1. What are product OKRs?
2. What makes a good product OKR?
3. How to choose the right product OKRs for your team
4. Product OKR examples for product usage 
5. Product OKR examples for commercials 
6. Product OKR examples for retention/churn
7. Product OKR examples for customer satisfaction 
8. Product OKR examples for different product lifecycle-based stages
9. Product OKR examples for velocity/productivity

And if 18 product OKR examples aren’t enough for you, we have more, covering an even wider range of possible SaaS and digital product scenarios. Get them all in our free ebook The Ultimate List of Product OKR Examples. 

What are product OKRs?

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) are a framework used for setting and managing goals across an organization, department, or team. Product OKRs are the declaration of what a product team hopes to achieve within a certain timeframe (typically a quarter), and how they will measure whether that has been achieved.

When it comes to product management, OKRs are integral to shifting a team’s mindset from projects to goals – in other words, from outputs to outcomes.

The objective part of an OKR represents the ambition – what you want to achieve. Each objective is then kept company by a key result or three. They are the measurable metrics, coupled with a specific target, that will need to be hit if an objective is going to be celebrated as achieved.  To set a product OKR is to say: “We want to achieve X, and we’ll know we’ve done it when Y happens.” 

Product OKRs, when set and managed correctly, will become a product team’s guiding light when it comes to prioritizing their work and focusing their efforts. OKRs set the direction of the product strategy and establish the criteria for evaluating the possible work that could be done. 

When faced with a whole bunch of product ideas and possible projects or features, it’s your product OKRs that will help you make the right decision on what makes it onto your product roadmap. When your roadmap aligns with your product OKRs – as a Now-Next-Later roadmap in ProdPad does – you’ll find yourself making product decisions based on the most important business outcomes. 

In short, product OKRs are the key ingredient that will keep your product team thinking strategically – choosing and prioritizing what is being worked on based on the likelihood of impacting the objective and getting them where they need to be by the end of the quarter. 

As the folks at Google say, “We also use OKRs to help people stay focused on the most important goals, and help them avoid being distracted by urgent but less important goals.” As one of the most experienced organizations when it comes to running OKRs, I think we can all agree that they’ve done alright for themselves. There might just be something in this…

What makes a good product OKR?

There is a bit of an art to writing effective product OKRs. You probably know that, since you’re here looking for some product OKR examples. Most product managers know they’re important to have, but that doesn’t make them easy to write. Like we said, it’s no one’s favorite job. 

Let’s start with the general principles of what makes a good product OKR. Once you’re happy you know how to spot a good OKR, we can dive into our product OKR examples and you can decide which might work as a starting point for your own versions. 

Let’s break it down….

A great product objective is simple enough for everyone in the company to understand, but it should also be inspirational, aspirational, and – most importantly – challenging. Objectives are there to point you in the direction you want to travel and inspire you to constantly look for new ways to do exactly that.

Product objectives should also contribute towards achieving wider company-led goals, and the connection between each of these goals should be outlined in your product strategy.

A great key result should be measurable, challenging, and time-bound. It should also be specific enough to ensure that everyone knows what success looks like.

Key results usually make use of one of the metrics that make up your KPIs. But it’s not enough to simply state a metric – that metric needs a target. A key result should include what you are going to measure, and the specific measurement you want to hit. 

You’ll hit your key results when the chosen metric(s) reach the target: that’s the outcome that you’ll use to determine if your OKR has been successful or not.

Good product OKRs are:

1. Aligned
   The whole team should agree with the objectives you’re setting – and should agree that they’re for the good of the product in general.
2. Defined
   Don’t be vague: set some iron-clad win conditions everyone understands – and can work towards with confidence.
3. Measurable
   What separates an OKR from any old aim is that you can objectively say you’ve achieved it, with measurements as a yardstick.
4. High-reaching
   Keep some of your OKRs grounded, but shoot for the stars with others. If you 100% everything, your goals were too grounded.

It’s also worth remembering that:

Product OKRs should ladder up to something big
Great OKRs cascade. Together, all your OKRs should work together to tell a story of where you want the product to go, and what you want it to achieve. You’ll get there by tracking major and minor OKRs – the small ones ladder up to the big ones, and the big ones ladder up to that one massive dream you have for your product.

Product OKRs are team-wide
Individuals can have OKRs, but when you’re dealing with product development, setting goals on that granular level is only going to result in siloed teams working in the dark. OKRs should be transparent, and form a core part of your overall product roadmap – a roadmap that everyone’s working on together.

Product OKRs are learning opportunities
OKRs should be set and reviewed as frequently as is relevant for each one. And when we say ‘reviewed’, we mean it. If you fail to hit an OKR in your given timeframe, the worst thing you can do is delete it from your roadmap and move on. Instead, run an autopsy. Figure out what went wrong, what your teams learned, and how those learnings can help shape future OKRs.

Choosing the right OKRs for your product

What works for Google, wouldn’t work for a brand-new startup, and vice versa. The appropriate product OKRs will vary for different products and teams, depending on a bunch of factors. You need to ensure you pick OKRs that are relevant to you.

It’s worth asking yourself the following questions:

• What stage is your business at?
• What lifecycle stage is your product in?
• What does your market look like? 

You’ll want to consider the stage your company is at. Are you starting up, going for expansion, looking to diversify, or about to IPO? Businesses will often have very different objectives at different stages of their life.

At one stage revenue growth might be the most important company-level objective, at another time in a company’s life profitability could be the priority. Those business goals will have a significant impact on which product OKRs are right for you. 

You’ll also want to think about the lifecycle stage of your product – again, that will impact the OKRs that will make sense. Are you launching your product? Are you trying to build a customer base from scratch? Do you have a large customer base that you need to invigorate? 

And what are the market conditions you’re operating in? What does the competitive landscape look like and how are your consumers behaving?

With these considerations in mind, for each of our product OKR examples, we’ve mapped out a scenario for which the OKR would work. This way, you can see if you recognize your own circumstances in any of our examples and you’ll have an idea of which product OKR examples are worth pulling out for your own use. 

The Product OKR examples 

OK, here’s what you’ve been waiting for – 18 product OKR examples to pick and choose from to help you get your strategy planning off the ground. 

We’ve split the OKR examples into different types, so depending on your overall strategy, you can easily find the examples that are most relevant to you. 

But before we dive in, we do need to lay down one caveat.

Here’s the thing: some of the examples we’ve given here include Key Results that could arguably be bordering on Initiatives or projects – things to do, rather than metric-based goals.

That’s because we want to give you as clear an idea as possible of the kind of things that you should be considering for each type of OKR. Hinting at some of the actions around each OKR is our way of really painting that full picture – and helping you get the most value out of our examples.

Key result best practice should usually be metric-focused, measurable goals that will indicate whether or not you’ve achieved your objective. Then the Initiatives you put on your roadmap under each OKR are the things you’re planning to try in order to hit those targets.

So, when you take these OKRs and adapt them for your own use, you might find you want to shift some of the KRs we’ve listed here to become Initiatives, and have the more metric-based KRs as part of your OKRs. We’ll leave that up to you.

Product OKR examples for product usage

Digging into the nuts and bolts of your product usage can help you identify a load of key areas for improvement. Are daily logins declining? Are some features going untouched? Are there UI and UX elements that people aren’t gelling with?

Product usage OKRs are super important because, in the process of setting them, you’ll better understand the role your product plays in your customers’ lives – and push its usefulness in the right direction over time.

Example 1:

Example 2:

Example 3:

Product OKR examples for commercials 

Let’s talk numbers; it’s business-hat-wearing time. Improving or maintaining your product profitability means setting commercial or revenue-based OKRs that are designed to make that big red line go up.

When setting commercial OKRs you’re going to be lasered in on metrics that speak to revenue and profit
– so that’s monthly recurring revenue (MMR), annual recurring revenue (ARR), or general revenue based on customer acquisition or expansion. But that doesn’t mean losing sight of usability and removing pain points; these are the measures that tend to have the biggest impact on conversion rates, after all.

Example 4:

Example 5:

Example 6:

Product OKR examples for retention/churn

Retention or churn-based OKRs can be used to build on the things that make your product useful over the long term. When your customer churn rate is lower than your customer acquisition rate, you’ll be growing your user base.

The best way to do that is to drill into the potential causes of churn and work to eradicate them, all while testing out initiatives that promote long-term use.

Example 7:

Example 8:

Example 9:

Product OKR examples for customer satisfaction

You should probably be looking to drive customer satisfaction with every product decision you make and goal you set, but satisfaction-specific OKRs tend to focus on ways to improve the overall experience and turn existing customers into lifelong ones.

The key results that make up this kind of OKR can usually help you identify areas for product improvement based on real-world customer feedback.

Example 10:

Example 11:

Example 12:

Product OKR examples for different product lifecycle stages 

Every single product goes through the same lifecycle stages: Introduction/launch, Growth, Maturity, and Decline – and they all require a different set of strategies.

It stands to reason then that your OKRs for each stage should be specific to the kind of challenges and opportunities you’re facing at the time. To demonstrate that, let’s follow the same fictional company through the stages of its life and look at its objectives and goals during each…

Example 13 – Launch:

Example 14 – Growth:

Example 15 – Maturity:

Example 16 – Decline:

Product OKR examples for velocity/productivity   

Productivity OKRs are all about picking up the pace, getting more done, and achieving a higher throughput in any given timeframe. That makes them ideally suited to teams looking to work in a scrum or spring-based lean framework.

Importantly, when we talk about velocity, we’re talking about the speed at which a team completes tasks, so it’s important to measure it and use it to set objectives.

Example 17:

Example 18:

There you have it – 18 product OKR examples that you can use as you see fit! If any of those resonated with you, take them as a starting point, tweak, and adapt until you have the perfect OKRs to take to the team.

And look, if you want to get really serious about your OKR management, sign yourself up for a free trial of ProdPad and see what our OKR tool can do.

You can also access our sandbox environment and see our OKR tool complete with real-life objectives and key results, then hop over into one of the example roadmaps and see how the Now-Next-Later roadmap is structured around your OKRs. Heck, you can even view your entire roadmap by Objectives for a super-fast view of what you’re doing to achieve each of your goals.

Happy goal setting!

The post 18 Product OKR Examples to Kick-start Your Goal Setting appeared first on ProdPad.

In fact, in a way, they’re kind of like the first OKR tool you interact with. The objective? Grow (preferably in a way that somehow outpaces your siblings). Key result? Higher and higher marks on that chart. Initiatives? Keep eating those greens, kid.

But if you’re reading this, then we’re assuming – unless you’re some kind of child genius product manager – that you’re not 9 years old. This probably means your OKRs are a bit different these days. And that, in turn, means that wall charts and marks on a wall no longer cut the mustard when it comes to tracking and reporting on your progress.

All of which is a pretty roundabout way of saying: welcome to an article all about the best OKR software tools.

In this article, we’ll be working our way through the following:

• What is an OKR anyway?
• OKRs vs KPIs
• Why are OKRs important?
• What to look for in an OKR tool
• The 5 best OKR software tools

What is an OKR anyway?

An OKR, which stands for ‘Objectives and Key Results’, is an important kind of goal-setting framework for business leaders. Using OKRs, product managers, department heads, and managers can set clear aims for the future of the business and outline how they’ll get there.

Even though the acronym only defines two principle ingredients, there are often said to be three parts to the OKR framework: objectives, key results, and initiatives. So let’s look at each one in turn:

Objectives

What is it you’re trying to achieve? Is it to become the number-one product in your category? Or maybe it’s a more granular goal, like driving more people to your product page. You’ll likely have several business objectives at any one time – attainable and ambitious – and OKRs are how you formalize them.

Key results

These are the measurable data points you track to determine whether or not you’ve hit your goals. So if your goal is to become the number one product in your category, your key results might include things like ‘achieve 10,000 downloads per month’, ‘reach a top-10 app store chart position’, and ‘net 50 customer referrals per month’. 

Initiatives

This is the methodology that’ll help you tick off those key results and, in turn, achieve your objectives. If your goal is to drive people to your product page, for example, your initiatives would probably involve a mix of ad campaigns, email and content marketing, and organic social activity. 

OKRs vs KPIs

At their simplest, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and OKRs are both methods businesses can use to keep track of performance. But what can makes OKRs a more appealing prospect is that they wrap performance monitoring up in a bit of much-needed context, and provide a way to ladder achievements up towards a goal. 

So, while KPIs can tell you how a certain metric is performing, they don’t really tell you what that means, or what you should do next. OKRs, on the other hand, align teams on a clear direction of travel. 

What’s important is to understand how one fits into the other: KPIs are metrics, while OKRs are a framework that uses those metrics to determine success. Or, in other words: KPIs are one of the building blocks of OKRs.

To take an earlier example: if your OKR is to become the number one software product in your category, and one of your key results is to achieve 10,000 downloads per month, then you’ll be monitoring a KPI (downloads) to know if you’ve hit that goal. 

Without the OKR in place, your KPI is just tracking how download figures go up and down month-to-month or quarter-to-quarter, without rhyme or reason.

Why are OKRs important?

It’s pretty hard to incentivize change if you don’t clearly lay out your goals – and even harder if you don’t figure out how to achieve them. OKRs are ambition drivers; the framework gives teams something to shoot for. 

Here are three reasons why the OKR framework matters: 

1. OKRs galvanize teams

Setting a clear set of objectives is a great way to align teams on a common purpose. Without that vision, people end up just ticking along – often in siloes – plugging away at nothing in particular. 

2. OKRs provide focus

Those objectives also provide much-needed focus. It’s all too easy to cast the net too wide in terms of what success looks like, and that often results in scattershot strategies aimed at solving too many problems at once. OKRs help you shoot towards a few clear-cut aims.

3. OKRs push growth

The OKR framework is all about plotting a course to a better version of your business, which means they’re a great way to stop teams and companies from treading water. At least one of your OKRs should be as lofty as you can make it.

What to look for to find the best OKR software tool

Looking for your dream OKR-enabler? Keep an eye out for software with these three key facets:

1. Easy to update

No matter how smart or flashy, OKR tools can’t inherently know the progress of any of your goals, so you’ll want to choose something that people don’t hate updating. The simpler it is to add progress updates and data sources, the better.

2. Relevant data

Think about how much data you need to track. For most key results, some kind of data will naturally form the basis of how you determine success – so data visualization that tells a story is always a plus. But don’t get wowed by an overflow of data. Sometimes less is more; especially if you don’t want to end up having to work hard to sort the signal from the noise. 

3. Outcomes, not output

Remember that a KPI is an output; it’s a blank bit of data that speaks to a larger purpose. OKRs, on the other hand, are all about outcomes – so we’d advise looking for an OKR software solution that’ll help you learn from successes and failures instead of just posting rising or falling statistics. 

The 5 best OKR software tools

1. Perdoo

In a nutshell:

Perdoo is a lightweight but focused tool that brings KPIs and OKRs into one place and helps keep teams on track with reminders and check-ins on a regular basis. One cool feature here is that integrations with Slack and Teams let managers share progress and wins as and when OKR inroads are made. That’s alongside coaching options from the Perdoo team that can help businesses of all sizes get up and running with the OKR framework. 

From the site:

“Align everyone with the strategy. Focus teams on what matters. Engage employees to achieve goals and feel their best.”

Pricing:

Four tiers, from free up to $17 per user, per month 

2. Mirro

In a nutshell:

Billed as ‘performance management software for agile teams’, Mirro is part HR suite and part OKR platform that makes it easy to set up OKRs at an organizational, team, or individual level, and assign staff members for each one. It’s simple to update progress on each task, and that progress feeds into customizable dashboards that shine a light on progress by goal, with live leaderboards that can help teams and departments enjoy a bit of light competition.

From the site:

“High-growth companies may struggle with keeping their teams aligned with both collective and individual goals. Mirro simplifies this process by empowering people to take ownership, be autonomous, and be open about sharing their progress.”

Pricing:

$7-$9 per user, per month

3. Unlock:OKR

In a nutshell:

The Unlock:OKR team boasts 25 years of experience in the biz, and has used that know-how to create a software platform that’s incredibly focussed on that goal. The suite here is “designed to improve adoption of OKR, nothing more and nothing less,” which means an incredibly tight, lightweight tool that aligns teams and stakeholders on OKRs from both a bottom-up and top-down approach. That means egalitarian OKR input and reporting, with clear alignment. As with some of the other providers in this list, Unlock:OKR also offers coaching services to help teams adopt OKR best practices.

From the site:

“We believe OKR software should be light, almost invisible, enabling you to embrace the OKR framework in the flow of work.”

Pricing:

$6 per user, per month

4. Quantive Results

In a nutshell:

Previously known as Koan (before it was wrapped into the Quantive branding), this is a robust OKR offering that makes it easy to create and stick to OKRs as a team, while also reporting on live progress in a streamlined, visual way. Okrs can be set up using a variety of templates, but there are also custom fields for inputting the vectors and requirements that work best for your teams. Quantive Results boasts Adobe, Ubisoft, and TomTom among some of its big-hitter users. 

From the site:

“Quantive Results enables companies to improve what matters and stay ahead of the competition by connecting your organization’s data and people to a shared mission with a strategy execution platform.”

Pricing:

$18 per user, per month, with enterprise pricing on request

5. ProdPad

We’d obviously be remiss if we didn’t talk about ProdPad here. But not just because we’re extremely biased: moreover, ProdPad is the only OKR software package designed specifically for product managers. Product management is at the heart of every feature and tool we make, so our OKR integration has been built to keep things clean and efficient, without losing any core functionality.

OKRs in ProdPad can be designed at the product level or the product portfolio level – it’s up to you. Whatever the case, they’re built into your home page, with their own tab and easy management.

Setting up new objectives is easy, and – because we’re huge fans of labeling things in threes – you’ll always be able to see at a glance whether things are on track, behind, or at risk.

At its core, Prodpad is a product roadmapping platform, so we’ve ensured that OKRs can be assigned directly to roadmap initiatives and that they pull through dynamically to the Now-Next-Later sections of your roadmap (hello again, threes).

Importantly, we think it’s vital to track success through the lens of outcomes, rather than outputs. That means that instead of ditching all your data the second a target’s been hit, you can use ProdPad’s ‘Completed’ OKR section to track the success or failure of a particular initiative – and use that as a learning tool. There’s a space there for logging what worked, what didn’t, and the overall outcome for each OKR.

All told, we think the OKR integration built into ProdPad is pretty slick. But then we would, wouldn’t we?

Pricing:

Try for free, then plans from $24 per editor, per month

Honorable mention: Google Docs

If you’re just getting started and need something a bit more no-frills, maybe Google can get you off the ground.

Author John Doerr and the experts over at Measure What Matters have great little templates for both Google Docs and Google Sheets, which can help you map out your OKRs in a no-nonsense, completely free way.

Obviously, you’ll lose the interconnectivity and roadmap integrations that you get with dedicated software solutions like ProdPad, but for smaller businesses and people brand new to the world of OKRs, you could do far worse.

Learn the basics with a free OKR E-Course

We’ve got a brilliant little E-Course on OKRs if you’re interested?

With five lessons sent straight to your inbox over the span of five days, you can imbibe everything you need to know about OKRs at a pace that suits you. 

Across those five lessons you’ll learn:

1. The fundamentals of OKRs, how they work with roadmaps, and how they compare to KPIs
2. How to set OKRs, manage execution, and understand how often they should be reviewed
3. How to communicate OKRs, manage their visibility, and create an OKRs Champion
4. How to manage OKRs in larger organizations, consider company and team level OKRs, and best practices around measuring success
5. What makes a good OKR (and a bad one!) – and how to avoid the common pitfalls

It’s totally free and will arm you with the tools you’ll need to design OKRs that will actually impact your product’s future. Click here to get started.

The post The 5 Best OKR Software Options on the Market Right Now appeared first on ProdPad.

Here’s what my advice was:

Question: What are some resources for pivoting from an execution/features/roadmap PM to a vision/strategy/metrics PM?

First of all, congratulations on making a huge change. Going from a feature-focused product manager to an outcome-focused product manager can be a really difficult transformation, so good job! Below I’ve outlined the key points to making the move over to an outcome-focused approach and linked out to some handy resources. 

Outcome-Focused Product Management Starts With a Product Vision

First things first, start with mapping out your product vision. You can do this on a canvas of some sort, there are plenty of those going around. Some to consider are lean UX canvas or business canvas. This template is a good place to get started too.

Once you have your vision outlined, you can start outlining your objectives. For example, if part of your vision is to be the number one downloaded app in the Apple Store x weeks running, perhaps one of your objectives might be “Increase User Growth”. The important thing here is to remember objectives are to be quantitative and measurable. Here is a nice piece on writing objectives and key results to align your team.

Prioritizing Problems Not Features

The next part of outcome-focused product management can be achieved bottom up or top down, depending on how you wish to prioritize. This means you could start looking at potential problems to solve and then map ideas and feedback, or you could look at feedback first and define which best fit your objectives. It doesn’t really matter to be honest, as long as whatever work you choose to do actually maps back to those objectives. Remember, objectives are there to keep you aligned. This means that instead of working on random stuff, you’re working on stuff that aligns to what you’re trying to impact.

My next piece of advice would be, make sure that whatever projects you choose to work on are written down as potential problems to solve, not as features. That is, instead of writing that you’ll work on a “Slack integration,” instead write: “How can we best support users that work on Slack in order to integrate and collaborate with our app more closely?” This gives you the space to actually understand how you might solve the problem better. We’ve got a really good example of what good OKRs and initiatives look like in our Sandbox. 

Learning From Each Outcome To Get Better Results

When it comes to writing down outcomes and looking back at your work, remember there is no such thing as failure. I mean, yes, you might fail – but that’s ok. The whole point behind outcome-focused product management is to allow yourself to fail, and to use this failure (or likewise, potential success) as an opportunity to learn.

• If you failed, how can you prevent yourself from failing again?
• Where did you go wrong?
• If you succeeded, how can you replicate that success again?

This is what outcomes are about. They’re about preventing the risk of business failure and potential debt before it happens, while keeping your team aligned and working towards the same set of goals.

Become an Outcome-Focused Product Manager With ProdPad

A massive well done to product managers who are able to make the change this effective, and quite frankly, more robust way of thinking about products. We’ve built and developed ProdPad to help outcome-focused product managers be more successful at work. Our lean roadmapping tool, customer feedback and idea portals, as well as our Objectives and Key Results functionality is what every forward-thinking product manager needs this year. 

Book yourself in for a personal demo with one of our product experts for more information. 

The post Outcome-Focused Product Management vs Feature-Focused Product Management appeared first on ProdPad.

We’ve written previously about how OKRs are used to align your team around the same set of goals. However, there are a few points product managers need to be mindful of when implementing OKRs into their product strategy – especially those in high-level positions.

1- It’s an objective. It’s not simply a goal

An objective is an actionable target that clarifies the desired outcomes. A goal tends to focus more on measurable outputs or milestones. Product objectives contribute towards achieving wider company-led goals, and the connection between them would be outlined in the product strategy.

2- It’s a key result. It’s not a key performance indicator (KPI)

Key results focus on the direct outcome of specific activities (or initiatives) which can be measured and learned from. KPIs are more commonly used to measure the continued success or progress towards a defined performance measure, not an outcome-focused objective. A lagging KPI may well lead to a discussion to identify a future objective (complete with the key result) to improve it.

3- Initiatives are something different, too 

An initiative describes the specific activities or projects the team is working on to influence the success of an OKR. Even if you identify what you need to achieve (the objective) based on the company strategy and determine what good looks like (the key result), you’re not going to get very far if you’re unable to clearly communicate the actions you plan to take in order to get there (the initiative). 

Let’s use this as an example:

Objective: Improve your overall health to avoid illness or injury

Key result: Lose 15 pounds by the end of 2020

Initiative: Exercise for more than 30 minutes at least 4 times per week

4- OKRs don’t always have to cascade 

OKRs should not be put in place to control teams and trickle-down keeping everyone in check. They are used to unify teams, stretch yourselves to achieve greater things, and ensure that everyone is moving towards the same destination. Specific product objectives do not need to be entirely derived from  those at the group level. It is the product manager’s job to make sure their OKRs are directly linked to the outcomes their products are seeking to achieve and not last week’s departmental leadership meeting. ProdPad can help you avoid this issue through the product and portfolio canvases. The portfolio canvas establishes the vision, high-level strategy, and approach to achieving the objectives for the entire portfolio of products. Some, but not necessarily all, of the product objectives should align with and help achieve those portfolio-level objectives.

5- Don’t lose sleep over the stretch target 

Objectives are there to point you in the direction you aspire to go down. If you hit 70% of your stretch target then that should be applauded. You’re trying out something that hasn’t been done before. As long as you are testing and making informed decisions a reduced achievement won’t be massively detrimental. Be sure to record the outcomes of each OKR so that you can learn and improve. This will help you reduce risk in the future and operate on a more cost-effective basis. 

6- Avoid gamifying objectives and key results

It’s important to remember that OKRs are not there as targets for the individuals in your teams. OKRs measure the overall success of the product’s performance. As a leader, it is not best practice to start trying to hide targets under your OKRs. This will stifle innovation and growth as team members will end up gaming the system to improve their individual performance. One great way to combat this is to build in counter-metrics that pair a quality metric with the quantitative key result measure. 

When done well, with buy-in across the entire organization, OKRs can be a valuable tool to increase alignment, foster innovation, and propel your teams to greater success. Looking to implement OKRs into your own organization? Book yourself in for a free demo where our product experts will be happy to help. 

The post Six Pitfalls to Avoid When Implementing Objectives and Key Results appeared first on ProdPad.

OKRs link to individual initiatives on your roadmap, with the functionality to track progress. Objectives help product teams stay outcome-focused and understand what needs to be built. Worthwhile conversations can happen around the ‘progress status’ of a Key Result. And, stakeholders can see why certain items are being worked on to deliver the product strategy.

Let’s look at ProdPad’s Objectives and Key Results feature

Our CEO and Co-founder, Janna Bastow, has taken time out of her busy schedule to give us an exclusive walk-through of this feature. 

Book yourself in for a free demo with one of our product experts for more information. They’ll be able to answer your questions on our Objectives and Key Results feature.

The post Video: Let’s Look at Our Objectives and Key Results Feature appeared first on ProdPad.

These are valid questions. Your executives may even be asking them already. 

A good product roadmap focuses on your product’s vision and direction. The what, the why, and for whom you’re building. It comes down to communicating strategy. It is not about how fast you work or what the final solution looks like.

“Your users don’t care about what you are building. They care about what problem you’re solving for them and what outcomes you’ll enable them to achieve through your product. Setting OKRs forces your team to focus and to deliver a meaningful result for your users and the business.”

Gabrielle Bufrem, Product Manager @ Pivotal Labs, and Mind the Product Trainer

Tying objectives and key results to your roadmap ensures your team and customers understand the value you’re bringing to them. But they also promote transparency, healthier conversations, and help you to manage expectations. Most importantly, they give your product team the flexibility to adjust and pivot as needed.

What does a good objective look like?

Think of an objective as a goal you want to achieve in the future. They set clear direction and should provide motivation. It’s helpful to ask the question “where do you want to go?”

It is likely your portfolio will have both company-level objectives and product-level objectives, with each group supporting the other. A company objective aims to help the business, while a product objective aims to help the user. 

“Company objectives are derived from the company vision and strategy for building a successful company. Product objectives, on the other hand, are derived from the product strategy and vision. This will be different from the company vision (of course the product vision must support the company vision.)”

Simon Cast, ProdPad CPO on Company vs Product Objectives

What do these objectives look like? Well, it depends. And it really does. They will vary according to your industry, company size, growth stage and of course, your vision. With that in mind, there are some common objectives that companies may look at:

Once key objectives are defined, they can be used as a basis for the roadmap. It’s not advised to focus on more than three objectives at a time, otherwise you’ll have too much on your plate and not know where to keep focus.

“Less is more when it comes to getting started with OKRs. Moving from a focus on outcomes instead of output requires a mindset shift as well as changes to the tactics of prioritization/collaboration/communication. Don’t underestimate this effort. It’s better to start with even just one OKR for a quarter to understand how to make them work for you in a successful manner, and thus feel motivated to stick with them long term, rather than be overly aggressive and experience major failure on your first try.” 

Robin Zaragoza, Product Coach and Founder at The Product Refinery

You can now use these objectives to prioritize your initiatives.

Stay outcome focused with ProdPad

ProdPad’s roadmap section allows users to focus on outcomes and objectives. Objectives are available both on the portfolio (business) and product (user-focused) levels, and you can tie them back into your roadmap initiatives.

This means your entire team can see what you’re working on, which objectives you’re affecting, and the overall direction of the product and company.

What does a good key result look like?

Key results are the specific metrics you measure to ensure your work is having a positive impact. They stem from the objectives you have identified for your roadmap. A key result is always measurable and must be quantitative. They show you how you’re progressing towards your objective. Again, ask yourself the question “how do I know if I’m getting there?” Try not to overwhelm yourself with loads of key results.

As well as being measurable, there are other attributes to consider when creating your key results, such as:

They should make you feel a little uncomfortable

Key results should mean that you have made a significant change, something that is noticeable by others. It is thought that if you hit 70-80% of your key result target, you’ve done a good job. Try to make them tough; you should feel a little uncomfortable when looking at them. You’re not challenging yourself enough if they’re too easy to achieve.

Make them specific

Key results at the portfolio level should cover broader metrics. However, those at the product level should measure more granular progress. For example, the adoption of a specific area of your product.

You can’t just get it done

Key results are not things that you can do. They are things you can influence. Better results tend to come from the initiatives that are influenced by your actions. For example, don’t just build a website – build a website, and then increase website views by 25% each month.

Taking the previous initiative as an example, and looking at the objective of “User Growth,” a possible key result to track would be to Increase the count of Nimble users by 40% by the end of 2020. You now have a very specific metric to track, its hoped-for impact, and a hypothesis that ties back to how you will get there. Success!

Add key results in ProdPad

ProdPad allows you to add key results for each objective, so you not only have the ability to set direction but also understand how each initiative affects a key result. For each key result you can link to specific initiatives on your roadmap, giving you the whole picture on your objectives, key results, and the contribution of your team’s work against them.

Tying it back to your roadmap to understand the impact of your work

An outcome-based roadmap allows you to look back at your work and understand its impact on your customers and business. In combination with key results tracking, it means you can keep an eye on progress, assess risk with more detail, and pivot with more flexibility as you prepare for the unknown.

“Before your objectives are realized, how do you track your progress? Metrics, key results, KPIs, or some form of measurement along the way can inform you. This is critical to knowing how far along you are to solving those problems identified on your roadmap.”

C.Todd Lombardo, co-author of Product Roadmaps: Relaunched

Document progress in ProdPad

ProdPad provides a space to outline your objectives alongside their specific key results, and you can also tie initiatives to them. As you work to reach your goals, you can update ProdPad with status updates, so your entire team is able to look back at your work and understand how it’s moving along.

When you’ve completed the initiative, you have a space to write down the outcomes for both the initiative itself, as well as the impact of the initiative against your key results. 

Using objectives and key results: the takeaways

Tying back objectives and key results to your roadmap lets you focus your attention on projects that best support your wider strategy. You and your product teams can remain outcome-focused, learning as you go, while reducing future risk. Meanwhile, your executives and key stakeholders can view your roadmap and easily identify what you’re working on, and why.

Looking for a little more info? Book yourself in for a free demo with one of our product experts – they’ll be more than happy to answer all your questions and talk you through ProdPad.

The post Align Your Teams by Writing Good Objectives and Key Results appeared first on ProdPad.

To assist you in your journey to building amazing products, here are three key ProdPad features to help get your entire team involved in your product strategy.

Slack

For many of us, Slack is where conversations happen on a day-to-day basis. You and your team can now convert messages into ProdPad ideas and feedback via our slack integration. Therefore, you’ll never miss out on conversations that might lead to a stroke of genius.

What’s more, you can have conversations directly in Slack thanks to its seamless sync with ProdPad. Therefore, your entire team can now get involved – right from the comfort of your Slack workspace.

Other key benefits include:

• The ability to submit feedback on behalf of customers directly from Slack. As a result, support and sales teams can get involved with a simple command or message action.
• You can attach images and files to ideas and feedback. Perfect for providing more definition. 
• Your team can get involved by voting and @mention(ing) each other.
• Being able to help your product team by allowing members to submit items on a per-product basis.

If you want to give it a try, add the ProdPad Slack app to your workspace today!

Objectives and Key Results

Objectives and key results (OKRs) help align you and your team around the same set of goals. This provides a clearer understanding of the outcomes and possible impact on your users. With OKRs directly tied to your roadmap, you can also enable better conversations to happen across teams and stakeholders.

In ProdPad, you can create objectives and key results both on both portfolio level (to understand business-level objectives) and the product level. Each initiative on your roadmap is tied to an objective and key result, with the ability to track progress.

Once you’ve completed the project, you can record the impact on the key results, as well as the outcome for the project itself. Take this opportunity to reflect on your original intent, and whether or not you reached the goals you wanted to reach. It is important to remember this is a space for you to record what you learned. Look at how you can recreate success or avoid failure in future projects.

Publish your roadmap

Now that you’ve got the ball rolling with great ideas from Slack, as well as aligned objectives, it’s time to build and publish a roadmap.

ProdPad offers you the flexibility of publishing your roadmap in three different formats: PDF, URL or an embed code. 

With the added benefit of customizing views and display options, you can create multiple roadmaps for different target audiences. 

All changes are replicated to your existing URL’s automatically, so you’ll never need to worry about shared roadmaps being out of date. Also, our added security controls allows you to expire URLs and embed codes at any time.

Perfect your product strategy with ProdPad

Sign up to our monthly newsletter, The Outcome. You’ll be the first to hear how all our features can benefit your whole company. We’ll make sure you are the first to:

• Hear about our upcoming webinars and product resources
• Learn about our latest findings, insights and recommendations 
• Get the lowdown – with news from the product industry
• See what ProdPad are working on, and which events we’re attending

The post Three Ways to Align Your Product Strategy With the Whole Company appeared first on ProdPad.

It’s fashionable currently among the anti-roadmap faction to believe that you can better build a product by just using objectives.

But while using only objectives is better than the featureitis of a Gantt based roadmap, it still suffers from several problems that result in a poorly delivered product. You’ll end up with a product that people don’t love.

A list of objectives means that you build in a linear manner. While concentrating on one objective at a time might be good for focus, it can be bad for the product’s development overall, since it takes no account of the relationship between objectives. If two objectives are in tension you can spend a lot of time undoing work you’ve already done.

Product management done by list of objectives only means you lose the ability to see and prioritise solutions that tackle more than one objective at a time. It means you optimise for single points and not the overall strategy. It’s like improving or optimising at a single point in a manufacturing process without paying attention to the impact on the overall process, and ending up with a worse performance than considering the overall system would have had.

The art of product management is in optimising for delivery of the product vision rather than any specific objective. Relying on a list of objectives is a poor way of achieving this, particularly as the objectives may be company ones rather than product ones.

So should you ditch objectives? Not at all. Objectives are vitally important: they are the outcomes that help you implement the product strategy that delivers your product vision.
But product objectives must be considered holistically in terms of your product strategy – and this is where roadmaps come in. Not Gantt-based roadmaps but objective-based roadmaps.

With objective-based roadmaps you can see how the problems you plan to solve help you move towards the outcomes described by your objectives. You can prioritise problems and solutions that solve multiple product objectives. You can see how working on one objective could cause problems for other objectives.

Objective-based roadmaps showcase areas of focus (initiatives or problems to be solved) via three time horizons (now, next and later) and then link those areas of focus to the objectives. You quickly see commonalities and conflicts, so that you can prioritise while showing progress and order of delivery without being terrorised by arbitrary deadlines.

Objective-based roadmaps allow you to re-prioritise easily as the company objectives and product strategy evolve.

So, what does a good objective-based roadmap look like? The hierarchy shown below meets the needs of all stakeholders. The product roadmap is made of up of a series of initiatives and in each case, the initiative is designed to achieve the outcomes defined by the associated objective(s). This is still pretty high level, so the addition of ideas – experiments which can be run or prototypes which can be tested – means that there is an indication of what can actually be done to solve the user’s problem. This ensures that the roadmap can be communicated in a way that’s appropriate for the audience – i.e. leadership, sales and marketing can see what problems will be solved while the delivery teams can see what they need to try in order to solve the problem.

In essence, an objective-based roadmap becomes a prototype for your product strategy, one that can be understood and responded to by everyone in the organization.

Cards in the “later” and “candidate” columns should either have no objective or only the strategic objectives. As the cards then move into the next and now columns they should also gain tactical objectives.

It is not enough to just have objectives and manage your product on a list of objectives. You need to place the objectives and initiatives for each objective in context so you can choose the most effective course to reach your product vision. A roadmap creates this necessary context.

Discovery, vision, objectives and roadmaps, how does this all fit together? Find out in the next in this series of blog posts.

The post Lead by Example – Why Objectives Alone are not Enough appeared first on ProdPad.

Company objectives, team objectives, personal objectives, product objectives… So many objectives! One particularly troublesome problem for anyone involved in product development is the confusion between company objectives and product objectives.

We should start by defining what we mean by objectives.

Objectives are outcomes that show you are delivering the strategy that you have defined in order to achieve your vision. This applies for either company objectives or product objectives. And it is also the key difference between product and company objectives. Your company objectives are derived from your company vision and company strategy while your product objectives are derived from your product vision and product strategy.

Product Objectives

So before you arrive at your product objectives you need to start with your product vision and define your strategy. Then can you can come up with product objectives whose outcomes show that you are delivering your product strategy.

Let’s go through an example

Say our product is a smart thermostat for electric heaters (yes, I’m cold). Your vision for the product could be:

“MakeItWarm is to be the smart thermostat that puts the user in secure control of sustainable comfort of their homes or business. This will be achieved by allowing the user to set their comfort zone via multiple devices and will teach them how to provide that most sustainably.”

With the product vision detailed, next you should define a strategy that will allow you to achieve that product vision. A strategy is best defined as a series of outcomes that will indicate you are achieving your vision.

Continuing our example the strategy could be:

“Our strategy to deliver this product vision is to:

• Provide a Wifi/Internet connected thermostat that is easily installed by the user
• Provide a usable interface on multiple devices
• Support multiple forms of heating and cooling
• Partner with renewable and sustainable energy suppliers to provide users with the opportunity to switch supplier depending on demand and need”

These outcomes can be thought of as the strategic objectives. From these strategic objectives come tactical objectives or shorter term goals that help to achieve the strategic objective.

Let’s take the strategic objective of “Provide a usable interface on multiple devices”. This could then have a more tactical objective of:
“Implement a web based UI for the thermostat”
or
“Implement native mobile app for Android and iOS”

Both are objectives that help to achieve the overall strategic objective.

Company Objectives

But how do product objectives fit in with company objectives?

These two types of objectives often end up being used interchangeably, even though they’re not the same. This is particularly common in single product companies. The key to understanding how they fit together is to firmly separate company objectives from product objectives.

Company objectives are derived from the company vision and strategy for building a successful company. Product objectives, on the other hand, are derived from the product strategy and vision. This will be different from the company vision (of course the product vision must support the company vision).

Examples of company objectives are “Increase conversion from basic subscription plan to premium for users who have been with us for one year”, or “Increase margin on each thermostat”. Company objectives can be achieved through the effort other teams in the business – such as sales, marketing and customer success – rather than only through product or service.

Company objectives are focused on company outcomes and product objectives are focused on user outcomes. There is the potential for conflict between the objectives: you can do work that is valuable to the company but detrimental to the user, and also do something valuable for the user that is detrimental to the company.

Company objectives should feed into helping you work out which of the product objectives should be the focus within a specific time period. This helps you to prioritise your roadmap based on the product objectives which are linked to the initiatives or themes on your roadmap.

Achieving Success

If our product strategy is based on achieving objectives, how do we know that it’s successful? That it’s delivering the product vision? For a subscription-based business that is measured by looking at conversion and churn, if the conversion rate is going up and churn rate is going down, then the strategy can confidently be said to be working.

Or can it?

Conversion and churn can be affected by factors other than the product. For example marketing may have found a rich target market which is bringing the right people in or customer success could be actively spotting people likely to churn and helping to prevent this.

This is further complicated because improvements in marketing, sales and product reinforce one another. For example, finding the right target market for a product may result in feedback which improves the product, and makes the marketing more effective. So you can’t simply say x% is due to marketing and y% is due to product.

In reality conversion and churn are representative of the company’s success. They’re not representative of a user’s success with the product, and a user’s success with the product is the measure you need to show that the product strategy is working. Churn and conversion are simply proxy measures that you are solving the user’s problems, although they may represent good company objectives.

You should define up to three metrics that are indicative only of user success. These metrics will need to align with your strategy and objectives in order to be usable. In our smart thermostat example, the metrics that indicate user success are “Energy bill is lower than the same time last year” or “House temperature remained in the comfort zone without user having to manually intervene”.

Untangling product objectives from company objectives is crucial in making sure your product delivers for your end users. The two are often conflated in single product companies but you must work hard to separate them and ensure they remain separated. Start with the product vision, define the strategy and then create your product objectives.

Can you manage a product solely on objectives? Find out in the next in this series of blog posts.

Our product management blog has even more articles on a range of PM topics.

The post Company Objectives vs Product Objectives: Spot the Difference appeared first on ProdPad.