Transform your projects from good to game changing. Ben Lamorte shares the power of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) as a transformative tool for project leaders. He introduces a simple framework: define the destination, articulate its importance, set measurable key results, and outline an action plan. Hear about the impact of strong OKRs, and how tracking progress fosters motivation through small wins and helps teams maintain focus.
Chapters
00:00 … Intro
01:29 … What are OKRs?
02:05 … The Objective and The Key Results
03:36 … The Destination
07:57 … Examples of OKRs
10:22 … The Key Result Champion
11:52 … The Human Side
14:57 … Common Project Problems OKRs Can Fix
18:25 … Keeping the Team Aligned
21:32 … Ren Love’s Projects from the Past
23:48 … Benefits to OKRs: Learning
27:26 … Benefits to OKRs: Communication
28:29 … The Salad Dressing Approach
31:56 … Common OKR Mistakes
35:02 … Outputs vs. Outcomes
39:16 … Ben’s OKRs Field Book
41:37 … Lessons Learned
46:10 … Ben’s OKR Career
48:15 … Find Out More
49:04 … Closing
Intro
BEN LAMORTE: I highly recommend that you take this outcome mindset. And, by the way, even if you don’t do OKRs, ask yourself that question; right? What is the intended outcome of this project? And really align on that before you start working on the project.
WENDY GROUNDS: Welcome to Manage This, the podcast by project managers for project managers, where we connect you with the people and insights shaping the world of project management. I’m Wendy Grounds, and here with me in the studio is Bill Yates. Today we’re thrilled to welcome Ben Lamorte. He is an expert in the realm of OKRs, Objectives and Key Results. Not OKRs and not MOKRs, but we’ll talk about that later on.
BILL YATES: We’ll sort that out.
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah, we’ll sort that out for you. Ben admits that he has more OKRs coaching experience than anyone on the planet, having worked with over 300 organizations including global giants like 3M, Cisco, Nike, and Capital One. In 2014 he founded OKRs.com, where he’s been on a mission to help business leaders define and measure progress on their most critical goals. He’s also an accomplished author with two books on OKRs under his belt. Today Ben’s going to talk with us on his insights on how project leaders can unlock the true power of OKRs to achieve transformational outcomes and ensure that your project is adding value.
Hi, Ben. Welcome to Manage This. Thank you for joining us today.
BEN LAMORTE: Absolutely. So glad I could join.
BILL YATES: Ben, let’s just start out with OKRs. Is it OKRs? Is it okra? Or is it – how do we refer to this thing?
What are OKRs?
BEN LAMORTE: Well, you’re right. I mean, look, this acronym OKRs stands for Objectives and Key Results.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
BEN LAMORTE: And when I first got introduced to the framework it was actually MOKRs, and that’s really confusing. That’s Mission with an M and then OKRs. So, it was Mission, Objectives and Key Results. And so MOKRs, right, that’s where I got introduced to it. And so now people pretty much call it OKRs.
BILL YATES: Okay.
BEN LAMORTE: That’s how you’re going to hear it. Of course, it stands for Objectives and Key Results.
The Objective and The Key Results
BILL YATES: Yeah, so let’s go into that part further. So, describe the O. Describe the KR. One’s more qualitative; one’s more quantitative. Go into that a little bit.
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah, I mean, the objective is really a qualitative statement, right, that starts with a verb. And it’s, hey, you know, we want to improve let’s say marketing efficiency or whatever. You come up with something you want to improve. And look, executives talk like this all the time. The hand waving, you know, like hey, let’s improve, you know, retention of our customers; or, like, let’s improve onboarding or whatever we want to improve. That’s great.
But the next thing we do is the key results; right? And the key results answer the question, how do we know we’ve achieved the objective? Or how do we know we’ve made progress on that objective? And they’re more mathematical, kind of quantitative statements. We’re going to reduce the time that customers spend on hold from 60 seconds to 30 seconds or something like that.
Now, you know, we know if it was achieved or not. It’s not subject to opinion. And people love this because, right, the engineers are the technical people. They want to know how do we know we know; right? They’re tired of these executives just hand waving and saying, hey, let’s improve onboarding. Let’s make the customer experience better. Let’s optimize. So, the key results really come into play there.
BILL YATES: Yeah, that’s good. That’s a great way to put it. And this resonates with project managers, Ben, because there is nothing more frustrating than having that sponsor of a project that can’t really define the key results. You know, it’s always fuzzy. And then you play the rock game, you know. Bring me a rock. No, that’s not it. Bring me another one. So that’s, that’s a very, very important distinction.
The Destination
BILL YATES: Now, with OKRs, one of the statements that you made that I read I really liked. You talked about it helps us keep our eyes on the destination. Talk about that further, the destination.
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah, look, this one is such a great point. I’m going to give you the whole context here because it is the podcast long format so I won’t just give you the one-sentence answer, and which is one of the reasons why I love this podcasting thing. You know, I started out in engineering, and they put me in front of a computer. They said, “Hey, Ben, you know, you’re a management consultant.” And even though I down deep was a people person, they didn’t really care. They just said, hey you’re a quantitative guy. Here’s a spreadsheet. Go build spreadsheets. And so, I got really good at spreadsheets.
And in my 20s that’s kind of what I did; right? In my 30s I was presenting all my spreadsheets. Of course I would put it in PowerPoint, back in the days when that was really what you do, especially if you’re in consulting. You know, nobody wants to see your spreadsheet, so you show them the PowerPoint summary.
But even then, people would say, well, Ben, you know, the executives would look at the stuff I’m doing and say, you know, “You seem really smart. I like you. You’re a nice guy. But you’re too in the weeds.” And most of the leadership, and I don’t want to name names, I don’t want to point fingers, but I’m going to say you know who you are, people that ever had me as an indirect report or something. And it wasn’t helpful, you know, just telling me you’re too in the weeds, whatever, great. But their way of helping me was saying you should, you know, focus on the bigger picture. You know, and I’m like, I don’t even know what that means.
So, I got this guy Jeff Walker. He’s a critical player in my life. He’s one of my most important, if not the most important, mentor for me. And he goes back to Jeff Walker started Walker Interactive; okay? This is punch cards. The first interactive general ledger. And later Larry Ellison recruited Jeff Walker to start Oracle applications. And, you know, look, back when Oracle was a hardware company, 20 million, Larry Ellison was not a household name. Let’s just put it that way.
And Jeff Walker comes in, builds Oracle financials, becomes the head of applications, basically honestly is the founder of Oracle, effectively, because he starts Oracle applications and also becomes the CFO, becomes the EVP of marketing. I mean, this guy is a polymath; right? I was lucky enough to get him to be my mentor. And I did not know at the time that Jeff had used OKRs at Oracle. That was one of the critical ways that he used to scale the organization.
And I got Jeff as a mentor. He would call me up every now and then, say, “Hey, how’s business going?” And I would just say, “Oh, we’re operating on all cylinders. You know, we’ve got the webinar filling up. We’re trying to get the new prototypes, we’ve got – sales reps are just killing it. He’s like, “Ben, let me ask you a question. When you go on a hike, do you have a destination?” And I was kind of thrown off by this question.
But I said, “Well, you know, I have a small daughter at the time. And, you know, we sort of have a…” “Well, do you have a destination, or do you just have sort of a general area where you’re going?” And I said, “Well, honestly, we sort of have a general area where we’re going. I mean, my kid’s four years old. We might see a waterfall. We’re not like we have to get to some destination. We just sort of park and go for a hike.”
And Jeff said, “Ben when I ask you about your personal life, I’m happy to hear about your daughter and the waterfall. But do you know when I talk to you about work, when you answer the question the way you just did, where you say all these different things about what you’re doing, and you’re operating on all cylinders, you’re wasting my time.” By the way, he went Oracle on me. I’m not going to do it here. But these guys, he chewed me out.
But the thing is, Jeff was not like those other guys that said you’re too in the weeds or whatever; right? He said, “Let me tell you what you could have done, and what you should do in that situation.” So how about that.
So, this is where the conversation shifted. And he said, “Start with the destination. First tell me what – where are we trying to go? Right? What is the objective here? Then pause. Tell me why it’s important. Make sure we’re on the same page and aligned about why this objective is so important. And then tell me the key results, how we know we got there. And then tell me the action plan and the webinar. Otherwise, I don’t even know why are we even doing the webinar. You’re just telling me all these things.”
So, Jeff created that voice inside me. And then I started doing that; right? I said I would talk to people really. But where do we ultimately want to get? What’s our goal here? What’s our objective? How will we know we got there. I sort of became an OKRs coach even before I really even knew what OKRs even stood for. Jeff later on revealed that – he revealed MOKRs. That’s what they used at Oracle.
BILL YATES: Okay.
BEN LAMORTE: Mission Objective Key Results. So, I took a lot of his ideas and internalized those. So, I do believe that destination, boy, if you want alignment, if you don’t know what the destination is, alignment is impossible.
BILL YATES: That’s so true. And man, it is so insightful that you had that kind of contact and relationship with Jeff Walker. That’s amazing to be on the front line.
Examples of OKRs
So, most of our listeners are project managers or project leaders. Give some examples of OKRs that a project leader would be able to relate to.
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah. Well, so, look. I had a real client situation where back in the days when APIs were a big deal they were selling stuff. Okay? But in order to sell it – it was a software platform type of a deal – they had to make sure that their prospects had certain, you know, underlying software systems.
BILL YATES: Sure.
BEN LAMORTE: Like, I don’t remember what it was, Azure Cloud or who knows, some technical term. Bottom line is they called it APIs. And this was how they could connect to these other systems. And they were losing deals; okay? They were losing 30% of their deals just out of the box because of compatibility issues. And they did some research and found out that it was some kind of a Microsoft connector that was killing them, and it was just a deal breaker.
So, they had an objective called, you know, Operation Partner API Project; right? Make API project a success. This Partner API project is going to be a success. We all agreed why it was important, you know, because we’re losing a bunch of deals here. Very simple. And the question is how will we know we’re successful? They started writing key results. And one of them was win our first MS connector client; right? That’s a binary statement, yes or no.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
BEN LAMORTE: Most key results look like increase this from X to Y. But we have zero. So going from zero to one can be a huge key result. And then the other one was – and this was interesting. They were thinking a little bit ahead because, even if we win our first connector client, have we really achieved our objective? Not quite. There’s something missing. And that is the capability to sell going forward. So, they had increased the number of sales reps who can actually demo the MS connector component to their solution from two, they had two guys that could do it, to 20.
So, the engineers had to actually work with the project team to get the sales rep. It was a very cross-functional project. And we see that a lot with effective OKRs, and especially with project managers who tend to work across teams.
BILL YATES: Yeah. If the API fails, then the project never gets going.
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah.
BILL YATES: You know, that’s kind of my background, too. That was something that I had to work with a lot with utilities and financial software in the past, was making sure that the new system and the current systems that were in place could talk. It is really interesting to me. I like that KR that you have where they were looking into the future and saying, okay, it’s not just that we can do this, but then we have to be able to sell it. So, let’s make sure we have sales reps that are set up for that.
The Key Result Champion
BEN LAMORTE: Exactly. Yes. And that’s why most of these objectives have kind of a yin yang of key results; right? They’re not just one key result for the objective. Typically, you’ll see two, three, maybe four key results that sort of represent achieving that objective. In this case they only needed two. But I think the key point here is each of these key results is highly actionable; right?
BILL YATES: Yeah.
BEN LAMORTE: Because we’re taking an outcome mindset. So, we know we want to win that first Microsoft connector client. So, we have a key result champion within the project, a name next to that key result. And that person’s got to go and figure out what have we got to do; right?
BILL YATES: Yeah.
BEN LAMORTE: Well, we’d better identify like a beta client. You know, let’s figure out who’s a Microsoft person that’s out there that would be willing to work with us, even though we can’t do it now. Who’s going to be able to, you know, test it out? That’s a big step right there. Then we’ve got to find some, you know, engineers who are going to program this thing up, and we’re going to have to have QA, and we’re going to have to assemble a team. And then each of those team members has little checkbox action items; right?
BILL YATES: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN LAMORTE: And so that project manager could be that person for each of those key results. After all, there’s only two. And most project managers like to play that role. They’re probably good at that role of being what I call the “key result champion.”
BILL YATES: Yes.
BEN LAMORTE: Now, they’re probably doing some of the work, too. I mean, it’s not to say they’re totally hands-off. But they definitely have a team, and they’re managing it. It’s usually, like, every week or two, boom, did this get done? Did that get done? What do we need to do? Is this working? Is that not working? So, this OKR model can be a great model for project managers to have like an OKR whereby they’re the key result champion, and each key result has an underlying action plan.
The Human Side
BILL YATES: Yeah, yeah. These key results here, you’re hitting on it. These are things that we could and should track, and we should maintain the progress of them. Again, you know, think status reporting and some of the basics of project management. The fun thing for me is there’s a human side to this, a human wiring, you know, dopamine, endorphins. Key results in tracking them just work. So, talk a little bit about our human wiring, how these key results…
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah. I’m going to tell you a personal story first. Look, when I first started with OKRs, I had a key result where it was impossible to make progress on this key result until literally like the last day…
BILL YATES: Oh, man.
BEN LAMORTE: …of the period that we were measuring. It was one of those things where it was like a survey; right? And we couldn’t even get the survey results. So, when you update this thing a month later, you know, how are we doing? It’s like, well, I don’t know. We’re waiting for the survey results. Okay. The next month, how are we doing? I don’t know. We’re waiting for the survey results. This is the most frustrating kind of key result.
So, a key result where it’s effective is when you can feel like you’re winning or point to something along the way; right? As opposed to you’re either there or not. And so that’s one of the best practices because otherwise you sort of get discouraged with OKRs. And that part that you said about the human wiring, it’s so important because you need to feel like you’re winning.
You know, look, one of the books that I highly don’t recommend, but I do recommend the TED talk version, is called “The Progress Principle.” And it comes from this group of Harvard researchers. They’ve got some really good points. But, you know, look. Like any other academic-oriented book, it’s like 300 pages of which you probably need 50. Okay? Sorry, guys.
But if you look at their TED talk, it’s maybe less than an hour, and it’s really good. And what they talk about is they did a bunch of research on engagement. You know, what really makes work rewarding? How can we make people actually feel like they’re winning at work? How do we make work enjoyable?
But what they said is, they concluded that making measurable progress on meaningful goals is the most engaging and fulfilling part of work. You know, look, if you’re building houses, it’s such a better job than what we knowledge workers have; right? Because we see the fruits of our labor. We see, all of a sudden, you know, we do all that work to get the foundation, the permit, whatever. Next thing you know, we’re putting up the walls. You know, I have a friend that’s doing that. He’s so excited. He’s like, yeah, we’re putting in the electrical, or we got the plumbing. We’re going to put the windows, he’s making progress.
When you look at what happens with knowledge workers, you come home from work, and you’re, you know, how did it go? Well, I mean, we released the new patch, but then Google says they’re changing something. You know, I don’t want to talk about this. Let’s go to the pub. You know, I don’t even know; right?
BILL YATES: Yeah.
BEN LAMORTE: Whereas, if you take the time to write down these OKRs, you have a clear destination, and you can measure your progress and see yourself going forward on that progress. Of course, fine print, you actually have to make the progress; right?
BILL YATES: Yeah, yeah.
BEN LAMORTE: So, setting the OKRs is not enough, and trying to do stuff is not enough. You actually have to see the needle move. But when that happens, yeah, it’s kind of like an addictive thing that you get – they called it “quantified work” at one point, where it’s like the Fitbit experience, you know, where you’re like, I’ve got to get my 10,000 steps. If you can have that feeling of getting the 10,000 steps at work and see that progress and get that feedback, it can be a really good thing for really everybody.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
Common Project Problems OKRs Can Fix
WENDY GROUNDS: You talk about the signs that show or indicate when a team needs to establish some OKRs. Can you talk about a few common project problems that OKRs might fix?
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah. The first book I wrote in 2016, I called it, you know, “OKRs: Driving Focus, Alignment, and Engagement.” And those three things seem to be the big three. The warning signs are things like this. And this happens a lot; right? I’m working in a team, and we have no idea what the company’s goals are. That’s usually a problem. And that can be solved by the company actually setting OKRs and communicating those to the organization.
What happens is, once you’ve worked at a company that has OKRs, and they’ve been doing it right, you’re kind of spoiled; right? So, if you go to a different company, if they’re not doing OKRs, you’re kind of lost. You’re like, wait, what are we doing here, guys? You know? And then even within a more microcosm level, like of my team, do I even know what my team is trying to do? And how do I know if I’m contributing to those goals or what’s going on?
What we find is that teams really benefit from having a mission. So, you know, most companies have a mission, right, a long-term statement of why do we exist, who’s our customer, what’s the impact we make. Most companies have that. Come on, if you don’t have that, we need to talk.
But what happens is a lot of teams, and I would even argue, like if you’re a project manager, and you’re creating a team, take one hour and figure out what is our mission. Like why do we exist? Who’s our customer here? What is this problem we’re solving; right? So that’s huge.
I mean, there are some other ones too; right? I want to make sure that I know what the people in the other department do. And I’ve seen this happen; right? So, if the other department, going back to what Jeff Walker did, he actually had every team having a mission. Remember, he did MOKRs.
So, they would start with that mission and then have the OKR underneath it. And every team, even the sub teams, like accounts payable; right? You might think, oh, accounts payable, they’re just a humdrum thing. Why do we need to have a mission? But they did. We pay the vendors and keep them happy. That was it. And I’ll never forget this. I had another client, Sears, and they had an accounts payable department, but they were going bankrupt at the time. My publisher said, don’t mention Sears, you know, because it won’t look good, you know, nobody wants to. But the fact is they used OKRs effectively to go out of business.
Their CEO at the time saw the Google video that came out in 2014 and said, “Hey, I want to do that.” And they did a pretty good job overall. What happened was their accounts payable team had something like this mission: String out the vendors as long as you can and see if they go away. They didn’t want to pay the people. And everybody knew they were going bankrupt.
So, you know, and even I, they were my client, and I knew I was helping their teams try to figure out ways to streamline and cut costs and do all this stuff. So, let’s just say it this way. I don’t even know if I ever did get paid by Sears. I’ll say that their accounts payable department had me taking drug tests and doing all these things.
BILL YATES: Wow, yeah.
BEN LAMORTE: And I’m like, look, I’m just trying to do some remote coaching for you. Why am I taking a drug test? But they had put in all these great, you know, blockers so that you couldn’t bother to even get your invoice paid. And then, even if you did, it was 120-day terms. I’m going to forget about the invoice by then. They knew what they were doing.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
BEN LAMORTE: So, the reason why I tell you this is the mission statement, even for something like accounts payable, which you might think is just a straightforward function, that can be completely different, depending on your business situation. And boy, when your team knows that mission and is clear on it, it’s going to drive that strategy. So those are some of the things that I see. I guess the other one would be, look, I’m working in my project, you know, on my team, and I have no idea how what I’m doing moves the needle. I just feel like I’m just coming to work and doing my stuff. That could be a sign that you need OKRs, as well.
Keeping the Team Aligned
BILL YATES: I totally agree. It’s so key for the team to stay engaged and to be aligned towards the same goal. So, I think for the project leader who starts to sniff out some of these indications, they need to, you know, have a meeting with the team. It could be a one-on-one to start with, but then maybe with the entire team to say, hey, what do you guys’ think are the key outputs, the key results that we’re pushing for? And you know, put them on the board.
For some people, it’s going to be super obvious they’ll be rolling their eyes. For others are going, oh, I didn’t know that was something we were pushing for, too. And then turn it and say, okay, now each one of you, I want you to describe what your role is in helping us achieve that. How are we going to get that result? What are you doing here?
BEN LAMORTE: Right. That’s exactly right. Yeah, you nailed it. You know, and there’s another part that I want to emphasize, which is the why. Okay? You hear everybody talking about, hey, we need to focus on why. Okay. Let me operationalize that for you.
I’ll give you a quick case study. I had this one client; they show me their OKRs; right? And the first objective is successfully transition to the cloud, something like that; right. And then they had some key results. I said, okay, great. Here’s your objective, and here’s your key results. I’m your OKRs coach. Let’s pause for a minute. So, your objective is successfully move to the cloud. Let’s talk about why is that important, and why is that important now?
“Why is that important” educates everybody and gets them aligned on why is this even important? Why are we doing this? But the why is this important now, boom, creates a sense of urgency. Because look, there are so many things we could be doing. Let’s do that right here. I was embarrassed, actually, because I was onsite. This was in Boston, and we had a four-hour workshop set up to do OKRs. We spent the next four hours talking about why this objective was important. We never even got to the key results. So, I’m sitting here going, I failed; right? I’m supposed to come out of here with the OKRs drafted. I’ve got the whole leadership team.
But they had an incredibly lively conversation, and it was things like this, like, wait, why are we going to the cloud? Well, wait a minute. Is this public cloud? Is it hybrid cloud? What about those international guys that wanted on local service? Wait a minute. Are we going to – all of a sudden, the cloud became this really granular conversation, and they had to break things out.
And they ultimately figured out that, like, they had to change their objective. They had to change their objective to make it more specific and talk about what component of the cloud they were really focusing on. Now when they said here’s why, and here’s why we’re doing it now, they had this alignment. So, at the end of that session, even though we never even got to the key results, that came, like, maybe a week later, they were so much in better position.
And so, what I want to invite you to do if you’re a project manager, is come up with an objective for your project. Obviously, if you can come up with a mission, even better. But look, if your project is six months, you don’t need to take the time to come up with a mission because missions are long-time, you know, like 10-year statements or something. But come up with your objective on what you’re trying to focus on improving with this project, but then really take the time to talk about why, and work on that with your team.
Because when your team knows why something’s important – and also invite them to contribute. Hey, why do you think this is important? Have them go through that process before you get to the key results. That we found has been unbelievably effective because it creates more of that emotional engagement component. And also, by talking about why, the key results kind of just get revealed. They sort of emerge from that conversation.
Ren Love’s Projects from the Past
REN LOVE: Ren Love here with a glimpse into Projects of the Past, where we take a look at historical projects through the modern lens.
Today we are going back in time to the creation of a Greek Icon: the Parthenon.
The Parthenon is a large, marble temple overlooking a series of smaller temples that are collectively known as the Acropolis of Athens. It was the largest and most ornate temple even built on the mainland of Greece. Construction of the Parthenon began around 447BCE, and was built to honor Athena Parthenos, the patron goddess of Athens.
The construction of the Parthenon was a monumental endeavor in regards to the Iron Triangle of project management: the Scope, Schedule, and Cost of the temple was huge. The project was funded by a coalition of Greek city-states, led by Athens – and was estimated to cost 480 talents – which translates to a substantial investment in the order of millions of dollars today. In terms of human resources, approximately 1,000 skilled workers were supported by perhaps hundreds (or thousands) of unskilled laborers. Many of these laborers were responsible for cutting and transporting the high-quality marble from quarries up to 10 miles away from the site.
The design incorporated advanced architectural techniques of the time, including the use of entasis, which is a slight curvature of the columns that creates the appearance of perfectly straight lines. The building features 46 outer columns and 19 inner columns, and was originally adorned with a series of intricate sculptures and friezes – which were considered masterpieces of Greek art.
So, was this project a success? Absolutely. The Parthenon took roughly a decade to build but has stood the test of time, surviving earthquakes, fires, wars, explosions, and looting across the centuries. Today, the Parthenon stands as a powerful symbol of ancient Greek culture, and draws continuous admiration and scholarly attention, and highlights the enduring legacy of the Ancient Greeks.
Thank you for joining me for Projects of the Past, I’m Ren Love. See ya next time!
Benefits to OKRs: Learning
WENDY GROUNDS: Can you give us any additional benefits to setting and tracking OKRs?
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah. So, like I said, I wrote my book, “Driving Focus, Alignment, and Engagement with OKRs.” And the general benefits that you’ll hear about are also the shorter cadence. So, you know, typically we’re really good at setting five-year goals, and we’re really good at doing like weekly or biweekly sprints or something like that. But the OKRs are kind of that bridge, right, that three- to six-month-out kind of a thing.
And so that’s a benefit is having that shorter cadence and really thinking about how we’re going to hold ourselves accountable in that type of a time period. The ones, though, that’s not unique to me. The two benefits that I see – and look, I shouldn’t say this is unique to me, but I see these two benefits coming from my clients.
And when I talked to them how they’re benefiting, it was somewhat of a surprise. The two words are “learning” and “communication.” And I talked to so many organizations that say, “Oh, we’re a learning organization; right?” That was a buzzword at one point. Really? Okay, so how do you mean we’re a learning organization? “Oh, well, we offer training to our employees.” Well, if you go talk to the employees, they’re saying, “Yeah, we’re a pain in the ass organization. Our company makes us take these stupid trainings.” I mean, to me, this whole learning organization thing, it could be a disconnect.
So, I said, look, one of the things that I heard from one of these quote “learning organizations” at the end of our OKRs project, where they said, well, what are your key takeaways, and they said, “Really for the first time I feel like we are a learning organization.” And I said, really, what do you mean? And they said, “Well, at the end of each OKR cycle, typically a quarter or so, we do a reflect and reset. We don’t just point backwards. We say, okay, here was the key result: Increase the number of partners or something from X to Y or whatever. And we failed. And we didn’t get very many partners.
But what did we learn? Well, actually, we learned that getting more partners doesn’t help because even though these partners pay a thousand dollars to be partners, then they don’t do anything. So, we were thinking that they would start selling on our behalf, and they’re not.”
So, what we really want to do is apply that learning into the next cycle and say, look, I don’t want more partners. I want better partners. And okay, but what is a better partner? Then we figure that out. And we say, okay, increase the number of partners who are quality, high-quality partners as measured by they sell three certificates in the first month because we found out that the people that can sell three certificates in the first month, they stick around and become good partners. Oh, that changes everything.
Let’s not go after a bunch of partners now. Let’s go after a small number of partners, and let’s handhold them, and let’s make sure they’re successful. I mean, this is a totally different strategy, and we learned that in one quarter.
The beautiful thing about OKRs is you will fail, but you incorporate what you learn from failing into the next cycle. So, the learning is built in to the actual OKRs process. And so, I became a huge fan of this learning. So, I as a coach will actually – I don’t hold my clients accountable for executing on the key results. Look, there’s plenty of forces that do that within their organization.
But when it comes time to the reflect and reset at the end of the cycle, no more Mr. Nice Guy; right? I’m like, look, I don’t care whether you’ve succeeded or not. What did you learn? And I want to know what did you really learn? How are you going to apply that learning? If you learned it, but you don’t apply that learning, did you learn? That’s like the old tree in the forest thing; right? I’m like, look, I don’t really care what you learned if you’re not applying it.
So, I hold them accountable for saying the next key result cycle, this is what we’re going to do. See, we’re incorporating our learnings. And that’s been incredibly effective to the point where I’ll get like every project team to report the one learning that they are going to incorporate. And they have to report that publicly to the rest of the organization because then it creates this learning culture.
It also shows that it’s okay to fail; right? I mean, there are so many people out there saying, you know, you have to succeed. All these new workers are just stressed out. And, like, stop worrying about that, and start thinking about what you can learn and how we can do better and, like, let’s work as a team. So learning is the big one.
Benefits to OKRs: Communication
And then the other one would be communication, which I think I talked about earlier, which is, you know, the story of those three IT directors. Maybe I didn’t mention it, but I had the CIO, one time he called me after his one-on-ones. And it was – it was the strangest thing because I didn’t even know the CIO. And he says, “You’re the OKRs guy?” And I said yeah. He said, “I just had the best one on one with each of my three directs. These guys have been working with me for 20 years; okay? Finally, I feel like they’re talking to me the way I want to be talked to.” And I was like, what do you mean?
He said, “Well, they showed me their OKRs. They had a format, a structured way. Here’s the objective for my group. Here’s why it’s important. Let’s align on that. Okay, here are the key results. Here’s what we’re going to do. I felt like we were in the military, like, okay, let’s go, marching orders, you know, we’re ready to go to battle; as opposed to, you know, we sit there, we have coffee, and these guys were in the weeds. And I’m thinking to myself, oh, that was me. I was that guy that was in the weeds.”
So, kind of my life passion is to help people who have been told that they were in the weeds, or even if they haven’t been told that they were in the weeds, but to be able to be more strategic in how they communicate with this OKR framework has been the big win.
The Salad Dressing Approach
BILL YATES: The idea with project managers of, you know, learning as we go, that’s so integral to good leadership and doing retrospectives, looking back and making changes on the fly to get better, whether it’s the end of one cycle of work, we’re doing an Agile approach; or if you’re taking, okay, the project is almost done, we’re halfway through or we’re done, and we’re going to do a reflection on that.
But I like that reflect and reset. And I see the need or the use of OKRs in that to feed right into that. So now I have something that I have been measuring. And hey, guess what? We’ve been measuring the wrong thing. You know, let’s change our objective. Let’s reset and then see how it plays out this next cycle of work.
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. And just to build off of that for a minute, look, I call it the salad dressing approach to life. And what do I mean by that? It’s alternative-focused thinking, which is there’s a great book by Ralph Keeney called “Value-Focused Thinking.” Again, I don’t really know that I recommend the book unless you’re a graduate student because the first chapter makes sense, and then he just goes off into some mathematical thing.
But the bottom line is, when you go out to a restaurant, and they say, hey, what kind of salad dressing do you want, a lot of people say, I don’t know. What are the options? So, once you hear the alternatives, then you select from the alternatives.
And in value-based approaches you would say, “Hey, what kind of salad dressing do you want?” Well, my values are I don’t want to gain weight. I want to avoid saturated fats. I’m trying to go low sodium. So, I guess what I’ll have is olive oil with lemon. They’re going to give you that. I guarantee you, if you ask them, can you give me olive oil and lemon? They usually pull that out.
The deal is you take value-based thinking, and you’re thinking out of the box in a way; right? Because you’re not just telling me, here are my choices, let me choose. You’re thinking about your values.
Now, when you decide what your OKRs are – and this is also consistent with this book called “Measure What Matters” – you don’t want to just assume, oh, here are all the metrics I can choose from for my key result. Let’s pick that one and that one; right? You want to say how we know we’ve achieved the objective. And so, what happens is sometimes you realize, hey, we need to measure the percentage of leads that convert within six weeks from lead to opportunity.
Because we don’t know what the quality of our leads are. And after six weeks, if they didn’t convert, they’re garbage. They’re gone. So, we need to start tracking that. That’s going to be a measure of lead quality because the sales team keeps telling us the leads are bad.
Well, if we keep on having this “the leads are bad,” how will we know if we’re getting better leads unless we know what is a good lead; right? How do we know we’re getting more good leads? If we’re not measuring that, we’re in trouble. So, you just nailed it. It’s like sometimes you have to create what I call a baseline metric key result. Obtain a baseline metric to reflect the quality of the leads as measured by reporting the number of leads that convert from an inbound lead to an opportunity that the sales team has sent a proposal to within the first six weeks with at least 100 data points in my sample. Now I just spat out an actual best practice key result. I’ve been doing this a lot; right?
But that’s the kind of thing, that’s the kind of statement that we want. So that at the end of this next cycle or quarter, we’re not sitting here going like, oh, yeah, the sales team says we have bad leads. We’re trying to, we’re doing everything we can, Captain, to get better leads.
But we have no way of knowing if we’re getting better leads other than the sales team says, yeah, well, they’re much better now. You know, this whole, yeah, now they’re much better now, you know, opinion thing, that’s just not a way to run a business. So that’s where, again, OKRs come into play, and I really like the story of the value-focused thinking as opposed to just taking this alternative approach.
Common OKR Mistakes
BILL YATES: Remaining flexible is such a key with OKRs, taking a realistic look at them and going, okay, this one has given us the results that we really find value in; this one, not so much. We’re measuring something great, but it’s too early. We can’t see what’s going to happen with this lead. What are some other common mistakes that you see leaders make with OKRs?
BEN LAMORTE: Well, for one thing, I see them measuring quantity over quality. It’s a little bit like that last example I gave where they’re – that’s why I chose that example, you know, oh, let’s get more partners. It’s really easy to measure the number of partners or the number of mobile app downloads. I don’t think so many people do that quite as often as they used to, but there was a time when leaders were so excited about, like, let’s just get more downloads; or, like, let’s get more visits or, you know…
BILL YATES: We need more clicks.
BEN LAMORTE: …stuff like that on the website; right? And really the question is, does that really represent value? We have to ask our question, does the metric that we’re measuring actually equate to value? And I just talked to one of those McKinsey consultant guys who turned into an internal OKRs coach at like a big tech company. Smart guy; right?
BILL YATES: Mm-hmm.
BEN LAMORTE: And he said, you know, “The way I look at it, Ben, is does it pass the earnings call test? If I put that data on the earnings call, would anybody even care at all? Or would it just be so far removed; right?” And look, not every key result will pass the earnings call test. But if you can find something that’s somehow a leading indicator to a financial thing, like, you know, profit or revenue or whatever, if you can find that type of a key result, then you’re in good shape.
And an example of that, a good type of a key result happened to me when I was working with this shoe company that’s based somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, you know, and they have a shoe that, I kid you not, that you can charge. Okay? You have to charge your shoes. There’s an app for your shoes. It ties your shoelaces. Developed for NBA players because, you know, hey, when they’re shooting free throws, we need to loosen the shoelaces; right?
BILL YATES: Of course, of course.
BEN LAMORTE: You know, they’re going to have a better percentage; right? But when they’re playing the court, they’ve got to be really tight. So, imagine some guy on the sidelines, Steph Curry shooting shoelaces. Okay, take it down to 80%. You know, the shoelaces down. Well, anyway, it turns out they tested these shoes, but they were taking too long to charge, like 10 hours to charge my shoes.
First of all, I wear shoes. I don’t even charge my shoes. So, I’m used to zero per charge. But if you want to have these shoes, be more effective, they wanted to get them to charge in two hours, because that might be more like, ah, whatever. I’ll just throw them on the charger, they’re charged, as opposed to like an overnight charge. Did I remember to put them on overnight?
Well, instead of coming up with a key result like drive the revenue from the shoes, or get more customers to buy shoes, or, you know, whatever, increase the repurchase rate of shoes, which clearly the earnings call people would care about, they came out with, in the lab, reduce the time to charge from 20 to 80% from 10 hours to two hours. And so at least they could take a test pair of shoes, and by the end of the cycle they could try to prove that out. That’s not really moving the needle on any business metric in the near term, but it’s on track to set you up to make an impact later.
So, one of the best practices there is to think about what would that key result look like, even if it doesn’t move the needle financially. But how can we drive a leading indicator that we’re pretty confident will drive ultimately a financial.
Outputs vs. Outcomes
WENDY GROUNDS: Many organizations are going to focus on outputs rather than outcomes. Could you talk a bit about the difference?
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah. Well, first of all, let me – let me emphasize, I think most organizations want to focus on outcomes and not output, but they confuse the two. And it’s not even just the organization, it’s the people. Look, and I’m not blaming anyone. This is how our brains work. Okay? When we talk about, like, oh, we want to improve our website or something, okay, well, we’re going to post a blog. We’re going to launch some new features. We’re going to update the checkout button or whatever. There’s all sorts of things we’re going to do. So that’s how our brains work, and that’s fine.
And an outcome might look more like, hey, what is the value we’re trying to create? And it normally looks like changing some kind of a measurable customer behavior, you know, or ultimately doing something that will impact customer behavior that will drive financials, like I was talking about before. So instead of post the blog, it might look like increase the number of prospects requesting a demo on the blog landing page from X to Y or what have you; right?
So that’s an indicator that that’s going the right way. Now, where I’m going with this is the outcome mindset is a mindset that a lot of clients that I work with are looking to get to. And you’re never going to just throw away the output mindset; right? The output mindset is I’ve got to get this done. I’ve got to check the box, get these things done; right?
It’s like big list of things, get them done. But a lot of times we prioritize based on what’s easiest to do. Or if somebody is yelling at us, we want to get it done. Back to the whole, hey, I’ll feel good when I’m crossing things off my box; right? But with the outcome mindset, we start with that objective. We start with that why is it important. Here are the key results. We develop our action plan in the context of the key result. And now we have a potential to prioritize those action items. So that’s really exciting when you can get into the outcome mindset.
But here’s the key. Make a list of all the things you want to do, right, like post a blog. Let’s use that one. Let’s post, let’s just go post a blog. All right. Great start. How can we make that measurable; right? Oh, post five blogs. Well, okay, wait. What is the intended outcome of posting a blog? That’s the question we want to ask. This is one of the three magic questions that the OKRs coach asks; right? The first is what is the objective that was most important to focus on moving the needle now, and why? That’s the first. The second is the key result question. How do we know we’ve achieved the objective?
Well, the third, because this is the way our brains work, right, is we just make a list of all the things we’re going to do. We’re going to post the blog, et cetera. So, the third is, well, what is the intended outcome of posting the blog? That question often is met with, you know, I never really thought about that. I hate to say it, but that’s what happened. I’m just posting blog, too busy doing my work, but I haven’t really thought about what’s the intended outcome. But I guess it would be to get more subscribers. Really. So why is it important to get more subscribers?
And they say, well, actually that’s probably not it because that’s more of a vanity metric. Nobody really cares how many subscribers we have on our blog. I guess it would be to get more leads. Really. How would we know if we got more leads? Well, they have to fill out the landing page; right? See, so this is how we ultimately get to increase the number of people who fill out the landing page on the blog from X to Y, in parentheses (excluding Yahoo). I based that on a real story. We were finding that if people put their Yahoo email addresses or like Hotmail or something, they probably were just getting free information because they’re putting in their personal account instead of their work account.
BILL YATES: Mm-hmm.
BEN LAMORTE: So, things like that, right, now we’re getting into that outcome that we’re shooting for. The reason why that’s so important is once you know the outcome, right, back to the destination, now we can start talking about what is the thing that we need to do? What are the tasks and outputs that we need to deliver on in order to get us toward that outcome?
So, output and outcome are confusing because they really just go hand in hand, and they overlap a lot. And I don’t want to think of one of them as bad and good, but I do want to emphasize that to get more shifting toward that outcome mindset, you have to simply ask the question, what is the intended outcome of the task, or how can we shift that further down the value chain?
I had one organization within Indeed, I think I can say that, I won’t name their exact names, but Indeed’s a super cool company. They’ve got some really good engineers in there that are doing OKRs really well. And they were always asking that question. You know, that’s great. If we launch that feature, that’s cool. But how can we shift that further down the value chain? How do they use the feature; right? And if they use the feature, so what? And they kept doing that so they could get further down the value chain to help them think about what’s that ultimate outcome they want.
BILL YATES: That’s so powerful.
Ben’s OKRs Field Book
BEN LAMORTE: But I’ll tell you a personal story. Here I am telling you I’m this great OKRs coach, like this is what I’ve been doing for 10 years. I’ve been doing this for too long, but I still love it. But here I am, I’m working on a book called “The OKRs Field Book” back in 2021. And I’m writing a lot, spending a lot of my time on that.
I have a coach. And my coach says, “Ben, what is the intended outcome of ‘The OKRs Field Book?’” And they caught me on this. I’m like, well, I know it’s not to make money because I’ll tell you, I did a book in 2016. We didn’t make any money from that. And they’re never going to make a movie out of it. I mean, who wants to watch “The OKRs Field Book” the movie? It just isn’t going to happen. So, it’s definitely not to make money.
And at the time I’m like, well, it’s definitely not to do marketing because you know, I’m in coaching. I can only take on so many clients. I don’t really want to get a whole bunch more clients. And my coach interrupted me and said, Ben, it seems like you’re very clear what you’re not trying to achieve by writing “The OKRs Field Book.” But that’s not my question. I’m asking you, what is the intended outcome of writing “The OKRs Field Book”? And it was – this is how weird it is; right? Here I am telling you I’m an OKRs coach. But I hadn’t bothered to answer that question.
I really meditated on it; and I realized, wait a minute, the real reason I’m writing “The OKRs Field Book” is I want to connect with other OKRs coaches around the world and kind of mentor them and get them talking to each other. So, this book is great, but I need a whole chapter called Join the OKRs Coach Network; right? So, the call to action of my Field Book is to read it. And then I want you to then, if it’s a success, join the network for some really low price.
But that way you’re in a membership organization which will have events every month. It’s going to be a small group of maybe 100 or 200 people. It’s not going to be thousands of people. But once I knew that that was the outcome that I’m shooting for, boy, that actually informed how I’m going to write the book. Otherwise, it’s like in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People,” where you’re climbing up those ladders; and, you know, you really want to begin with the end in mind. That’s the classic habit.
And so, I was guilty of this. I was just going to climb up a ladder. And then when I’m done, I was going to get up there and look around and be like, okay, now what? You know. And this is not the way to do work.
So, I highly recommend that you take this outcome mindset. And by the way, even if you don’t do OKRs, ask yourself that question; right? What is the intended outcome of this project? And really align on that before you start working on the project. There you go. That’s the key takeaway, I think, from this whole thing.
Even if your organization isn’t formally adopting OKRs, I really want to encourage you to try to adopt some of these questions into your practice of project management.
Lessons Learned
WENDY GROUNDS: Ben, I have one more question for you. Can you give us an example of a project that has struggled with OKR implementation, and just some of the lessons learned from that?
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah. In fact, this is something that happens all the time. And the recent case study I’ll give you is a client that I’m working with now. And that is, in the OKR cycle we have three steps. Step one, you write down your OKRs. And I can almost always help my clients succeed there. And we’re really good at that; right? You know, write them as outcomes and things like that. Then we have step two, checking in and monitoring progress. And then step three is that reflect and reset where we get the learnings like we talked about before.
But step two is what we also say a pitfall here is set it and forget it. In other words, just like our New Year’s goals, right, where we write them all down, we get all excited. Probably we had too much alcohol. And then we try to remember, oh yeah, that’s right, you know, I wanted to achieve these things, but we haven’t made it accountable. We don’t broadcast that throughout our whole family and friends and have a planned check-in meeting to go over where we’re at.
So, step two is checking in and monitoring. I have a security team client from a major tech company, and they’re actually asking a security team from that company. In other words, one of my clients is asking one of my clients, hey, do you have any personalities on the team who just set it and forget it? And how do you deal with that?
Because that actually is one of the biggest, if not the biggest pitfall with this whole OKRs thing is you get all excited, you write them down, and then you just go back to work. And so, their answer, which I will read to you more or less, because I’ve kind of got it bullet-pointed out, is like, look, you have to have a process with a cadence of review, and you have to define that. Now, in their case, they had a six-month OKR cycle with one formal check-in, right, in the middle.
So, think of it, we write our OKRs in January. Okay. In April we’ll have a check-in, and then in June or July we’ll wrap it up. That one formal check-in was critical, and they have a standard way of updating progress where literally each key result, they have a spokesperson for that, probably the project manager for that key result. And they’re going to say, here’s the current value. Here’s how confident we are. Here’s the blocker, and here are the next steps. And they’re going to have three to five minutes to do that. And then the next key result’s going to get presented in front of the senior executives; right?
So, what’s nice about this is, in this particular case, this client of mine was the first to ever do this, but they had me do a dry run with each of the OKRs and each of the OKR champions so that, by the time they made that update, they had it down. There was no, “Uh, let me think, you know, we were at four,” you know, none of that stuff. And none of this dwelling and dwelling and dwelling on details. I coached them up. I said, look, you’re going to tell me what do we achieve in the first part of the session? You have three things.
And then the confidence, you’re going to tell me the confidence is it starts at 50% by definition. But you’re going to tell me what percentage confidence and that’s it. So, you’re going to say, like, “It was 50%; now it’s 70%.” That’s it. You’re not going to talk about the confidence and why. And I don’t want to hear it.
So, we got it very clear. And it’s on a slide that’s visual; right? So, they give that formal update, and now they’re going to tell me the blockers, whatever. And so anyway, we rehearsed it. The feedback was, first of all, the senior executive said, okay, finally; right? My team is speaking to me, back to communication, right, just the way I want to hear. I’m confident that I know what they’re doing and I have visibility in what’s going on.
But the key result champions are those project managers who were speaking up in front of leadership. Some of them had never done that before. Well, they were super confident, and they all just did a great job. So, they just felt great about it. And back to your point about the biology of this, because it’s so spot on. See, now the entire team was looking forward to the next check-in. Other people said, “Hey, I want to do that.” Right? This is how you get exposure to senior leadership.
BILL YATES: Yeah.
BEN LAMORTE: People were like clapping after the key results; you know? They were saying, “Great job.” So, this is really the answer. There’s a secret point in here, too. Notice I said one. They only had one mid-cycle check-in. They had a six-month cycle cadence, and then three months in they had the one formal check-in, and that was it. It’s “Do it right,” as opposed to having lots and lots of meetings to check in like every week or every two weeks. Sure, that sounds good. But then you’re creating a lot of work, and you’re creating like a lot of meetings. And people just find that as more overhead, and it can become a problem or a struggle for your OKR project, as well.
So, the key point here is, have a check-in; and when you’re first starting, how about just have one? You can always add more meetings if you need them. But that seems to be the minimal viable approach. And that seems to be, you know, the Pareto curve, right, 80/20 rule; right? We’re going to get 80% of the value for 20% of the effort. People like that, as opposed to maybe we could get 85%, but then it’s 30% of the effort, whatever, you get this. I’m an engineering guy, so I’m going off on tangents.
Ben’s OKR Career
WENDY GROUNDS: Yeah. Ben, why don’t you tell us how you got into OKRs? It’s a pretty niche area. Why don’t you tell us your story?
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah, so, I was at the time working at a software company, working with customer excellence, which was basically a sales rep not on commission. It was an incredibly good job, just, you know, dinners with clients and talking about features and things.
But I started talking to the clients, and I found myself doing OKRs coaching. I was asking my clients, really, that’s great that your budget looks like that. But why is it important to you to optimize the FP&A department? What do you mean by your FP&A department isn’t great? Why is that important to fix that now? How will we know we’ve optimized? They’re like, wow, this is great. So, I’m doing the OKRs coaching with these folks.
And I’m still in touch with Jeff Walker and I talk to Jeff, and he says, “Ben, what is the one thing that you do that you love to do, that you’re really good at, and that really adds value?” And I said, “Well, that would be OKRs coaching. I’m doing that with some of my clients now.” He said, “Okay, well, how many hours a week are you doing that?”
And I said three or four. And he said, “You need to make that 30 or 40.” I said, “Jeff, this isn’t even part of my job. I mean, I can’t do 30 or 40.” He says, “Well, then, quit your job.” Right? And then he went Oracle on me again; right? And he said, “Look, I don’t care if you do this for free. You go out and do what you just think is so great in the world, and you’ll find out just how big the market is.”
So actually, I ended up quitting my job, and I went out there, and I started doing OKRs coaching for free. And by the way, this was back in like 2013. This was before OKRs were a mainstream thing. And Google came out in 2014 and said, “Hey, guess what? We do OKRs.” And so right around then, that’s when Sears did it. That’s when it became really popular. So luckily for me, I was out there doing this for free and educating people on this stuff. And it just evolved into a business.
I’ve somewhat never looked back. This is by far the longest career I’ve had, and it does keep me talking across all industries.
BILL YATES: Yeah, I know. And I so appreciate you sharing this with our industry and with the project managers because, you know, we’re all about tracking things. We talk about KPI pretty frequently with our clients. So being able to have this depth of conversation about OKRs with you is super helpful.
BEN LAMORTE: Great.
BILL YATES: Thank you for providing this to us.
Find Out More
WENDY GROUNDS: Why don’t you just let our audience know how they can find out more or get in touch with you.
BEN LAMORTE: Yeah, I mean, the best way is just go to the site https://okrs.com/. I guess that shows you I must have gotten in early on this thing because I have the website www.okrs.com. That’s the best way to do it. If you do go onto my site, there’s somewhere it says you can click here and get a PDF preview of “The OKRs Field Book.” If you’re really going to adopt OKRs, that’s the book you want to get.
And of course, if you’re actually looking for OKRs coaching, you know, in your organization, boy, then in that case, just send me an email directly, ben@okrs.com. And those are probably the best things to do. You’ll also see on my website; I have some videos and things that you can play around with.
BILL YATES: Ben, thanks so much. Thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time and sharing your expertise with us.
BEN LAMORTE: It’s been a lot of fun. Thanks, Bill. Thanks, Wendy.
Closing
WENDY GROUNDS: That’s it for us here on Manage This. Thank you for hanging out with us today. You’ve just earned free PDUs for listening. Head over to Velociteach.com. Click on Manage This Podcast at the top of the page. Then hit the Claim PDUs button and follow the simple steps.
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