Whether you work at a large global company or a small local business, setting goals and measuring success are very important things. There’s no concrete way to do this, and there are loads of different methods in which people have come up with over the years. Just doing a simple Google search will show you things like:

• What are KPIs?
• How do I write actionable KPIs?
• How do I create meaningful KPIs?

At Google we do things a little differently, and even within Google different teams have different methods, and even within the teams, different people have different methods. There’s no one way that is the right thing that everyone should follow. The truth is setting goals and figuring out how to reach them are very unique to every product and team. But in this article I thought I’d quickly write up what’s been super useful for me, and hopefully that’ll help you!

Introducing OKRs

This isn’t something new, and is plastered all over the internet now. But OKRs stand for Objectives and Key Results. It’s a framework for essentially setting a goal, and defining how you measure success for that goal.

Let’s say I’ve got a car rental company and I want to increase bookings online. An example OKR could be:

Objective: Increase car rental bookings coming from search and social media

Key result: 20% increase in successful bookings, discounting referrals from partner sites or direct visits

Now the objective is clear and meaningful. Increase in bookings has a direct correlation to increase in revenue so that’s the goal. Now even better, if the bookings come from cheaper marketing channels (e.g. social and search), those bookings are even more valuable hence the smaller scope. And as such, the key result measures that slice of bookings directly, although it is still important to keep an overall eye over the business.

Annual OKRs (or rather annual vision / plan / mission)

Annual OKRs, or rather an annual vision is rather important to have. It is the document that will be referred to throughout the year to ensure that all projects and work is in alignment with what was set out to get done at the start of the year. I’m not going to talk too much about this since it’s quite a detailed topic on its own and requires a bit of explaining.

Quarterly OKRs

The OKR example from earlier is essentially a quarterly OKR. Objectives should be chipping off at whatever goals and visions are detailed out in the annual OKRs, with direct measurable key results.

How to go about setting OKRs

The most important thing is that you do your research and properly understand the bit of the business you’re writing a plan for. It doesn’t really make any difference if it’s a product (e.g. Instagram Stories) or a team that does a specific task (e.g. sales or support), understanding the details and really getting into the nitty-gritty is basically step 1. So:

Step 1: Understand the nitty-gritty

If you’re going to be setting goals for a team (or even yourself) then you really need to know what you’re talking about. Learn how your part of the business works, what impacts it, who’s involved in making it successful, do other teams have any impact on your bottom line, etc.

Get familiar with the data. If it’s sales, understand what’s been sold the past few quarters, match it up with market trends and buzzwords. Get feedback from customers about what’s working and what’s not. If you’re Product Manager, you’ll need to know all that as well, in addition to understanding how your customers are using your product. What are they saying on places like Reddit? The more information you have about your customers, and all the teams involved in making your thing successful, the better!

Step 2: Set some Objectives!

The best goals or objectives are often the most simple. Based on everything you should know about your business, what all the other teams are doing and the status of any and all influencing factors, developing an objective should be relatively straightforward because most of the difficult thinking should have been done during the annual planning. Simple, direct and ambitious is the winning formula. For example:

• Netflix: Make streaming videos on Netflix easier and more hassle-free than streaming from pirate websites or competitors
  Assuming people will be happy to sign up for Netflix to watch originals and older shows they may not have seen, rather than navigating the horror of pirate streaming sites full of popups and low quality streams
• Revolut: Make banking as simple and free as sending WhatsApp messages
  Assuming here that simplicity, and no costs associated with spending money will make adoption easier
• Instagram: Increase inventory (user submitted photos/videos) by assisting users more with regards to selecting, editing and posting

One thing to note is that two of the three objectives above required a bit of explaining in order to make it understandable. Those same two objectives are much more ambiguous and harder to measure. Other ways or writing a goal that will have the same effect on the business would be:

• Netflix: Increase account signups in strategic markets by expanding video inventory
• Netflix: Increase watch time by making it easy to find new shows, pick up where you left off and skip irrelevant parts of videos (e.g. intros, recaps, etc)

Step 3: Define the Key Result(s) for each objective

Let’s go with the Instagram example above. The objective is super direct, and the Key Results associated with a successful Objective would be:

• 100% of Instagram apps on devices have access to photo and video media
  This would allow Instagram to help with the selection part of the assisting (rather suggesting images or videos to post)
• At least x% of auto-applied filters aren’t changed before posting content
  An indicator that Instagram’s auto-filters are liked by people
• x% of suggested posts are actually posted by users
  Here’s an optimization goal, with a clear funnel. The goal is to not have anything drop off in the middle

Step 4: Build a roadmap of projects

Now you should have your annual plan, linked to a set of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). How do you go about achieving them? Well just like writing an annual plan is a whole post on its own, so is brainstorming and roadmap building. But essentially that’s what you should do. Get everyone and anyone related to making your objectives a success into a room and get to brainstorming!

Once you’ve got all the ideas, the next steps are a bit more difficult where you have to essentially:

• Group ideas meaningfully
• Create bite-size projects that can be lead by individuals
• Build a roadmap of all the projects and how they fit into the larger picture
• Share, get feedback, iterate (regularly, all throughout the quarter to ensure you’re still doing the right thing)