Louis Bidou

The Objectives-Key-Results framework is a methodology for creating and tracking objectives. Its main benefit is to keep vision, objectives and key results always in front of the whole team. It is a proven framework Google, Intel, LinkedIn, Zinga, Oracle, Twitter, amongst other, have been using.

DEFINE From your vision derive ambitious objectives (5 maximum), which have a few numerical key results (3-5 maximum) on which are built todos. Define annual and quarterly objectives on the company, team and personal levels.

SHARE Use a quarterly template to keep track of the roadmap on each of those organization's levels.

Objective 1 — Description, Alignment, Progress (% average) Key result 1 — Progress (%) Key result 2 — Progress (%) Key result 3 — Progress (%) Objective 2 — Description, Alignment, Progress (% average) Key result 1 — Progress (%) Key result 2 — Progress (%) Key result 3 — Progress (%) Objective 3 — Description, Alignment, Progress (% average) Key result 1 — Progress (%) Key result 2 — Progress (%) Key result 3 — Progress (%)

It's fine to use Google Docs to implement this, even if your company is big. Everyone OKRs have to be public to the whole company. On the team and personal levels, you can add to each objective a description of why it's important highlighting how it aligns with the objectives of the superiors/peers levels.

UPDATE Each individual should update its key result completion on a weekly basis, define todos for the following week for each of its key results, and take a few minutes to see where its superiors/peers levels are.

ASSESS At the end of each quarter, define the new objectives and draft the next key results. Calculate key results average to get the objectives grades. Google says a 60-70% is succeeding, meaning that you have to define challenging objectives that make you uncomfortable.

Sources: http://www.slideshare.net/HenrikJanVanderPol/how-to-outperform-anyone-else-introduction-to-okr https://weekdone.com/resources/objectives-key-results https://medium.com/startup-tools/okrs-5afdc298bc28#.g6jbh8gqj http://firstround.com/review/How-to-Make-OKRs-Actually-Work-at-Your-Startup/

In this essay, Paul Graham tells why startups founders should go for unscalable things at first.

RECRUIT — Recruiting users manually is the most common one. When at Y Combinator, Stripes founders were used to get people try their beta on the spot: “Give me your laptop”. As absolute numbers are small, measure progress by weekly growth rate.

FRAGILE — To locate the most promising vein of users, go for a untargeted launch, observe which kind of users seem most enthusiastic, and seek out more like them.

DELIGHT — As startups can provide a level of service no company can, try hard to make your initial users happy.

EXPERIENCE — It's not the product that should be insanely great, but the experience of being your user. Even with an early, incomplete, buggy product, make the difference with attentiveness. It's the best way to start a very positive feedback loop.

FIRE — Sometimes, focusing on a deliberately narrow market is the right thing to do. It's always worth asking if there's a subset of the market in which you can get a critical mass of users quickly.

MERAKI — Hardware startups should assemble their own hardware. Pebble did.

CONSULT — B2B startups could pick up a single user and act as consultant building a specific product. Fit its needs perfectly, and you'll usually find you've made something other users want too. But, to retain your freedom, make sure not to be paid.

MANUAL — Some startups could be entirely manual at first. If you can, do it as long as you can.

BIG — Launches and partnerships usually don't work as a way to get growth started.

VECTOR — Try thinking of startup ideas as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going.

Source: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

Why this? Why keeping track of the few resources that really strike me, and some of the questions I spend time brainstorming on? Why, every now and then, taking some time to step back and share simple thoughts and doubts on a specific topic? Who am I writing to?

I started this early 2016. At that time, I was back to school for a few months, taking a deep breath by traveling far away, and figuring out what would be my next move. I traveled, read, and talked to as many people as I could from entrepreneurs to management consultants to professors to happiness officers. I was about to walk through the door of what sometimes other adults call “real” life.

I had this feeling of leaving my “non-real” life with nothing much than all my life ahead of me, which is, that being said, still something. I realized that all the discussions and readings and listenings I have had were just ways to tool me with a few guidelines to guide my actions in the upcoming months or years. Life is all about improvisation, and as Malcolm Gladwell writes in Blink, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, “improvisation is an art form governed by a series of rules, and actors want to make sure that when they are up onstage, everyone abides by those rules”. So even though, hundred times a day, we figure out in the moment what is the best thing to do, I feel we do it regarding our previous experiences and what we learnt.

Thus, keeping track of what I learnt along the way feels like making sense, at least for me. I am not this kind of guy who forgets, so I know I will not sit on this part of my life ; it was good times that helped shaping what I am today. And even if I can not force my next teammates to read entirely the books or articles I read, or guess what I think about some organization topics, I feel the ball is in my court to prompt them with easy to read summaries of these resources, thoughts, and questions.

This is my way to make sure that once we are up onstage, we'll efficiently grow on things we learnt and discovered along the way.