So good morning. Good afternoon, good evening. Um I can see join from different geographies. Uh And it's so exciting to be here.Uh For last two days, I have been listening to a lot of awesome speakers and uh it's a great honor to share the stage with such amazing uh people out here. So once again, welcome to this session uh for next 20 minutes, we are gonna deep dive. I mean, at least we'll try in this topic of Okrs. Uh a little about myself, I'm Ruja. I work as an agile and Okr coach with log me in uh and I'm based out uh in Germany. Uh Yeah. So for my last more than a decade, I have uh tried different frameworks with Agile Lean and OKRS. And I think uh it's a continuous journey of learning. And today I'm gonna just share a couple of things which I learned from my Okr journey uh in the last couple of years. OK. So I hope you all can see my screen. We wanna talk about objectives and key results. OKRS. Uh And the session is about how do we design effective OKRS for our team. How can you design your uh uh effective OKRS for your team? Um starting with OKRS now, OKRS is an acronym for objectives and key result. Ah So let's look into what does it mean?

What are OK. Objective is simply what is to be achieved? So what is an objective? It is nothing more, nothing less it is that simple. What statement? What is that statement? What is that thing? What is that goal? Which you as a team or individual or as an organization you want to achieve? This is nothing but your objective. A key result is a benchmark which will help us to understand that. How do we get to that objective? So the key results are nothing but house. So Okr is a goal setting framework. There are many, many goals setting framework out there. Some organizations use KPIS key performance indicators, some use smart goals and Okr is one of them usually in Okr uh philosophy. They say KPIS with souls and intent is nothing but Okrs.

So what are uh objectives and key results or the goal setting framework? The objective is simply what has to be achieved and a key result is how do we get there? So this will benchmark and monitor step by step progress towards this objective. Now, a lot of times when I work, I'm working with teams and organization, I have realized that the leaders just come with their team and they start talking about OK team, we as a team, what should be our goal? What should we achieve? What should we be working on in next couple of months? I mean, that's, that's OK. That's a good approach. That's all OK R is about but the most important layer or a step before defining OK R is you start with a why now, what does this mean as an organization? It is the leader's responsibility to talk about purpose, purpose is nothing but why do we exist? So as leaders, as managers to your team, it is important that you communicate the purpose of your existence? Why do we exist as an organization? Why do we exist as a team? Why do we exist as a product? So it is very, very important that we start having conversations around the purpose after purpose, it is important to talk about vision. What is vision? What impact do we want to create in the world for what we exist? So purpose, OK.

This is why we exist and vision is what impact do we want to create? What value do we want to bring in the world for what we exist? Following the vision? It's mission now, mission is this? How do we achieve this? How do we get to this vision and purpose? So it's very, very important that before you start uh setting ors or bringing goals to your team, to your department, to your organization, you start with purpose, vision and mission discussion and conversation and communication. So I think this is the starting point which we have to um handle before we jump into defining ors. So how is the flow you first start with purpose vision mission? Now this purpose mission vision could also be around here. We are launching a new product, we had this uh problem or a lot of users had this problem. And we are thinking about launching a solution for this. So this is our new uh and we want to translate it to a product. We want to build a product around this. So this could also be a purpose vision mission around a product or around a department or around a particular initiative or on a very, very meta level, like on the ORG level. So it's totally fine that you can define purpose, vision mission on different um uh initiatives or different teams or products or as a whole organization when you define purpose, vision mission strategy.

Okr is that vehicle which is, which will translate this into your day to day work into your execution work. Now, I remember working in the industry, I many a times I attended all hands meeting and town hall meetings where all the leadership came and they spoke about different strategies and our vision and what we want to achieve in the next 10 years and five years. And you know, sitting in those meeting, it felt like, wow, I'm in such a great company. It's so inspiring. And motivating. But then after those two hours of meeting, when I came back to my workplace, on my table, on my desk, I started thinking, OK, now I have no clue that. How do I translate this to my everyday work? What should I do in my role uh in order to add value to this purpose, vision mission? And this is exactly where OK, come in place that will help you and your team to formalize this goal, which will be aligned to your higher purpose, vision and mission. OK? Now look, let's look at some of the characteristics of objectives and key result. So if you look at objective and objective has to be audacious, inspirational, meaningful, it should express goals and intent.

Now, a lot of times I have seen teams, they, they come together, they sit with pen and a paper or maybe they open a conference page and they start writing their objectives. And one of the biggest mistake which people do is they confuse objective to a to do list. So an objective is not a to do list, it is not a task manager um uh framework or it is not a task list. It's, it's something which is quite audacious. It's something which you want to do in order to bring change. So objective is something it has to be meaningful. It has to have this outcome driven, value driven intent in there and it should make you positively uncomfortable. So please make sure that you as a team or individual should not convert your to do list as your objective. It is not objective is purely a statement set of goals which will help you to drive some meaningful changes in your organization. And this is what objective is all about. On the other hand, key result, key result has to be smart. We mean by smart, it has to be specific measurable time bound, aggressive, realistic Marissa Mayer from Google because Google is quite uh uh uh experienced practitioner of. Okr, she always says that hey, it's not a key result unless you have a number in it.

So it's very important that you set a very, very audacious meaningful value driven objective quoted by 3 to 4 key results which you can actually track uh within that time frame, you can measure them and you can actually uh be very, very uh specific in terms of achieving those actions or those key results which are connected to your uh objectives.

Now, how do the or uh overall flow look like? So I already told you you will start at the mission statement following the mission, you will have different objectives. So it could be two objective, three objective, four objective. I usually tell teams to avoid more than three objective.

The reason is less is more so and again, or philosophy, they say less are the goals, the more focus you have. And it's important to, to um uh have control on your work in progress. So having 10 goals and objectives for a quarter, I'm not sure if it's pragmatic or realistic to be, you know, to be w working on 10 goals at the same time. Apart from that, it also adds a lot of cognitive load to your team, to individuals. So it's very, very important that you tackle 2 to 3 objective in a quarter. Below these objective, you will start writing 3 to 4 key result for each objective. And inside that you may have your to do list. So I was talking about, hey, you may have list of activities, list of tasks which you need to do, let's say every day in order to fulfill this key result, which will effectively add value to the objective. So definitely you may have task list but that needs to be uh jotted down under the key result. So it has to start with mission objective, key result and following it, it has to be your task activities, et cetera. Now let's look at one of the okr. So I will show you the first okr here. Um It's a diversity or a diversity goal, increasing the diversity in the workforce of the organization. Now, if you look at this objective, you know, it is talking about driving change.

So it is not like a very, very simple to do list. It is talking about changing the culture, driving some important change in the structure of the organization. Now, if you look at the key result, the key result could be women make up at least 40% of all the team members. Next key result, women make up at least 35% of all the managers. And the last one is increase the proportion of team members who belong to ethnic minority to 35%. Now, if you look at this, you can, you can already get the idea that how the Okr model will work like objective is really, really meaningful something which will drive a lot positive culture or change in the organization. And then you are talking about very, very specific measurable, verifiable key result which you will track on a very weekly basis and see, hey, my activity today, is it contributing in this key result? Oh yeah, this will move my key results, let's say from 10% to 20% or let's say from 20% to 22% and effectively, this will add to my objective.

So this is how this whole OKR work like you start with a very, very meaningful intent goal followed, following the key results. Um OK, now a quick history, how did it start? So, OK, I started in a company called Intel and the grave who was the then CEO of the company invented OKR framework there. The beauty of OKR is it is not only top top down characteristic driven performance management kind of a system it is not OK. R is very much intrinsic motivation driven, engaging collaborative framework. So any company who is thinking to implement, OK, please do not link it to the performance appraisal of the people. Please do not link it to the compensation part. Please do not link it to the firing hiring because that's not the intent here. The intent of OKR is purely, hey, am I motivating my team to, to uh help them to best their, uh, to, to break their own best record? So it's all about how can we continuously improve and, you know, beat your own best record, uh, in the next iteration. So, uh, it's, it's a tool which was defined by Andy graph later on, John Deere learned it and then John Deere got it to other companies, uh, like, uh Google and linkedin and Walmart. And the beauty is, it's very collaborative.

No one get fired if you feel on your. Ok. R because it's all about, hey, how can we improve, how can we improve these, uh, how can we remove these impediments? What is stopping our, uh, uh, journey towards our goal? So it's, it's a, it's a very motivating and engaging tool which help employees to come forward, create a lot of psychological safety because come on, it's my goal. I can go audacious. No one is gonna fire me here. So, okr, give this kind of mindset and culture to the, to the organization and I think this is how it is different from other goal setting frameworks there where even a little bit of failure may cause me, you know, some, some uh after effects. OK. So now another important thing why companies work with Ookrs? So it gives a lot of alignment. I told you OKRS are like top down and bottom up. So the manager comes with a list of OKRS to the team and the manager tell the team that, hey, I think we should be working on these objectives based on what the leadership have defined. So the manager of the team comes with the OKR proposal and the team on the other hand, also comes with the proposal that hmm you're right. But we think that hey, this is also something we need to work on in this quarter or in this year.

So in this way, you are cool collaborating, top down and bottom up. And that's a very aligned way of defining your OKRS engaging. I mean, imagine my manager asking me, what do you think about uh this goal for our team? Do you think this makes sense? It gives me a different level of motivation when I'm heard or when I'm participating in defining the OKRS of my team? So, so I think instead of top down having collaboration and partnering is, is quite motivating another thing it gives focus and clarity. I told you having 2 to 3, Okr is the best way to do. So handling 10 things. At the same time, I won't recommend go for 2 to 3 simple focus defined ors uh Then it is data driven, you're tracking your OKRS every quarter, every week. And it is transparent, it is transparent to the manager, to the team, to the whole organization and it gives a lot of autonomy, autonomy to the manager, autonomy to the people. So I think this is, this is the whole beauty of Okr. And that's why they say Okr is um Kpis with soul and intent. Now this is a typical Okr setting uh guideline look like you start with Ookrs based on that the department will define their OKRS based on that the teams will define their ors. But you see they are all interlinked, they are all aligned horizontally, vertically in diagonal way. So they need to kind of make it transparent and align with each other that how can we enable everyone to um reach that objective?

Now, this is one of my favorite pic picture from Spotify. I'll just quickly tell you how Okr will take you to the most sweet spot in this uh uh matrix or in this picture, organizations who are always here in the low alignment, low autonomy, very, very bad state to be in. People are lost because they are not aligned, the vision is not communicated to them and people are also not given autonomy to decide what should they work. So we come for work. I mean, we come from 9 to 6 just, just to work and get our paycheck. But there's no motivation talking about this section where the high alignment is there and low autonomy, the manager comes with the decision and tell the team what is to be done again. Not a sweet spot because we have hired smart people who can tell us how it is to be done rather than be telling them what to do and how to do. So. Again, not a very good spot to be in another spot here where you have high autonomy and low alignment.

If you see here, the leader is thinking that hmm maybe the goal is clear to the team but and the team is a, you know, there's a lot of autonomy, the team is autonomous, but then they, they are not aligned, they don't know the vision. So they are just driving in different direction. And ultimately, you know, no one is meeting that um um not star matric or that ultimate success uh criteria. What matters the most for the organization, the most sweetest spot here is this where you see the leader is saying, hey, we need to cross the river and he's asking the team that, hey, figure out how so this kind of sport is somewhere organizations should try to drive towards and OK, definitely helps uh organizations to bring uh uh you know, teams and people to reach this le now this is the uh overall uh cycle of Okr, I already mentioned that we start with purpose vision mission.

Then you have OKR definition. Okr check in. So you define OKR, you track your OKRS and then you reflect on your Okr reflection is not blame game here. Reflection is all about. Hm why did we fail what we could have done better? So it's kind of retrospective and this is how this whole cycle helps uh uh the team to be in time and you know, a focus on the most matter, uh mattering things, what they should be working on. All right. So with this, um you can always reach out to me that's my email ID and my linkedin uh please connect and if you have any further questions, anything which I can help you with, with regards to Okr. Uh Yeah, very happy to support any questions you can share it in the chat because I think we still have three minutes to go. We can take some questions if it's here, any feedback, anything which you want to uh say just feel free. Awesome. So yeah, Anne, how are different from KP? Like I mentioned KP are like you are just given this one key performance indicator, a matrix that hey, this is a matric and now we track this, but we don't know why we don't know what is the intent behind tracking this matrix.

So OK, will make it more meaningful. So like I said, OK, is KP with intent, meaning and soul. So, OK, R will guide the team to understand why we are doing this, why this is the most important goal and you know why we have to track it in this way, why we are measuring this and not this. So there are a lot of these kind of conversation will happen within the teams and departments which will make it more meaningful. So this is how OK R is different from Kpis. Um Simon said, I find that Okr also works well with other goals. Uh like, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Totally. Uh So, Okr can combine with different um different frameworks. So recently, I'm also writing a blog around how do we combine Okr with Scrum, which is another powerful framework. So definitely this is, this is totally doable and uh yeah, you can use it implemented in any kind of ecosystem, any kind of team structure. So there's no uh uh yeah, there's no kind of bo border defined here. Thank you, Annie. Thank you Simon for your questions. Thanks for joining in. Uh And like I said, if you have any more questions, feel free to approach and yeah, keep OK. Ring. Thank you very much.