What Is OKRs(Objectives and Key Results) ?

Hi everyone, I hope you are all doing well and in good health. Today we will be making an explanation from a new learner(yeah that’s me :| ) about OKRs(Objective and Key Results)

OKRs is means Objectives and Key Results. John doerr who wrote “Measure What matters” book is calling Andrew Grove as the Father of OKRs in his book.

While john doerr was working at Intel he attended Andrew Grove’s(he was director of engineering at Intel) course which was about Objectives and Key results.

And after working Intel john doerr joined Kleiner Perkins(it’s an American venture capital firm). And he worked with companies like google, gates foundation and bono. he worked them with OKR which is a goal-setting methodology. While I was searching if google still uses it or not I came across a news which is larry page words about OKRs: “As much as I hate process, good ideas with great execution are how you make magic. And that’s where OKRs come in” thats what larry page says and he says that too “OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over”. And yes since that time(from 1999 to today) all googler has written down her objectives and her key results.

Let’s dive in and learn better about OKRs.

Objective is the direction and key results are milestones. Lets give an example of Andrew Grove. We want to dominate the mid-range microcomputer component business. That’s an objective. Thats where we are gonna go. Key results for this quarter winning 10 new designs for the 8085(It’s an microprocessors produced by Intel). This is a one key result, its a milestone. Key results have to be measuerd. And at the end you can look and without any argument say did I do that or did I not do that. Yes or no, simple. That paragraph was from Andrew Grove’s speech, you can watch the video from here. (Dont skip the video, you should exactly watch it)

So The objectives are what you want to have accomplished and key results are how you are going to get that done. objectives are what and key results are how. Each objectives can have 3 to 5 key results and good key results are specific, time-bound. They are aggressive but realistic. They are Measurable and they are verifiable. Those are good key results.

Another must watch video from john doerr’s Ted speech about OKRs is here .

I wanna finish the article from john doerr’s speech at Ted “We can get back on the right track. if we can and do measure what really matters”

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