One of the most influential books I read in my career was “Measure What Matters,” by John Doerr. This book popularized the OKR approach, objectives and key results. I have had success using principles from that book from time to time. However, I have one piece of advice. You will not succeed by waving a magic wand and implementing an OKR plan across your entire team in a single night. Most of the time, people will resist, hesitate, and avoid being measured. It is the stepping on the scale issue that all of us face. Truth hurts, so we avoid it.
If you want to achieve the powerful results that come from getting a team to focus on North Star objectives, you first have to build the discipline to measure them. This is equally daunting. If you go into your favorite AI product, such as askturing.ai, and ask, What metrics should I use to measure my business, you will receive a long list of complicated abbreviations and names that feel overwhelming. You cannot, and you should not, do all of them. Pick the ones that are meaningful to you now and keep the list to only a handful. Once you pick them, the real work of running a business begins.
Building the discipline, mechanisms, and processes for tracking metrics is not a simple science. Most good metrics are compounding, meaning they are the culmination of many activities, reports, and outcomes from internal teams and tools. As a consequence, a good metric often requires an overhaul of how you do things so the whole company, and all the employees, can align toward that metric. Do not take this lightly. By deciding on a metric, you are effectively deciding to perform open heart surgery on your company, and it will expose things you might not want to know. Remember, the truth hurts.
Returning to “Measure What Matters.” The intent of that book is to explain the OKR process, to set goals and objectives, and to define the ambition to improve them. That is good and powerful if you can get a team on board. However, you will not get far unless you first do what the title commands. Measure what matters. In other words, establish metrics that tell you how well you are performing against the most important things. That is the first step in the OKR process that most people miss. They want the R in OKR and forget that you must track the work in order to know whether you achieved any results at all.
Another consideration is that tracking metrics will initially be viewed as annoying and an unnecessary drain on time. Once people start focusing on them, the nature of the work changes. The metric becomes part of the daily thought process. People begin asking themselves, How can I improve this metric. That is exactly what you want. When it comes time for the OKR process, when you show the most important metric and say, By next year we are going to increase this metric by 100X, everyone will panic at first. Then they will start to consider how their metrics apply. Tell them not to worry about the audacious goal. Worry about your metric only. How can you 100X your metric. If everyone does the same, the combined effort will lead toward achieving what once seemed impossible.
