themselves. By
utilizing collaborative frameworks like the Product Field, you can
outline the strategic direction of your product and identify the
existing blind spots pretty quickly.

Arriving at the "right" set of OKRs is a journey that requires iteration—

often both within and between goal cycles. But it can get a lot easier
when Product Teams have the right strategy, to begin with.

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Deep Dive: From Product Strategy to Actionable Goals

Learn the fundamentals of
designing a Product Strategy that
supports a focus on Outcomes in
this free preview lesson from my
“Outcome OKRs for Product
Teams” course.

Learn more

In my Path to Product Strategy Course, you can learn more about

how to shape and articulate your Product Strategy and connect it to
the usage of OKRs and Product Discovery.

The OKR Cycle for Product Teams

The “common understanding” regarding the length of an OKR cycle
is one quarter, but there’s no written rule about that. Depending on
how your company operates (b2c versus b2b) or what other
dependencies might play a role (i.e., fiscal year schedule), you should
feel free to adapt the length of your cycle.

While keeping in mind that you want to adjust your actions based on
the progress toward your goals, you should pick a length that allows
for measuring change to chosen Key Results without spanning
unnecessarily long time horizons that are too hard to predict.

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Product Management OKR Cycle

In addition to setting up a cycle for success through collaborative,

Outcome-focused goals through OKRs at the beginning, one of the
main benefits of using OKRs should come from regular check-ins.
You can achieve a feeling of surprise at the end of a cycle when the
carefully crafted goals haven’t been reached, and a team’s actions
didn’t adjust to that without using OKRs.

Don’t feel surprised at the end of a cycle if

the carefully crafted goals haven’t been
reached, but you also didn’t regularly
revisit them and adjust your actions
accordingly.

Throughout the OKR cycle, you want to explicitly check the progress
of each Key Result on a weekly or biweekly basis while making hard
choices about which actions matter to make progress (and which
ones don’t).

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It’s not just a box to tick off; it’s THE opportunity to adjust your
actions.

We’ll talk later about the dependency of your OKR cycle cadence to
other disciplines like Product Discovery.

Starting with the WHY

behind using OKRs
As with all frameworks, there is no one “right way” of using OKRs. But,
there are better practices for shaping OKRs based on the individual
context of your company and team (i.e., skills, structures, incentives,
etc.). The way you implement OKRs in Product Management should
be set through a system derived from the desired benefits your
team or company expects from adopting OKRs.

The way you implement OKRs in Product

Management should be set through a
system that is derived from the desired
benefits your team or company expects
from adopting OKRs.

Starting with the WHY can be a decisive first step. Within your
Product Team or Product Management community of practice, you
can get started with these questions:

What does the organization we want look like? What are the
common themes?

Why do we want to work with OKRs?

What do we want to achieve with OKRs, specifically in Product

Management?

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Once you have landed on a set of changes you want to achieve by
using OKRs, start measuring it. Don’t try to reinvent your organization
overnight, though. Instead, focus your first efforts on the most
important ones. Are OKRs primarily a way for you to enable more
transparency about progress and success? Or to enhance
collaboration within a Product Team? Or is a shift toward Outcomes
your absolute priority?

Breaking down the target further will make it more realistic and help
you adjust your OKR process without making it feel like an
overwhelming catalog of meetings, routines, and requirements.

But these initial WHY questions should also inform the initial MVP for
your OKR System. Without getting stuck with analysis paralysis,
some critical aspects of how you want to get started should be in
place:

Will you start with a pilot team? If yes, which team?

Who will take on the responsibility for facilitating the OKR

process and guiding the team through their drafting and check-
ins?

What is the process for decision-making? Completely bottom-up

and democratic? With a veto right by the team lead? Through
top-down instructions by company management?

What aspects of a team's work do you plan to cover through

OKRs?

Is the measuring and reflection of OKRs integrated into existing

routines and tools? If yes, how and who takes care of it?

You can expand your OKR system over time as you expand and
reflect on your OKR adoption.

In my Outcome OKRs for Product Teams Course, you will learn what
it takes to make OKRs a useful practice for product teams beyond
rigid by-the-book approaches. I walk you through a conscious
adoption of OKRs ranging from a clear WHY all the way to the tactical
connections of everyday Product Management.

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 CHAPTER 2

How to Define OKRs

in Product Management

OKRs that help you and your team measure progress and focus on
Outcomes require more than following “best practices.” This chapter
will help you to facilitate the drafting of meaningful OKRs that work
for your team.

Main Takeaways:

The inputs required to capture the holistic success criteria of

your product

Differentiating Outcome and Output OKR sets

Identifying OKRs that help measure the progress and success of

your activities

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Capturing a holistic view of your

Product’s success through Key Results
Answering the question “How does success for our product look at
the end of this cycle?” can be difficult if a Product Team lacks
tangible guidance. After all, granting the autonomy to define OKRs
from the bottom up doesn’t automatically clarify what should come
next.

That’s why it’s the responsibility of the Product Team to either

demand access to or create the inputs required for the definition of
their OKR sets.

These inputs can include (but are not limited to) elements like:

Quarterly or yearly company/department OKR sets

Company Purpose and Vision
Product Vision and Product Strategy
Previous OKR sets and existing Theme-based Product Roadmap
elements
Product Discovery Insights in the form of proven user problems
or validated solutions

Strategic vs. Product Team-owned Inputs for the OKR Definition

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The quality or lack of these inputs can often reveal significant flaws in
a team or company. How can you expect articulated Key Results
containing what should be achieved, instead of what should be done,
if a team doesn’t have the possibility or skills to interact with users
through Product Discovery directly?
How should a team name their contribution to business goals if
there’s no clarity about where the company is headed? And how can
you expect defined OKRs to match cross-team priorities if there’s no
alignment and communication about agreed high-level initiatives?
Though each of these inputs brings benefits to the table, I have seen
the absence of a Product Strategy as the most harmful. I would even
say that if you don’t have a clear and tangible Product Strategy, it
does not make sense to use OKRs.

If you don’t have a clear and tangible

Product Strategy, it does not make sense to
use OKRs.

The inputs listed above are not an exhaustive list every team has to
complete before they are “allowed” to draft their OKRs. Furthermore,
these should serve as orientation for the required clarity that informs
the quality of the defined OKR sets. If one or more of these are
missing, simply prioritize completing the puzzle until the next cycle
to improve your way of working. But there's certainly a strong
correlation between the quality of your OKR definition inputs and the
usefulness of your resulting OKR sets.

As mentioned earlier, defining the success of a product through Key

Results shouldn’t just be a list of all the same performance-driven
KPIs you measure already. Instead, use the idea of Key Results to
define how success would look from as many angles as possible.

There’s nothing wrong with starting your OKR definition process by

focusing on already established performance indicators like revenue
or growth. But don’t stop there; challenge yourself to think about
other measurable expressions of your product’s success.

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Exemplary metrics suited to represent holistic success could be:

A product’s or service’s conversion rate

Customer satisfaction in the form of NPS or a similar
methodology
Product reviews from platforms like G2 or the App Store
The number of new users completing an onboarding sequence
Changes in behavior from the sales team like the number of
necessary follow-up calls or steps to perform a product
demonstration
Results generated through User Testing Sessions or other
Experiments
Churn or retention metrics indicating customer preferences
through behavior

How to set up the definition of meaningful

OKRs with your Product Team

Defining OKRs in Product Management should be a collaborative

practice. One that includes all (ideally) cross-functional team
members to make sure the OKR definition is based on the
capabilities and commitments of the people “doing the work.”

A practical setup comes in the form of a workshop. Ideally, a

dedicated facilitator guides the team through the process, so
domain experts like the product manager(s), designers, or engineers
can focus on the content.

Before jumping straight into writing and sharing ideas for individual
Objectives or Key Results, everyone should be on the same page
regarding the context of the next cycle. That means the facilitator
sets the stage by revisiting all existing and relevant inputs. Ideally,
the owners of any of these inputs are present during this phase as
well. That way, the intent of, let’s say, company OKRs isn’t lost
through proxies and misinterpretation.

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Before jumping straight into writing and

sharing ideas for individual Objectives or
Key Results, everyone should be on the
same page regarding the context of the
next cycle.

Here's the issue the issue with conventional wisdom suggesting a

linear path: Have the participants define the qualitative Objective
first, and only then have them draft quantitative Key Results.

This linear path of OKR definition does not always lead to the most
OKR Set. Since articulating a concise, inspiring, and positive
Objective is more Art than science, I see a lot of teams get stuck at
this “first” level of the OKR definition. Is sticking to a given order
more important than making progress when drafting OKRs? I don’t
think it is; hence more Product Teams should adopt a non-linear path
to drafting OKRs.

Versatile OKR Definition Directions and Approaches

The main thing to pay attention to is whether you’re coming up with

ideas that match your OKR WHY and the current level of discussion.

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Deep Dive: Drafting Outcome OKRs

My “Outcome OKRs for Product

Teams” course provides all the
practical strategies and templates
you need for an effective OKR
drafting with your Product Team.

Learn more

The Danger of “trickling down” Key Results throughout Cascades

Though there’s nothing inherently wrong with different OKR

cascades within a company, these pieces of advice make things a lot
easier:

1. Less is more: Reduce the number of cascades as much as

possible. Though company-level OKR sets can provide crucial
guidance, department OKRs rarely do and instead only limit the
Product Team to focus on Outputs, not Outcomes.
2. Weak links, not strong ties: While company or department-level
OKRs are a relevant input for the OKR definition, there’s a
common myth that any Key Results of a higher-level OKR set
need to be synonymous with the Objectives of the team’s OKR
sets.

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Strict OKR Cascades lead to Output focus; Weak Links encourage Outcomes

Avoid narrowing the corridor for the team-level OKR definitions,

which would contradict the idea of bottom-up Outcome OKRs
defined by the Product Team.

Differentiating Outcome and

Output OKR sets
There’s a common misbelief that OKRs come with “built-in”
Outcomes. Setting goals this way will automatically limit your
discussion to fewer solutions, i.e., Outputs.

Before we go further, let’s go over what I mean when I talk about

Outcomes and Outputs.

To me, an Outcome describes a measurable change in behavior that

contributes to an Impact. (This definition is inspired by Josh Seiden’s
excellent book Outcomes Over Outputs.)

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An Outcome is a change in human

behavior that creates an Impact.
An Output, on the other hand, is an artifact that has been delivered
through activities. It’s one way of creating this behavior change,
whether for customers, users, or internal stakeholders.

OKRs can work with either Outcomes or Outputs. As with every

framework, the benefits of OKRs highly depend on how you use
them. It’s certainly possible to set some or all of your Key Results as
Outputs. In some instances, this might even be a better way to get
started. Some teams get stuck in the Key Results definition process
because they try to turn everything into an Outcome—just for the
sake of it.

For Product Teams, being aware of the difference between Output

and Outcome OKRs is an essential first step to drastically improving
the definition of their OKRs. Realizing whether they are already
talking about solutions or are still focused on articulating the
changes in behavior, Product Teams aim to create a big difference
for their continued use of OKRs.

Tip for Practice: HMW Statements

Try to rephrase your Key Results as a “How might we...?”

statement. This way, you can sanity-check your focus on
Outcomes and uncover premature discussions about feature
ideas.

Tweet this

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Here’s a practical example of how Outcome OKR and Output OKR

sets might differ:

Product Management Outcome vs Output OKR Set Comparison

As we will discuss later, there’s more to shifting to Outcome-based

OKRs in Product Management than merely defining more “Outcome-
ish” Key Results simply.

Balancing specific and responsive OKRs by

picking the right leading or lagging indicators

As mentioned earlier, one of the most desired benefits of using

OKRs in Product Management is the capability to help Product
Teams measure progress and adjust their actions accordingly.

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But to achieve that benefit, Product Teams need to pay attention to

more than just their focus on Outcomes or Outputs. Though it’s
aspirational to aim to describe a change in behavior instead of a
completed task, this can lead to a lag between your prioritized
actions and measurable results. It’s ok if your more action-oriented
Key Results are not perfect “by the book,” but they enable you to
make choices instead of having to wait until the end of a cycle to
notice a change in your Key Results.

It’s ok if your more action-oriented Key

Results are not perfect “by the book,” but
they enable you to make choices instead of
having to wait.

This concept is referred to as leading and lagging indicators, and in

my experience, it’s one of the most overlooked criteria for selecting
drafted Key Results to measure progress.

By the time company revenue or user growth has changed in a

significant way, you can’t tie these lagging indicators to one of your
last efforts and are probably already working on the next one.

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If you don’t want to default to using Outputs as your main success

criteria, you need metrics that LEAD teams toward creating and
measuring success, which brings us to leading indicators. Below is
an exemplary reverse-engineering of a lagging indicator based on
the previous example for a mental fitness product area:

Going from Lagging Strategic Metrics to Leading Key Results based on how
relevant and recurring a user action is.

Here’s the critical question for defining leading indicators:

“Which customer behaviors do we need to encourage to achieve

our business goal?“

The core idea of leading indicators is to help Product Teams

measure their success and progress within a given (goal) cycle. This
means that you might have to experiment with the level of behavior
changes you can measure and influence within a given time frame.

Leading indicators are not all that matter. After all, your company still
mostly cares about those lagging metrics. But leading indicators—
like changes in customer or user behavior—help you to predict your
contribution to the company impact. They increase (or decrease)
your confidence in pursuing an identified problem space.

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Picking the right metric to measure progress for your team and product requires
different perspectives

At least to a certain degree. This comes back to the idea that you
need to understand which solved problems and user behaviors will
ultimately lead to achieving the business’ overarching goals and use
these as a starting point for defining your Product Team–level OKRs.

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 CHAPTER 3

Using OKRs to Guide the

Everyday Decision-making in
Product Management

No matter how Outcome-oriented your drafted OKRs are, they are of

no use if you can’t integrate them into your everyday decision-
making. This chapter provides tangible advice for connecting the
practice of OKRs to Product Management domains like Product
Discovery and Scrum.

Main Takeaways:
How OKRs relate and connect to the different domains of
Product Management
Communicating chosen priorities from the OKR definition
through Product Roadmaps
How can Product Discovery and OKRs influence each other?
Combining OKRs with Scrum practices and routines

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Before we talk about the specific tactics of increasing our defined
OKRs in Product Management practices, it’s worth taking a step back
to understand the bigger picture.

The Product Vision and Product Strategy guide the long-term WHYs.
Why does my company exist? What do I stand for? Why do I have a
right to win in the market I have chosen to compete in? From this, the
quarterly OKRs can be derived, representing a miniature version of
this larger WHY which can also be called a “strategy in a nutshell.”

OKRs are a “strategy in a nutshell” for

individual Product Teams, helping connect
short- and mid-term priorities to the
overarching WHY.
In contrast, there is also the WHAT, which is represented by the
concrete Product Roadmap themes, Discovery priorities, and
activities, as well as individual user stories and tasks. Themes and
Discovery priorities often cover a medium-term time horizon. They
usually describe larger chunks of work or specific features that come
with a longer lead time until they impact users of the business. On
the other hand, user stories and tasks have a shorter lead time
because they are part of short development cycles, i.e., Scrum
sprints.

Connecting OKRs to Product Management Domains and Time Horizons

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Making sure OKRs and Product Roadmaps

don’t create a parallel universe
In the context of OKRs, the role of Product Roadmaps are one of the
few essential artifacts as both an input for the OKR drafting and
Output to communicate the chosen priorities needed to achieve
drafted and committed OKR sets.

Product Roadmap and OKR Set Relationship

Of course, not all Roadmaps are created equal. The most common
interpretation of a Product Roadmap tries to beat the uncertainty of
the future with more rigid and prescriptive features and shipping
dates. It’s commonly referred to as a Feature-based Roadmap.

Considering that a Roadmap is a vital input for the OKR drafting

process, it should be no surprise that the Feature-based Roadmap is
more of an obstacle than an enabler of Outcome OKRs for Product
Teams.

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A feature-based Roadmap is more of an

obstacle than an enabler of Outcome
OKRs for Product Teams.

A more flexible approach that balances guidance with the autonomy

to make decisions about the specific activities and solutions to
pursue is called the Theme-based—or Now/Next/Later—Roadmap. It
works with rather loosely defined time horizons that can, if
necessary, be mapped to a current OKR cycle, the next one, and/or
everything beyond.

Product Management OKRs and Theme-based Product Roadmaps

play nicely together before and right after you have committed and
aligned OKR sets, e.g., quarterly. You don’t need to turn Key Results
into release dates and Gantt charts right away. Instead, the themes
from the Roadmap inform your OKR priorities and vice versa.

You don’t need to turn Key Results into

release dates and Gantt charts right away.
Instead, the themes from the Roadmap
inform your OKR priorities and vice versa.
It’s also not about choosing between themes OR Epics at this point.
A Theme-based Roadmap also incorporates the Epics (IF identified
through Product Discovery).

But what if you haven’t done the Product Discovery work to decide
which Epic to pursue? Then there’s little to no point in using
Outcome OKRs in the first place. You could have just tasked teams
with building “this thing.”

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How can Product Discovery and OKRs

influence each other?
Product Discovery describes the iterative way of collaboratively
answering two key questions:

1. Why is this a problem worth solving?

2. What solutions are worth pursuing?

As mentioned, Product Discovery works excellently in combination

with Theme-based Roadmaps. This encourages your Product Team
to think about Outcomes instead of settling on detailed feature ideas
right from the start.

Differentiating the Problem Space and Solution Space of Product Discovery

But there are also challenges when using OKRs in Product Discovery.
For one, there’s the aspect of timing: When you have defined your
OKR at the beginning of the quarter, then embark on an (exemplary)
six-week Discovery phase, you have hardly enough time left to make
an impact with what you’re building.

Remember that shipped features sometimes need weeks in

customers’ hands before they cause a change in behavior and,
thereby, metrics.

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The messy journey to influence Outcome OKRs throughout a cycle

When you’re in the process of reducing uncertainty about both the

problem and the solution space, it’s more difficult to anticipate what
specific user behaviors might be worth changing. But that does not
mean that you cannot measure the progress and success of your
Discovery efforts.

Deep Dive: A Practical Guide to Product Discovery

In this in-depth guide, you’ll learn

what Product Discovery is, why it
matters, how Product Discovery
phases can play together, as well as
lots of advanced tips, strategies,
and tactics for your everyday work.

Learn more

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In my Adaptable Product Discovery Course, you can learn more

about how to apply a broad range of Discovery techniques to
collaboratively reduce uncertainty about assumed problems and
feature ideas.

Making working in the Problem Space visible through OKRs

In short, I believe that you have two (viable) options to use OKRs in
those scenarios:

First, you could emphasize the process. While a particular way of

’doing things’ is never a guarantee for the ultimate results you’re
aiming for, it can be a helpful leading indicator for staying on track.
This type of KRs aims to set thresholds for how your way of working
might have to change.

Examples could include:

Number of user interactions or workshops conducted (Output)

A particular share of quantitative or qualitative efforts as part of
your research and experimentation activities (Outcome)
Specific cycle times of how the Product Team interacts with
users or tests ideas (Outcome)

The second type of OKRs is about measuring user behaviors that

indicate the future success of your product. For this type of KRs to
be meaningful, you probably should have a rough idea of how your
Discovery might unfold. You want to pick metrics that help you
understand whether the most critical assumptions about your
feature idea are accurate.

Examples could include:

Success/completion rates of usability tests

Customer effort score in prototype testing
Open Rate and CTR from marketing or experiment emails
Opt-in/Opt-out rates out beta programs

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I recommend investing in these types of exploratory Key Results

when you use OKRs to structure your work during Product Discovery
or while your product is still in stealth mode. It is also helpful to
rethink your OKR cycle length. Three months might be too long and
difficult to predict, depending on your stage.

By agreeing on and regularly revisiting

exploratory Discovery OKRs, Product
Teams can raise awareness for this (often
unseen) part of their work.
Keep in mind that the primary job of a Product Discovery OKR is to
make Product Discovery work a visible priority for your team. It
doesn’t need to be the perfect incarnation of existing OKR
blueprints.

For more insights, check out this video in which I break down the
different key phased of Product Discovery as a range of options
Product Teams can choose:

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Combining OKRs with Scrum

Practices and Routines
When it comes to Product Delivery, you need to ensure that as many
items as possible in your product backlog can be associated with an
OKR. That is the only way to connect your team’s everyday tasks with
the higher goals of the organization. If you’re using JIRA for managing
your user stories and Agile processes, you can easily integrate this
OKR connection through a set of custom fields.

Of course, the same approach works for other task management

tools like Asana, Trello, or monday.com. The critical point is that you
establish a temporary link between individual tasks and an OKR to
make all team members’ contributions (and thereby their meaning)
clear.

How the Delivery Progress of Backlog Items determines the success of set
Product Management Key Results

In my talk “OKR: 3 Letters for Effective Product Organizations” at the

2019 Product Management Festival Europe, I shared more insights
on how Product Teams can utilize OKRs for their daily work:

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Takeaway: Finding Your Path Toward

Focusing on Product Management
Outcomes Using OKRs

One of the biggest challenges Product Teams face when making

OKRs a valuable tool for amplifying their existing practices is not
necessarily the complexity of the methodology itself. Instead, it’s the
rigidness of how the usage of OKRs is promoted and touted
elsewhere and a lacking iteration and adaptation mindset in most
teams.

These include Google’s, now infamous, OKR Video, how to-guides

for the “right OKR,” an increasingly present dogma of Outcomes
being “the only right way” to use OKRs, and a seemingly
overwhelming amount of OKR examples to choose from for your next
goal cycle.

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In addition to needing clarity about the intentions behind using

OKRs, a regular practice of reflection, and adaptation to using them,
Product Teams need to be willing to begin from an imperfect
starting point. Though a sole focus on Outcomes is an inspiring
aspiration, chances are that it will take more than just “better” OKR
drafting questions to achieve it.

For every Product Team that gets discouraged by an over-glorified

definition of Outcomes, there should be at least one that is not held
back and instead gets at it.

Don’t follow a prescribed OKR approach others came up with. You

have the unfair advantage of knowing what your organization and
Product Management work and ethical requirements are. Use that
advantage to find your approach.

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