Book Notes — Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke

This is my summary of the book ‘Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results‘ by Christina Wodtke. My notes are informal, dense and only contain quotes from the second part of the book excluding the fictional case study. While I don’t agree with everything in the book, I do recommend reading it yourself (check it out on Amazon here).

I. OKR Fundamentals

• OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results
• Objective is qualitative
• Key Results (most often 3) are quantitative
• They are used to focus a team or an individual around a bold goal

1. Objective

An Objective is like a mission statement only for a shorter period of time.

A great objective:

• Inspires the team
• Is hard (but not impossible) to do in a set time frame
• Can be done by the people who have set it independently

Your objective is a single sentence that is:

🚀 Qualitative and Inspirational

• The objective is designed to get people jumping out their beds in the morning with excitement
• While the CEO might get excited by 3% increase most people get excited by a sense of meaning and progress

⏰ Time Bound

• Doable in a quarter
• A clear sprint toward a goal

🙌 Actionable by the Team Independently

• Bigger companies can struggle because of interdependencies
• Your objective has to be truly yours
• Don’t allow the excuse of “The other team didn’t make it”

Examples

Examples for good Objectives:

• Pwn the director-to-business retails market in the South Bay
• Launch an awesome MVP
• Transform Palo Alto’s coupon using habits

Examples for bad Objectives:

• Sales numbers up by 30%
• Double our users
• Raise a Series B of 5M

Why are these bad? Because they are probably Key Results.

2. Key Results

Key Results take the inspiring language of the Objective and quantify it. They answer the question of “How will we know if we met our Objective?”.

Key Results can be based on anything you measure, like:

• Growth
• Engagement
• Revenue
• Performance
• Quality (eg: Net Promoter Score (NPS))

You can balance forces like revenue and quality by selecting opposing ones as Key Results.

Example:

“Launch awesome MVP” might have Key Results of:

• 40% of users come back 2x in one week
• Recommendation score of 8
• 15% conversion rate

KRs should be difficult, not impossible

• OKRs are stretch goals
• You want to push the team but not making it impossible
• A good way to do this is to set a confidence level of 5/10 on the OKR
• A confidence level of 1 means “never gonna happen”
• A confidence level of 5 means “I only have 50/50 shot of making this goal”
• A confidence level of 10 mean “Yeah, gonna nail this one.”

Check the right level of difficulty

Look at your OKRs. If you think:

• “We are really going to have to all bring our A game to hit these….” → You’ve probably setting them correctly
• “We’re doomed” → You’ve set them too hard
• “We can do that with some hard work” → They are too easy

3. What makes OKRs work?

3.1. OKRs cascade

• The company should set an OKR
• Each department should determine how their OKR leads to the company’s successful OKR
• A team can focus their OKR on a single KR or try to support the entire set
• No team / department can be an island
• Each individual should set individual OKRs that reflect both personal growth and support the company’s goals
• Individual OKRs are about becoming better at your job as well as helping your product to get better

3.2. OKRs are part of your Regular Rhythm

• Often OKRs are failed because they are set at the beginning of the quarter then forgotten
• Highly recommended to bake OKRs into the weekly team meetings and weekly status emails
• Adjust the confidence level each week
• Have a discussion about why they are going up and down

3.3. OKRs Provide an Unmoving and Clear Goal

• Do not change OKRs halfway through the quarter
• It dilutes focus and keeping focus is the entire point of OKRs
• Changing OKRs teaches not to take them seriously

4. OKRs for product teams by Marty Cagan

4.1. Applying OKRs at scale

As the company scales OKRs become a necessary tool to ensure:

• The product team understand how they are contributing to the greater whole
• For coordinating work across teams
• Avoiding duplicate work
• OKR setting needs to happen by product team level and not by department/discipline level
• The problem cross functional product teams are asked to tackle are communicated through OKRs
• OKRs help to ensure that each team is aligned with the objectives of the company

4.2. Applying OKRs in cross functional teams

• The problem cross functional product teams are asked to tackle are communicated through OKRs
• OKRs help to ensure that each team is aligned with the objectives of the company
• If different functional departments (like design, engineering, testing) have larger objectives (like technical debt, responsive design, test automation) they should be discussed and prioritised at the leadership level along with other business Objectives and incorporated into the relevant product team’s Objective.

5. Rhythm of OKRs

5.1. Monday Commitments

Each Monday the team should meet to:

• Check progress against OKRs
• Commit to tasks that will help the company meet its Objectives
• Update the 4 quadrants (foursquare) to communicate their plans

5.2. Communicating via a foursquare

What is the foursquare?
The 4 quadrants is a conversation tool to discuss:

• Do the priorities lead to our OKRs?
• Why is our confidence dropping in our ability to make our OKRs?
• Can anyone help?

What is included in the foursquare?

1. Intention for the week — What are the 3–4 most important things to get done towards to Objective?
2. Forecast for month — What should the team know is coming up that they can help with or prepare for?
3. Status towards OKRs — The confidence status of 5/10 has moved up or down?
4. Health metrics — Pick two things that you want to protect as you work towards your Objective (like code stability, team-wellbeing, test coverage etc)

How to make it work?

• Make time for these conversions every Monday
• During the check-in you can discuss only the four square and supplement with additional detailed documents if necessary
• Have fewer priorities and shorter updates

5.3. Fridays are for winners

It is good to aim high but missing your goals without seeing how far you’ve come is depressing. For this reason committing to the Friday wins session is critical.

In the Friday wins session teams all demo whatever they can:

• Engineers show bits of code
• Designers show mock-ups
• Sale can talk about deals closed
• Customer Service talk about rescued customers

Benefits of the Friday wins session:

• Feeling like being part of a special, winning team
• Teams starting to look forward to having something to share
• Individuals start to seek wins
• Company starts to appreciate what each discipline is going through and does all day
• Providing beer, wine, cake etc is important to make the team members feel cared for

5.4. Weekly Status emails with OKRs

The email should contain:

1. Lead with your team’s OKRs and how much confidence you have that you are going to hit them this quarter
2. List last week’s prioritised tasks and if they were achieved (keep is short with some explanation)
3. List next week’s top 3 priorities
4. List any issues or blockers
5. Notes: Anything that doesn’t fit into the above categories (short, timely and useful)

Benefits of the weekly status email:

• Helps with coordination and reduces effort spent on writing updates that no one reads
• Work should not be a chore list but a collective push forward towards shared goals. This status email reminds everyone of this fact.

6. Common OKR Mistakes

OKRs are great for setting goals, but without a system to achieve them they are likely to fail. These are some of the common mistakes.

☹️ You set too many goals per quarter

• Try setting only one
• You want the OKRs to be so clear that everyone can carry around in their head (if you have 5 it isn’t going to happen)
• If you have very different business (like google search, mail, car etc) then have one OKR per different market / business

️☹ ️You set OKRs for a week or a month

• If you can’t keep on track longer than a month you are probably not ready for OKRs
• If it can be done under a quarter it is probably just a task

️☹ ️You set metric driven Objective

• Objective needs to be a call to action that inspirational for all disciplines

️☹ ️You don’t set confidence levels

• OKRs encouraged to shoot for the moon so you can learn what you are really capable of
• Confidence levels of 50% when setting the Objective helps with the right level of objective setting

️☹ ️You don’t track changing confidence levels

• Depression to realise the last month in the quarter that you have not paid attention to your OKRs
• Mark changes as you get new info
• Help teammates you have been stuck at 5/10

️☹ ️You use the foursquare on Monday as a status report not a conversation

️☹ ️You talk tough on Friday

• We are tough on each other all week
• On Friday Crack a beer and toast what we did accomplish
• Be proud of what setting big goals did let us accomplish

II. OKR Setting

You can find Christina Wodtke’s OKR Setting worksheet here.

7. Setting company OKRs

7.1. Rules

• OKR setting involves having difficult conversations about the choices that shape the direction of the company
• The meeting should be kept small — 10 people max
• No phones / laptops

7.2. Before the meeting

• A few days before the meeting solicit all the employees to submit the Objective they think the company should focus on
• Small (max 24hrs) time window
• Someone should collect and bring forward the best and most popular ideas

7.3. The meeting

Set aside 4.5hrs — 2 x 2hrs with 30mins break. You might not need it all; the goal is to cancel the second session.

1.Choosing the Objective

• Each exec should bring 1–2 Objectives to the meeting
• The best employee ones are on post-it notes
• Put all post-it notes on the wall
• Combine duplicates
• Combine similar Objectives
• Stack rank them
• Narrow them down to 3

2.Choosing Key Results

All team members of the exec team free list as many metrics as they can to measure the objective. One idea per post-it — timebox: 10mins

Affinity map them (group post-its with like post-its):

• Write KRs as an X first
• X acquisitions, X revenue
• It is easier to first discuss what to measure first then the value
• Rule of thumb: 1 usage metric, 1 revenue metric, 1 satisfaction metric

Goal: find different ways to measure success in order to have a sustained success across quarters

• Set values for the KRs
• Make sure they give you the 50% confidence rating of achieving them

3.Check the OKR set

5 minutes to discuss the final OKR set:

• Is the Objective aspirational and inspirational?
• Do the KRs make sense?
• Are the KRs clear with no ambiguity?
• Are the KRs measurable?
• Are the KRs results and not tasks?
• Are the OKRS hard?
• Can you live with them for a full quarter?

8. Setting cascading quarterly OKRs

1. All employees submit the Objective they think the company should pursue next quarter (roll up through manager, survey, collected by consultant)
2. Exec team in a half day session discusses the Objectives proposed. They choose one. This requires debate and compromise.
3. Executives introduce the OKRs for the quarter to their direct reports and have them develop department OKRs (Should be run in the same way: free-listing, grouping, stack ranking, selecting)
4. CEO approval of department OKRs
5. Department head gives the company and department OKRs to any subteams, and these teams develop their own to work towards that
6. If the company is doing personal OKRs set them now
7. All hands meeting in which the CEO discusses why the OKR is what it is for that quarter. Covers last quarters OKRs and points out a few wins. (positive and determined tone)

9. Preparing for the next quarter

• You should be able to decide whether you have made you OKRs 2 weeks before the end of the quarter
• Admit you missed a KR or that you set a KR too low
• Get learning to roll it into the next goal setting session

III. Why we can’t get things done?

One: We haven’t prioritised our goals

“If everything is important, nothing is important”

• While we feel that everything is important, you can probably rank in order of importance
• Once prioritised choosing to work on them once at time has a higher incidence of success
• By setting a single Objective with only three key results provide the needed focus

Two: We haven’t communicated the goal obsessively and comprehensively

“When you are tired of saying it, people are starting to hear it.” — Jeff Weier, CEO LinkedIn

• You must weave reminders into every aspect of the company life
• Progress toward the goal must be marked in status meetings and weekly status emails
• Projects must be evaluated against the goal
• Continually repeating the goal assures that the goal is in the front of everyone’s mind and tied to all activities

Repeat the goal on:

• Every Monday in the commitment meetings
• Weekly status emails
• Friday win celebrations

Three: You don’t have a plan to get things done

The system around OKRs — commitment, celebrations, check-ins — makes sure you continue to make progress towards the goal:

• Helps you make sense of the work you need to do
• Keeps you on track even when you are tired
• Reminds you what you need to do

Four: We haven’t made time for what matters

“What is important seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important.” — Eisenhower

• Most people focus on urgent
• We need to block out time to make sure important things get done
• By committing every Monday to work towards the objective assures that you’ll be held accountable to progress

Five: We give up instead of iterate

The first time most companies fail on implementing OKRs by:

• Not setting hard goals: A team that never learned to set stretch goal
• Over promising and under delivering: A team that is lying to itself and needs to learn what it is really capable of
• The most common problem is no follow-through: Setting OKRs and ignoring them all quarter