Prioritizing is critical to success and success rests heavily on identifying the right priorities. OKRs are all about focus. To maximise focus, prioritization is important and knowing how to prioritize holds the key to success.One of the most difficult aspects of mastering OKRs is learning to evaluate your key results, and asking the hard questions, such as “Is this the right one to measure my objective?” To gain a better understanding, let’s take a look at an example.
In this example, we are trying to reduce the page load time of a web page, as reported by Google. As you may know, “page load time” is one of the key indicators of high-quality websites from an SEO standpoint. Apart from SEO considerations, page loading time is a very important aspect from a UX standpoint as well.
Once this is decided as an important enough problem to be addressed as an objective, engineering and the website teams work together and come back with 5 key results. Let’s take a look at the following OKR and see where we can make improvements:
Out of the 5 key results, four are reflective of the work they are trying to do:
- KR1: We have to compress the CSS and JavaScript files to improve the page performance
- KR2: We need to compress the images for page performance
- KR3: Remove unwanted JavaScript files
- KR4: Decrease page loading time from 10,000 milliseconds to 500 milliseconds, basically from 10 seconds to .5 seconds.
- KR5: Decrease the number of HTTP requests from 50 to 25 on the page.
And finally, they also had this key result, which is the topical key result here, which basically states the objective and puts the target numbers on those.
These key results were approved, and the team moved forward with their OKR.
Three weeks later, the team reported their progress, failing to realize the anomaly in these key results. What is the anomaly? In the photo above, you can see that key results KR1, KR2, KR3, and KR5 are all progressing on track. 63%, 90%, 85% and 62% progress on those respectively. This is a good sign- right? But if you see the fourth key result KR4, which is the topical key result here, the progress has stalled at 7%. So, clearly, there is a problem. The problem is that the bottom line that these key results were meant to help achieve isn’t actually being impacted. The four key results that are progressing “on track” don’t actually make substantive changes to the objective. These are examples of poorly-constructed key results.
This is a great example of an opportunity to learn. Being about to detect this issue sooner rather than later will save you time, and frustration. The last thing you want is to get to the end of a quarter and realize “Hey, we did all of that, but then it didn’t matter. Nothing happened, or changed for the better.”
Now let’s see why this problem occurred in the first place. As you can see from this two by two matrix, we have two axes here: prioritization of action items on the Y-left, and completeness of analysis or action plans on the bottom X-axis.
So on each axis, we have two options. On the X axis, we have:
- Inadequate/incomplete list
- Thorough, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive list (MECE list)
On the Y axis, we have:
- Basket of equals– which means the list of actions have not been prioritized properly
- Clearly ordered by impact
If you start with an inadequate or incomplete list of key results and don’t learn to prioritize, you have a disaster waiting to happen. Here’s where this current situation would fall on this matrix:
Now let’s say you have an inadequate, incomplete list of key results and attempt to order it by greatest impact. Even if you begin from here, you still have a problem, and it would mean a false start– even if you initially see some positive results.
Let’s take a look at the right side of the matrix. “Hit or Miss” means that you’re created a thorough, mutually exclusive, and collectively exhaustive list of key results, but you have not prioritized them properly. This box of the matrix has its name because, though you might make some progress, there’s no guarantee you’re getting the full benefit of your OKRs.
Finally, let’s look at the last square of this matrix. With a thorough MECE list that is clearly ordered by impact, you will have a “sure shot” at achieving the objective you set out to achieve.
When we take a second look at our original example, we can see that these five OKRs suffer because they’re in an inadequate list. Though some of these key results have progressed, the ones that will actually drive forward progress haven’t seen improvement. For this issue, we’ll need to backtrack, and look for things that need to be done that will actually impact your bottom line. Prioritization does not necessarily seem to be a problem in this example, because the list is small. However, ensuring that you have a good sense of how you will prioritize your key results as you create them is an important component to remember.