The Blog.

OKRs are all the rage among the startups these days. There is a lot of resources on what OKRs are and how to use them. While OKRs, as a concept, seem pretty straightforward – introducing them in an organization can be tricky.

The other day I came across this post on Spotify’s HR blog: Why individual OKRs don’t work for us. It’s an interesting read, especially when it comes from a company as successful as Spotify. It’s a short read and I highly recommend that you read it, but here are some of the parts I found particularly interesting (emphasis mine).

Objective is what we want to accomplish. Key result is how we measure success. Today, in Gtmhub we introduce Tasks – what will we do about it. Tasks are a new type of custom field that can be defined for OKRs. In this post, we’ll show how to set up tasks and how to use them.

The latest updates to Gtmhub bring improvements to the activity feeds. First, from now on every time someone posts a comment, owner of the objective will receive an email notification. This also applies to employees and teams; for example, if you leave feedback for a colleague, she will be notified as soon as comment has been posted.

In the latest release of Gtmhub, we have added a highly requested feature – aggregated OKR attainment. This new metric shows the cumulative attainment of an OKR and all of it’s child OKRs.

With the latest release of Gtmhub, we now support tags for Objectives. While, alignment remains the main way to organize and make sense of OKRs within an organization, we have found that often secondary taxonomy is needed. Our clients have identified two main use cases for tags: initiatives and areas.

One of the key ideas of OKRs is communication around progress. So far, Gtmhub has been automatically calculating progress and juxtaposing it with the time passed in order to determine how well an objective is progressing. Many times, however, there are circumstances that are beyond this simple approach.

Bottom Line: If you’re working with OKRs, you may find it useful to think about the Balanced Scorecard perspectives when setting OKRs. Which Balanced Scorecard perspectives, or categories are you supporting with your current OKRs? Do you need to rebalance your efforts? Who and which departments are supporting each Balanced Scorecard perspective, i.e. Financial, Customer, Internal Business Process, and Learning & Growth perspectives?

Exploring how OKRs combine with Agile from an engineering perspective

Bottom Line: When setting OKRs for the sales team, DON’T focus on the number. Instead, set objectives for the performance drivers, activity, process, method, aptitude, and attitude.